Blurbex

Architect Stanley Saitowitz presented his preliminary design for the new Tampa Museum of Art today in a meeting with some of the museum’s trustees.

The mood in the room was jubilant, and rightfully so. The structure Saitowitz is proposing—subject to the approval of the entire board of trustees next week—takes part in an international conversation about the future of museum architecture. It is a world-class design for a structure in a medium-sized city.

Saitowitz’s museum would sit along the Riverwalk, flanked by the Poe Garage (to the north), a new park designed by landscape architect Thomas Balsley (to the south), and the new children’s museum (to the east).

Sure, it looks like a box, but that’s not a bad thing.

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On my final day in town, I finally get around to visiting the Big Kahuna, Miami Basel, itself. With a lot of what’s on view sharing three characteristics—big, weird, and expensive—I prepare myself to enter a funhouse of visual art.

Basel is an art marketplace to the extreme, an art Costco for collectors, as one New York Times reporter put it this week. In one corner, Picassos and de Koonings line the walls; in another, monitors loop the latest in video art. This year, the fair drew a record 40,000 visitors to the Miami Beach Convention Center. Inside, it seems as if all of them are here now, yammering on cell phones in at least a dozen different languages.

It’s a shopping—or window-shopping—experience designed to make you feel very special and like complete shit all at once. Private lounges and VIP entrances separate the wheat from the chaff—but a latté or a glass of champagne is readily available even to the general public. Bag searches are obligatory (but not for me as a member of the press!), as is condescension from gallery helpers. And, please, though large metallic sculptures look an awful lot like playground equipment, do not let your progeny climb on them.

Many Bay area folks I run into confess that they’ve enjoyed the main fair least, some of them skipping it all together. But despite the satellite events that have sprung up around the city to offer art that’s fresher and more affordable, Basel’s still got one thing in spades: spectacle.

Pictured: (1) Visitors cool their heels at one of Basel’s public lounge spaces.
(2) Oldies but goodies: 40-year-old paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat will run you a cool $2 million.
(3) At Deitch Projects, a warped payphone by Richard Lazzarini sold for $350,000.

(4) Bored Gallery Babes, a species indigenous to the art fair ecosystem…

(5) Shintaro Miyake’s furry critters take over this Tokyo gallery’s booth.

(6) Lehmann Maupin Gallery of New York opts for a white tile floor to complement paintings by Adriana Varejao. The effect: like standing in a giant shower stall.

(7) Zilvinas Kempinas’s filmstrip suspended between two blowing fans sold out as an edition of six priced between $20-30,000 each.

(8) Iain Baxter’s canned bears were still available late Sunday afternoon for $27,500.

(9) Good question. This piece by Brett Murray, made from “metal and fools gold,” sold for $5,000 each as an edition of 3.

At another fair taking place for the first time this year, USF’s Graphicstudio struts its stuff. Ink Miami focuses on printed works on paper, so if you’re crazy for collagraphs or loony for lithography, there’s plenty to choose from.

The fifteen exhibiting presses—all members of the International Fine Print Dealers Association—hatched the idea of a specialty sideshow, feeling that their medium was underrepresented at the main fair. (Apparently they weren’t the only ones: Photo Miami emerged this year, too.) They rented out a cluster of suites at the Dorchester Hotel on Collins Avenue and, like the exhibitors at Bridge but in roomier quarters, transformed them into temporary galleries.
For Graphicstudio, the experience has been a boon, says Kristin Soderqvist, director of sales and marketing. In particular, being at Basel has presented the opportunity for face time with print collectors the institution lacked a connection with before. Business has been good.
“We’ll definitely be coming back next year,” she says.

In addition to exhibiting at Ink, Graphicstudio brought along some of its top-level members for a unique Basel experience. Twenty-three couples received VIP passes to the main fair with the option to take tours of Basel and satellite events with Graphicstudio director Margaret Miller. They also visited the home of Miami super-collector Rosa de la Cruz.
The Institution for Research in Art—an umbrella name for Graphicstudio and the USF Contemporary Art Museum—hopes to strengthen ties with Miami collectors who could conceivably contribute to the CAM’s permanent collection in the future, says Randy West, business coordinator at Graphicstudio. The Institute just received permission from USF to begin a $12.5 million capital campaign—to be matched with state funds—to construct a new building to house Graphicstudio and a permanent collection gallery for the CAM.

Pictured: (1) Graphicstudio’s Kristin DuFrain, Kristin Soderqvist, and Randy West in their suite at Miami Ink. On the wall: by Los Carpinteros, geometric abstraction in the footbed of a giant flip-flop. (2) A visitor peruses prints in a rack next to images by Vik Muniz.

A visit to Scope Art Fair to see Experimental Skeleton/Flight 19’s project in collaboration with Miami-based Locust Projects takes me to Wynwood, the up-and-coming gallery district just north of downtown.

Whereas in Miami Beach you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting Paris Hilton—or somebody in her entourage—Wynwood’s gritty streets are lined with lower-middle class duplexes, bodegas, and artist-occupied warehouses. For the first time since entering Miami, I don’t have to sacrifice a newborn infant to the pagan gods of parking in order to find a space. Here they are plentiful and free.
Wynwood’s development suggests what pockets of the area north of downtown Tampa along the river—Riverside Heights, Tampa Heights and lower Seminole Heights—could look like in five or ten years: a few more restaurants, many more galleries, and a diverse economic and ethnic mix of populations.

The district spans roughly a twenty block (from north to south) by five block (from east to west) area. Along the northern edge (40th St. between NE 2nd Ave. and N. Miami Ave.), stretches the design district, where dozens of high-end retailers peddling everything from custom tile to mid-century modern furniture have set up shop. A few blocks south and west, Scope Art Fair, one of the original alternative satellites to Basel (it also takes place in New York, the Hamptons, and London each year), takes place in a giant tent inside Roberto Clemente Park.

At the end of a long row of gallery booths, nestled in a corner unit, is a project created by members of Tampa’s best-known artists’ collaborative, Experimental Skeleton, who program the city’s Flight 19 space at the train station downtown. About two weeks ago the group got a call from Miami’s Locust Projects, a non-profit contemporary art space. Locust asked the Flight 19 group to come up with a non-commercial project (meaning nothing would be for sale) to make a statement at Scope.

Joe Griffith, the Tampa group’s leader, has a long-standing relationship with Locust Projects. A year ago, at another alternative fair during Miami Basel, he found himself exhibiting in a booth next to the Miami group. They swapped ideas for a collaboration, and last month Griffith brought some folks from Locust to Flight 19 to stage an event that combined death metal performances with visual art. When Locust needed an innovative project to fill their booth at Scope, they returned the favor by calling Flight 19.

Griffith tossed a few ideas over to Locust (one featured Tampa artist Theo Wujcik), but the one they liked featured Negativland—an experimental musical group known for reworking copyrighted materials into subversive “culture jamming” messages. Flight 19 proposed to bring some of Negativland’s latest work, which tackles the thorny issue of when spreading freedom and democracy becomes imperialism.
To create the installation, Negativland drew on the talents of its roughly half-dozen members to create various aspects of the project: a video, oil paintings, an audio soundtrack, and sculptural elements. Griffith helped by building the centerpiece, a sort of ghetto animatronic Abe Lincoln—a deliberately poor illusion whose electronic parts peek out and whose misshapen, waxy face only a mother could love.

As a few passers-by at Scope gawk, Honest Abe repeats the same line of dialog—fumbled variations of “might equals right”—over and over again as a stern director snaps at him in the background. As Abe stutters, “the right right equals the right might,” you’re left to draw the inevitable connection between this perverted image of a past present and a certain somebody in today’s Oval Office. Who the director might be…well, that’s up for interpretation, too.
The recording is a remix of the voice of the animatronic Abe at Disney World—which will no doubt be suing Negativland in the near future. (Just kidding, we hope not.) The group’s legal troubles—they were most famously sued a decade ago by U2 for sampling their songs—have become as renowned, if not more so, than their work.

Griffith says it has cost Flight 19 about $2000 to bring the show to Scope. The money will come from funds the group has raised to support itself—the city of Tampa supports them by donating exhibition space, not money, and Negativland is too strapped paying its attorney’s fees to contribute. With the help of Paul Wilborn, the city’s creative industries manager, and Nancy Kipnis, Griffith tried to find private financial support for the exhibit, but with two weeks notice before the event, no donors came forward.

When he returns to Tampa, Griffith hopes to do some fundraising for Flight 19 with the feather in his cap of having brought the group to Miami during Basel. Considering their yearly budget of about $5,000, that Flight 19 continues to bring impressive, adventurous projects to the artistic no-man’s land of downtown Tampa seems like a small miracle.
In January, the group will bring The Art Guys, a well-known Houston duo, to the train station to create a valise sentence. It’s a signature piece for The Art Guys, who carve words into vintage suitcases and illuminate them from within, arranging them in a long row to create a statement. The Flight 19 valise sentence will be the longest one the artists have created yet—and to complete it, members of the Tampa group will lend a helping hand.

Pictured: (1) Street art pays homage to Duchamp in Wynwood. (2) Bicycle rickshaws shuttle visitors between Scope, at the district’s north end, and Pulse Art Fair, to the south. (3) Inside Scope. (4) Flight 19 and Locust Project’s booth at Scope. (5) Honest Abe, as built by Joe Griffith. (6) A painting of the commander-in-chief, part of an installation by Negativland. (3) Photographer Dove Shore waits to lift visitors up into his moving van gallery. During the fair, he parked outside popular venues in Wynwood. (5) Miami artist Susan Lee-Chun peeks out from her bunker “camouflaged” with black lace.

In a row of postcard-perfect art deco resorts on Collins Avenue sits the Catalina, a smaller hotel with modestly sized rooms and red shag carpet-lined halls. As site of the Bridge Art Fair, for four days the hotel’s 60-plus rooms have been stripped of furniture and converted into intimate exhibition spaces for galleries from the U.S. and Europe.
This year marks the debut of Bridge, which is the brainchild of the folks who run the Nova Art Fair yearly in Chicago and Basel, Switzerland. Where the main fair—Art Basel Miami Beach, held at the city’s convention center—aims at blue chip collectors with offerings from A-list artists, the smaller, alternative fairs like Bridge set their sights on a crowd with a smaller budget and a willingness to discover new talent.

While price tags in the hundreds of thousands are no surprise at the big Basel fair, around $2500 seems to be the limit for most Bridge buyers, says Erika Greenberg-Schneider, whose Tampa Heights gallery and print atelier, Blue Acier, scored one of the coveted rooms.
During the fair, she’ll sell her heart out in an effort to make up for slow business in Tampa, where her gallery is supported largely by the printed editions she turns out for clients in major U.S. cities and Europe and by teaching at USF. The artists she represents tend to fit into one of two categories: graduate students and professors she has met during her tenure at the university—MFA grads Marie Yoho Dorsey and Steve McClure, professors Elisabeth Condon and Neil Bender—and mid-career European artists like painter Herve di Rosa and her husband, sculptor Dominique Labauvie. Most of her prices fall in the $1000 range, though some of the established European artists she represents easily command $5000 for a work.

“Dominique has had five one-man shows at Basel, Switzerland. People come to see him because he’s famous in Europe,” she says.
Conducting business in the cramped hotel room can be a hairy proposition. Its diminutive dimensions—roughly 12-ft. square, plus a tiny bathroom, where art hangs on the shower door—make for close quarters when Schneider, a helper or two, and a prospective buyer cluster around her display table. As a small crowd amasses to take a look at the work she’s brought—a variety of paintings, prints, multi-media, and metal sculptures—elbows start to collide.
“I’ve seen more people in two days than in a year in Tampa,” she says. “And I’ve sold more in two days than in two years in Tampa.”
Selling to Bridge buyers comes with its own challenges. Many are on the hunt for something to fit a specific space or match a particular color scheme, Schneider says. Already, she has fielded requests for paintings on square-shaped paper (when an artist’s work used mainly rectangular sheets), prints in red ink (when the originals were in blue), and custom-sized versions of a metal-and-glass table by Labauvie. Except for the change in ink color, she has accommodated—or at least attempted—the changes.

Marie Dorsey’s landscape photogravures have been a bestseller. The suite of four images got a plum spot in the hallway outside the gallery’s room, where many visitors linger while making the rounds. The prints, four different renditions of the same mountain landscape during spring, summer, fall, and winter, were displayed at the Tampa Museum of Art this summer during the underCURRENT/overVIEW exhibition.
Many visitors express surprise that Bleu Acier is based in Tampa, Schneider says. It’s not a selling point—often she has to explain that she represents European artists and USF professors who have New York credentials before potential buyers are willing to take a serious look, she says. When we discuss whether Tampa could ever support something even remotely like Miami Basel, she’s skeptical, to say the least.

“The thing in Tampa is: we have to realize who we are, and we’re nothing as far as the arts go. It’s going to stay that way until there’s a real venture happening, and that venture is not only private enterprises coming into town but it’s also the protocol, or the government, or arts people, which we do not have now,” she says. “It can’t [happen] unless you have the collector base.”
Schneider struggled to get support in Tampa for her Bridge endeavor. In the face of miserable gallery sales, she turned to the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, which does not ordinarily fund private, for-profit galleries, and managed to convince them to grant her $1000 to publish a catalog. At the fair, she proudly passes out copies as visitors pack the tiny room.
That grand, as grateful as she is to have it, was a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $12,000 in shipping, framing, exhibition fees, lodging, and other expenses she took on to come here. But with two days down and two days to go, she’s already managed to break even.
And now that she’s seen what’s selling, she’s ready to rearrange her tiny temporary gallery for maximum effect.
“If it’s not selling, it’s out. I’m not here to promote, I’m here to sell. If it’s not selling, it’s relegated to the bathroom,” she says.

Pictured: (1) Erika Greenberg-Schneider, owner of Tampa’s Blue Acier, talks with prospective buyers in a converted hotel room. (2) Bouquet by USF professor Neil Bender (3) A painting by USF professor Elisabeth Condon, whose work has sold well—check out that vibrant blue!

In a landscape of uniformly slinky dresses and metrosexual getups, Jeff Whipple stands out in a black t-shirt and a ball cap.
To go with his laid-back attire, the Tampa artist sports a laid-back ‘tude—even as a party thrown in his honor thrusts him into the spotlight. At South Seas Hotel, one in a row of boutique hotels on Collins Avenue brimming with Basel-related action, his multimedia installation—a triptych of simultaneous video projections—serves as an eye-catching animated beacon.

Walking into the hotel, I find Whipple on his way outside to make sure everything is working the way it should be. Gazing up at three screens mounted at the hotel’s front—one on top of the entrance overhang, the other two strapped tightly between palm trees—we wait for the piece to loop and begin again. When it does, all three videos seem to be in sync. Words and shapes fly smoothly from one screen onto the next, and the soundtrack blasts music and dialog at the right times.
“I’m just glad it works,” says Whipple, who’s been in town for nearly a week installing the piece and tweaking the details. He began work on it in July, when the Tampa Museum of Art approached him about doing a one-person exhibition during Miami Basel.
“It’s like being asked to go to the Olympics for the museum,” he says.
If Miami Basel is the Olympics of art, Whipple is the equivalent of a decathlete. He makes videos, paintings, digital photographs, and large-scale installations, writes plays and directs actors, all with great skill. This latest work, The Spasm Between the Infinities, revolves around an iconic shape that’s appeared in Whipple’s work since 1983: a wiggly triple quotation mark—the spasm—that represents the transformation of nothing into something. Meaning is born when the three lines register in the viewer’s mind as a pattern, Whipple says; one would be random, two a coincidence, but three—that’s something.
In the videos, three Bay area performers (one is poet Venus Jones) act out soliloquies on the brevity and harsh disappointments of life as a spasm of meaning. As they speak, patches in the shape of spasms cover their eyes and graphics pulse in the background. A naked man and woman covered with paper spasms dance awkwardly by themselves, and then a spasm made of wax is lit like a candle and slowly melts away. The whole presentation is nothing if not wacky, the scale and craft of its execution nothing if not impressive.

“He essentially is a prodigy,” says Tampa Museum of Art interim director Ken Rollins, who has followed Whipple’s career for nearly twenty years. While he was director at Largo’s Gulf Coast Museum of Art, he staged an expansive exhibit of the artist’s work. When Rollins decided the museum should have a presence at this year’s fair, he went to Whipple.
“This is probably the major art scene in America right now. For a museum to take on a fairly ambitious project in the face of some of the most important art in the world, I think, demonstrates something about the character of that institution…and confidence in artists in our state,” Rollins says.
“[Whipple’s] not just about making a pretty picture—he’s about exploring ideas, and often times exploring philosophical questions and relationships…and the values we ascribe in our limited time here on earth.”
The big question for the museum is whether the event will pay off as a marketing investment by planting its name—and Tampa’s—in the minds of thousands of serious art aficionados this weekend. The TMA is—as several people commented to me over the course of the evening—possibly the only museum from outside of Miami to stage an event at the fair. (Paris’s Pompidou Center may be another.) Most exhibitors are small private galleries.

The city of Tampa co-sponsored the exhibit through Arte 2007, the biennial festival that celebrates Latin American art at venues throughout Tampa, including the art museum. Their goal is to lure visitors to that event, which takes place next November. Paul Wilborn, the city’s creative industries manager, brought representatives from Tampa’s convention center to see the effect Basel has had on Miami Beach.
“This has made a huge difference in Miami…This is an art project that has caused incredible investment,” he says. “Florida is really evolving into a very cool state for art. It’s taken a while—in Tampa it’s taken a while…but things are happening so fast now.”
Christine Burdick, president of Tampa’s Downtown Partnership, speaks from experience when she echoes those sentiments. Before tackling our smaller burg, Burdick worked on the revitalization of Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, mere blocks from where we’re all standing, sipping bubbly Italian wine provided by one of the exhibit’s sponsors.
A decade ago, you could shoot a canon down Lincoln Road and not hit anybody, she says. Cultural use development was the primary force behind the area’s revitalization with retailers, restaurants, and condos, she says. In downtown Tampa, she hopes to repeat that success by bringing cultural businesses to Franklin Street in particular.
“It’s ours to grab,” she says of culture-linked economic success.
Mark Ormond, a Sarasota-based critic and curator who selected the pieces that appeared in the Gulf Coast Whipple exhibit, feels less compelled to cheerlead for Tampa, but even he thinks it’s not unrealistic to plant the idea of the Bay area as a secondary destination to Basel.
“I think people who start coming here, hopefully they’ll extend their trip to two weeks and maybe go somewhere else in the state and see what else is happening,” he says.
“I think Jeff was a wise choice. I have never seen him not rise to the challenge.”

Pictured: (1) Jeff Whipple’s installation at South Seas Hotel, (2) Jeff Whipple (center) with girlfriend Chalet Zell and Paul Wilborn, creative industries manager for the city of Tampa, (3) O, spasm candle burning bright – a still from Whipple’s video.

Since it debuted in 2002 (following a planned launch in 2001 that was scrapped after 9/11), Art Basel Miami Beach has become a global phenomenon. A spin-off of one of the world’s biggest art fairs, Art Basel, held yearly in the Swiss city of the same name, Miami Basel mixes art world commerce and networking with the see-and-be-seen mania of South Beach.
Hundreds of galleries from the US, Asia, Europe, and Latin America exhibit in the main fair, anchored at the Miami Beach Convention Center, as well as a host of satellite fairs and events that have sprung up in hotels, warehouses, and tents around the area. Last year, the event drew a crowd of 36,000.
This year, four groups from Tampa will be in town to strut their stuff—a reflection both of Miami Basel’s importance as an art event and Tampa’s growing strength as an arts community.
Graphicstudio represents at Ink Miami, a special fair devoted to printed works on paper.
Flight 19/Experimental Skeleton, the collaborative group led by Joe Griffith, works with Locust Projects of Miami to showcase work by Negativland at SCOPE.
Bleu Acier, Erika Greenberg-Schneider’s print studio and contemporary art gallery, sets up shop at the Bridge Art Fair.
And the Tampa Museum of Art throws a bash to celebrate local artist Jeff Whipple’s multimedia installation at South Seas Hotel in the center of all the action on SoBe’s Collins Avenue.
Stay tuned as I try to take it all in—from drunken hipsters in stilettos to $70,000 paintings. Between the obligatory fruity cocktails, of course.
–Megan Voeller