Of course, it’s no surprise. Everyone is going south for the week to catch the most instagrammable art of the weekend. That includes girl gaze artists are shaking up Art Basel Miami Beach, so be sure to make note of these while you’re there.
Suzy Kellems Dominik is at it again. The artist, famed for her neon-lit pussy sculpture from last year, is doing a public project at the Nautilus Hotel with a cluster of 12-foot-tall soft sculptures that look a bit like giant manicured nails. The artist calls them “the female form poetically objectified as a totem.” She notes: “there’s no way, especially right now, to disregard the female experience.”
Del Kathryn Barton, one of the leading women artists in Australia, has made a trippy site-specific installation with a psychedelic palette that immerses viewers in Barton’s fierce, carnal, and lavish universe. A web of eyes peers out from an original wall design, with Barton’s haunting, complex portraits integrated throughout. “As you look into this booth, it looks back at you,” explains Barton. “My intricately painted pictorial narratives float on vortexes of eyes, along with a series of child-beast-portraits.” The effect is that of a “surrealist cubby house.”
Over at the Untitled Art Fair, Los Angeles artist Sadie Barnette, whose father Rodney Barnette famously founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panthers party, has a solo show at with Fort Gansevoort Gallery. She is showing her glittery, pink-infused artworks, including one photo of a perfectly manicured hand holding a book called Malcolm X Speaks, which was released in 1966, a compilation of the major speeches the civil rights leader made in the last eight months up to his death. The manicure in the photo was made with Swarovski crystals, of course.
Lastly, African art is in the spotlight at the Prizm art fair, which is themed around art from the African diaspora alongside Miami artists. The exhibit features African American artist Deborah Willis, known for co-authoring a book of photographs of Michelle Obama, and is widely recognized for her photos of black fashion throughout the years. So despite the parties, it’s worth checking this other stuff out.
Photos via artsy, vulture, the guardian
