Five Local Artists to Watch During Art Basel Miami 2023

As is the case every year, Miami Art Week is the epitome of transience. Anxious art collectors flock to the southernmost state in the continental U.S. for a weeklong charade of art fairs, tropical-set window shopping, and parties galore. Unfortunately, local artists tend to take a backseat in the minds and heads of many, but it shouldn’t. They feed the cultural bloodline of the city year-round, so why not during this week as well?

In that spirit, New Times highlights below five local artists who’ll be elevating their practices to a new level during Miami Art Week. We urge you to support them by attending their shows.

Hernan Bas

The Bass’ Art Week presentation is “Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists,” one in a long line of museum exhibition openings this week. The museum showcases the Miami native’s largest work to date (measuring nine feet tall and 21 feet wide), along with his portrayals of welcoming spaces and scenes of queerness — more than 35 paintings will make their museum-setting debut. Bas is one of the most recognized contemporary artists in the global art world, which makes this hometown showcase a must-see for anyone who seeks to actively experience the talent that resides within the Magic City’s boundaries. A bonus: the enchanting Easter eggs — ties to literature, mythology, religion, and television — that the artist sprinkles in. The Bass show is one of only a few Art Week museum exhibitions this year that elevate local talent — and it’s a catchy play on names, too.

Chris Friday

A second-year resident artist at Oolite Arts, Chris Friday (AKA Friday) is stacked in public and private art installations and activations throughout the city. In October, the artist inaugurated “Banned: An Interactive Lucy St. Project” in the project room at the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum as a response to the nationwide rash of book bans that seek to snuff out vital conversations on race, sexuality, and gender. For the show, Friday commissioned 24 South Florida artists to combat censorship through personal interpretations.

In addition to that activation, which is on view through February 24, 2024, Friday offers the final installment of this year’s Art on the Plaza public art series with Narcissist at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Narcissist is a large-scale, freestanding metal figure sculpture enraptured by its reflection in the plaza’s fountain, oblivious to passersby and onlookers.

Befitting an artist whose mission is to create Black art that refuses to meet the eyes of the viewer, Friday’s presence during Art Week is a veritable manifesto against the forces that threaten to push out the rooted arts community.

Jessica Gispert

On the heels of her recent solo exhibition, “Desvelos,” at Emerson Dorsch, Jessica Gispert presents a new work, titled Devuélvenos, in Bas Fisher International’s (BFI) booth at NADA Miami at Ice Palace Studios in downtown Miami. Utilizing the wax and metal building blocks of “Desvelos,” Devuélvenos employs Latin American and Caribbean religious motifs to represent the path of tropical cyclones — destructive events through which nature renews itself. Gispert’s weather-radar colors, steel, and soot will be in conversation with Norwegian artists as part of BFI’s Heat Exchange artist-in-residency program, which will take her to Bergen, Norway, next year. For now, her ability to weave a spiritually informed and deep-rooted alchemy amid the temporality of an art fair offers a unique opportunity for Art Week visitors.

GeoVanna Gonzalez

Commissioned by the aptly named and Miami-based collecting platform Commissioner, in partnership with Chief — a private membership network for women-identifying executive leaders — and Untitled Art, multidisciplinary artist GeoVanna Gonzalez will take to the sands of Miami Beach on Friday, December 8, at 5 p.m. for the sixth act of Play, Lay, Aye. As an ongoing performance beginning in 2019, Gonzalez’s latest work builds on prior iterations’ reflections on queerness, grief, and the movement of body and sound in analyzing the political act of occupying and existing within a space. Collaborating with movement artists Maria Burt and Alondra Balbuena, poet Arsimmer McCoy, and musician Claudens Louis, the performance is free and open to the public, taking place on the dunes of 12th and Ocean Drive in front of Untitled’s temporary entrance.

The following day at 2:30 p.m., Gonzalez will speak on a panel at Untitled titled “Performance Architecture: Taking Up Space” as a means of expanding the conversation on what is implicated by being a woman artist of color within the spaces of public and private environments, and what care can be given to these radical acts of movement.

Cornelius Tulloch

With both a solo installation and a curatorial credit under his belt this year, Cornelius Tulloch continues to present dynamic visual dialogues about the vulnerability of Black Caribbean bodies and lived experience across geographies from that of a Miami-native lens. Premiering “Poetics of Place” at Locust Projects on Tuesday, December 5, Tulloch will discuss the fate of climate gentrification in the structure of a porch space that mirrors those found within the neighborhoods around the alternative art space.

Simultaneously on view beginning Wednesday, December 6, at Tunnel Projects in Little Havana, Tulloch’s curatorial collective exhibition titled “Woven Ecologies” brings together six artists — including the artist’s Tull Yard creative moniker — in conversation about Miami’s natural and built environments and the seeping cultural erasure that threatens Black Caribbean narratives. For each show, Tulloch wields his talent across mediums and as a community gatherer for the city to witness vital acts of resistance in protecting those who remain integral to the city.