assume vivid astro focus
Assume Vivid Astro Focus: XI | At The Bass Miami Beach
An Exhibit That Bestows Dialogue Within and Outside The Gallery Walls
Miami Beach's contemporary art museum, The Bass, is set to hold Assume Vivid Astro Focus: XI, an installation running that will run for two years starting November 13, 2024, to October 26, 2026. Based in Gallery 5 of The Bass Museum, the XI exhibition will showcase a large-scale installation that covers the walls of the gallery with decal graphics, patterned wallpaper of vibrant colors, and video performances. This immersive setup invites a larger-scale experience where gender, politics, and cultural codes intertwine.
Troy Simmons
Biomorphic sculpture at Art Basel poses human, environmental questions
When you’re strolling or playing outside, how often are you considering the tiny microorganisms that make up our environment? That’s one of a few questions posed by a new biomorphic sculpture exhibit during this week's Art Basel.
Viewing SPORE, the new sculpture by rising Miami-based sculptor Troy Simmons is like peeking inside a microscope, revealing a tiny world of black, fluid microorganisms.
Now scale that up to a 10-feet welded sculpture with hand-sewn fabrics, discarded aluminum parts, and mirrored surfaces that reflect one's image.
Does the artwork symbolize plant growth or human cellular structure? Simmons told WLRN that it's actually a "hybrid," a symbiotic relationship that speaks to the core of our humanity.
assume vivid astro focus
Merging drawing, sculpture, video, and performance, Assume Vivid Astro Focus enmesh gender, politics, and cultural codes into fantastical installations. For their presentation on The Bass' Instagram gallery @TheBassSquared, three works by the Brazilian and French duo survey their digital and video practice. Colorful and psychedelic, yet meditative, the collage-like work, a_ntes vulgar agora fino (2012)_ abstracts and animates imagery from another series of drawings titled 'Cyclops Trans Cheesecakes'. LSE ABBA/FASSBINDER (in collaboration with Los Super Elegantes) (2004) and Relevee (2006) highlight Assume Vivid Astro Focus' numerous collaborations with musicians, who integrate their installations into music videos and more experimental video works.
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Noah Cribb
Nature as canvas
In the vibrant heart of Miami's art scene, a growing movement of artists is turning to nature and biology as both medium and message, weaving environmental consciousness with cultural heritage and contemporary concerns.
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Alice Aycock
At 77, Sculptor Alice Aycock Is Plotting Her 'Last Big Piece'
The sculptor, whose large-scale works grace cities around the world, is collaborating on a new pavilion at Art Omi in Upstate New York.
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Rafael Ferrer
THE HAPPY FEW WHO SAW the Rafael Ferrer installations in “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1969 or at the museum’s Sculpture Annual the following year are unlikely to forget the artist’s attraction to unconventional substances—crank grease, mounds of hay, blocks of ice, piles of leaves. These materials were gathered into “enclosures” (in Ferrer’s apt denomination) that were sundered by puzzled visitors, who memorably tracked wet foliage across the black stone floors of Marcel Breuer’s still-new museum. Ferrer’s contributions marked the artist’s noteworthy place in the day’s radical collisions of painting and sculpture—then called post-Minimalist or process art—a primacy underscored by his inclusion in such taste-transforming international events as Harald Szeemann’s “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland in 1969.
assume vivid astro focus
FAENA ART'S ANNUAL GALA
At this year’s gala, Faena have brought in avaf to recreate one of their famous installations.
ángeles veloces arcanos fugaces is a participatory art installation that reimagines a roller dancing rink as an art experience by assume vivid astro focus (avaf). Faena Art, originally commissioned avaf to create a neo-disco roller rink in 2014 for the Faena Art Center Buenos Aires.
assume vivid astro focus first explored the concept of the roller rink as an interactive installation with Public Art Fund in Central Park, New York City in 2004 as part of the Whitney Biennial. That original iteration of the project was intended as an homage to the Skate Circle, a community of roller dancers in Central Park that have been a part of New York City’s identity for years and part of the fabric of its cultural life.
The Bass Art Museum is thrilled to unveil Night at the Museum’s extraordinary silent auction, showcasing donated artworks from a variety of artists, and exclusive hospitality packages from leading local hotels and restaurants.
Featuring names such as assume vivid astro focus, Hernan Bas, Noah Cribb, and Fredric Snitzer our silent auction artworks are the standout centerpiece to the festivities.
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María Martínez Cañas. Flight X (Hospital Bed). Photogram on photo linen. 72 x 48 in.
María Martínez Cañas
Environmental Futures III: South Florida Women Artists brings together master and emerging women and non-binary artists, highlighting the concepts of environmental ecology, social ecology, and mental ecology, as referenced by Felix Guattari's book The Three Ecologies.
Guattari's contribution to ecology studies resides in what he calls the ecosophical perspective– an extended definition of ecology beyond environmental concerns to address human subjectivity and social relations.
In his words, the ecosophical perspective includes unifying objectives, such as the struggle to end deforestation or the proliferation of nuclear industries, but alsoquestions of racism, phallocentrism, the disastrous legacy of 'modern' town planning, etc. This theoretical framework is very useful in approaching how South Florida women artists have documented the environment as natural, social, and subjective, departing from a palpable sense of ecological crisis.
Rafael Ferrer
Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940
March 10, 2024 - July 28, 2024
Organized by Curator María Elena Ortiz, Surrealism and Us is inspired by the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean with connections to notions of the Afrosurreal in the United States. Representing a global perspective, this exhibition is the first intergenerational show dedicated to Caribbean and African diasporic art presented at the Modern.
Inspired by the essay “1943: Surrealism and Us” by Suzanne Césaire, the presentation includes over 50 works from the 1940s to the present day, in a wide range of media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism, Surrealism and Us explores how Caribbean and Black artists interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks, framed within a pre-existing history of Black resistance and creativity, illustrate how Caribbean and Black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes.
Rafael Ferrer
As Told by its Makers: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art
February - April 20, 2024
As Told by its Makers features a selection of diploma works recently donated to the Academy's collection by National Academicians Rafael Ferrer, Katherine Bradford, Squeak Carnwath, Louis Fishman, Hermine Ford, Sangram Majumdar, and Jimmy Wright.
While focusing on painting, the works on view reveal the myriad styles, subject matter, and perspectives of artists grappling with how to address diverse contemporary concerns within their own practice, as well as in the larger cultural dialogue.
As Told by its Makers is curated by Diana Thompson, Director of Collections.
Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf’s Life in Parties
The artist known for his psychedelic, out-of-the-box interventions retraces his wild ride.
The first day Kenny Scharf visited New York, in 1977, he found himself at Food, the fabled artist-run SoHo restaurant, when a commotion outside alerted him to the fact that Faye Dunaway was running down the street in a split skirt, filming a scene for the fashion thriller Eyes of Laura Mars.
“That was so much more Hollywood than anything I remember growing up,” says Scharf, who was raised in Los Angeles and attended Beverly Hills High School with the children of multiple stars. Less than a year later, he returned to Manhattan to study at the School of Visual Arts, drawn by the allure of Andy Warhol and the combination of art, music, and nightlife.
“Me and every other kid who moved to New York at that time wanted to be part of that,” he says. Within his first week at SVA, he met Keith Haring,Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Joey Arias.
TOMAS VU
Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette
November 11, 2023 - June 2, 2024
Asia Society Texas is pleased to present Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette, the organization’s first public art installation. This collaboration between Cuban American artist Rafael Domenech and Vietnamese American artist Tomas Vu assumes the form of a dynamic outdoor pavilion with two stages, occupying AST’s 13,000-square-foot lot at the intersection of Oakdale and Caroline Streets in the heart of Houston’s Museum District. Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette is commissioned in partnership with the University of Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts.
Blane De St. Croix
Horizon
October 3, 2023 – January 21, 2024
In Horizon, sculptor Blane De St. Croix unveils a series of new works rooted in his study of landscapes in the UAE. An artist-researcher, St. Croix works on site, together with scientific researchers, to develop art that is in direct response to the land itself.
The major new works in this exhibition, commissioned by The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, were developed during a series of residencies over the last year in which the artist worked closely with NYUAD faculty, and resident scientists.
Hernan Bas
Hernan Bas Brings His Conceptualists to The Bass Museum of Art
The Miami painter's series of fictional conceptual artists is on view in a solo exhibition at the Miami Beach Museum.
“The Conceptualists” presents Bas’ cohort of fictional artist peers, which he has spent the last few years painting and bringing to life from a running list of concepts. Showing them all together for the first time, Bas has decided to install the show in a configuration of mini booths within the museum, a reference that mirrors the physical space of the main Art Basel fair several blocks away.
Hernan Bas
Hernan Bas Didn't Paint the Works in His Show at The Bass. His Alter Egos Did.
The Miami native was inspired to take a foray into conceptual artmaking during the pandemic. The results surprised even him.
Known for his expressionistic paintings of androgynous young men, Bas has often embraced the double entendre. “The Conceptualists” expands on his interest in queerness, desire, the occult, and the absurd, but does so through the creation of fictitious conceptual artists who engage in eccentric behavior as part of their practices.
assume vivid astro focus
Sky's the limit in public art project in solidarity with Miami's drag queens
As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cracks down on their public visibility, local celebrities from Fantasia Royale Gaga to Persephone Von Lips are celebrated in banner form above Española Way.
The art collective assume vivid astro focus (avaf) has created five double-sided banners celebrating local drag queens as part of Elevate Española, at present on view above Española Way between Washington and Collins Avenues. “I wanted to make something colourful, celebratory and full of energy,” says avaf’s founder, Eli Sudbrack, an artist who works between São Paulo and New York, making large-scale, colourful projects. “Our practice is always talking about queerness. We’ve had many drag queen collaborators in the past and drag queen artists have been persecuted recently, especially in Florida.” he says, adding: “Miami has a very strong drag queen scene, and it’s important to connect with the local community and celebrate their art.”
assume vivid astro focus
Miami Beach Just Unveiled a Public Art Installation Honoring Its Local Drag Icons
A citywide celebration of public art kicked off Miami Beach Art Week.
City officials including tourism and culture director Lissette García Arrogante, Commissioner Laura Dominguez, and city manager Alina Hudak, were on hand on December 5 for the unveiling of Adora Vanessa Athena Fantasia (2023). The newly-commissioned art installation by Brazilian collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus (AVAF) honors drag culture at a crucial time, given the recent efforts by Governor Ron DeSantis to ban drag performances in Florida.
James and Suzan Wines share how they designed an Off-White store in Ginza, Tokyo, for Virgil Abloh
Architects working in contemporary retail design realize projects through a potent mixture of architecture, art, and business. This approach attempts to create a space that relays the retailer’s vision and ethos through space and material. Though clients near and far have been affected by the “retail apocalypse,” which saw a shift in focus from in-person shopping to online, recently there’s been a veritable renaissance. Again, art, and architecture meet.
I spoke with James Wines, founder of New York–based SITE environmental arts studio, and his daughter, Suzan Wines (SITE, I-Beam Architecture & Design), about their recent collaboration with Off-White and the late Virgil Abloh, and the importance of architecture within retail design.
Alice Aycock
Groundswell: Women of Land Art
at the Nasher Sculpture Center
September 23, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Using materials like earth, wind, water, fire, wood, salt, rocks, mirrors, and explosives, American artists of the 1960s began to move beyond the white cube gallery space to work directly in the land. With ties to Minimal and Conceptual art, these artists placed less emphasis on the discrete object and turned their attention to the experience of the artwork—however fleeting or permanent that might be—foregrounding natural materials and the site itself to create works that were large in scale and located outside of typical urban art world circuits. For many years, art historical narratives of Land art have been dominated by men. Groundswell: Women of Land Art, intends to shift that focus to shed new light on the vast number of Land works by women artists, whose careers ran parallel to their better-known male counterparts, yet have received less recognition and representation in museum presentations.
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Alice Aycock
Women of ‘Groundswell’: Thinking Outside the Spiral
Revisiting the land artists at the Nasher Sculpture Center, a critic finds their work was never more relevant than it is today.
The land art movement, which flourished in the ’70s amid enormous media attention, at times seemed like a boys’ club. When Michael Heizer dynamited the Nevada earth to create his “Double Negative,” or when Robert Smithson built his “Spiral Jetty” from a 1,500-foot coil of basalt rocks on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, they expanded the proportions of contemporary art to a scale that owed as much to ancient sites like Stonehenge as to the cowboy fantasy of the infinitely expandable frontier.
Kenny Scharf
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy
Winter 2023 - Spring 2024
Kenny Scharf’s contribution to Luna Luna was a wave swinger dedicated to the cosmic spirits of flight, graffitied with playful geometric shapes and his signature cartoon figures.
Influenced by growing up near Disneyland on a diet of cartoons and sitcoms, Scharf’s Luna Luna commission comprises a chain swing ride featuring panels spray painted with geometric shapes and his signature cartoon figures. Audience members were suspended from the rotating top of the carousel, above the crowd. Scharf also made six free-standing sculptures installed elsewhere in the park.
Vickie Pierre
To Recognize a Pattern
September 23, 2023 — December 10, 2023
On October 7, 1977, an exhibition titled Patterning and Decoration, curated by legendary art dealer Holly Solomon, opened at the Museum of the American Foundation for the Arts in Miami, Florida. In a short essay written for that exhibition’s catalog, Amy Goldin offered, “This exhibition is not offered in the spirit of a lecture but as an invitation to a worldly or a cosmic dance. The artists remind you of the possibility of joy beyond reason, of solemnity beyond fear.”
Presented nearly fifty years later, To Recognize a Pattern brings together works by pivotal Pattern and Decoration artists, alongside work by three contemporary artists Mark Fleuridor, Ashnide Jean-Baptiste, and Vickie Pierre. While Fleuridor, Jean-Baptiste, and Pierre make work that evoke P&D, their rich and varied practices interweave other influences, many of which derive from living in South Florida.
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Jon Pylypchuk
Jon Pylypchuk: I’ve Got Love for You
On view May 20 - August 19, 2023
A site-specific installation by one of Los Angeles’s most iconic artists. Painter, musician, and multimedia artist Jon Pylypchuk transforms the Mullin Gallery with an animated forest filled with tender ghostly presence.
Featuring new bronzes and paintings, this exhibition debuts the artist’s songwriting and is envisioned as a tribute to important people in his life, including his wife and his late best friend Tony Fernandez. Jon Pylypchuk: I’ve Got Love for You presents talking ghosts and other friendly, surreal creatures who guide gallery visitors through an otherworldly landscape. Pylypchuk’s original songs will be presented throughout the exhibition, which stands as a testament to the emotional complexity of his career-long exploration of selfhood, community, and estrangement.
Rafael Ferrer
entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico
Aug 19, 2023 - May 05, 2024
entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico examines the artistic genealogies and social justice movements that connect Puerto Rico with Chicago. Featuring works by an intergenerational group of artists with ties to Chicago, the exhibition presents Puerto Rican painters who use printmaking techniques and approaches alongside artists who address social and political issues through their work.
The exhibition also centers Chicago as a city that for decades has championed national conversations on Puerto Rican self-determination and Latine issues, such as immigration and bilingual education. It features a selection of materials documenting the social movements and community organizations that advocated for the rights of underrepresented Latine communities, including historic photographs and other ephemera that tell the story of the anticolonial resistance and transcultural solidarities in the Puerto Rican community in Chicago.
José Bedia
José Bedia Explores Tribal Religions in "Simetria Natural"
José Bedia breathes new life into tribal aesthetics in order to bring us closer to our origin.
Maria Elena Gonzaléz
Pollock-Krasner Recipient, 2022-2023
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation revealed that it would award grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to ninety-three artists and nonprofit organizations around the world. The recipients represent fifteen countries and fourteen states and territories. The grants are meant to provide artists and organizations with professional support, enabling them to create new work, purchase materials, rent studio space, prepare for and mount exhibitions, and attend residencies. Funds may also be used to offset living expenses.
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José Bedia
Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from thePatricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond
at MoMA, NYC
April 30 - September 9, 2023
Chosen Memories brings together contemporary works by Latin American artists who have been investigating history as source material for their work. “History is a living organism,” said the Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó, one of the 40 artists featured in the exhibition. Bringing together videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures made over the past four decades, the exhibition reveals how some of today’s most relevant art is conceived through investigating and retelling history in new ways.
Anchored by a transformative gift of works from trustee Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and shown in dialogue with other Latin American works from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition presents work by some of the region’s most important artists. From reframing long histories of colonialism in the region and exploring the different ways in which artists revisit undervalued cultural heritages, to looking at the ways in which kinship and belonging are strengthened, the exhibition offers us new ways of looking at the past to better understand, and shape, our current moment.
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Enrique Martínez Celaya
Enrique Martínez Celaya at Museo Marino Marini
The "Watching and Waiting" exhibition reflects on the sculpture's role as a witness.
Cuba-born artist Enrique Martínez Celaya spoke to The Florentine ahead of the opening of his sculpture exhibition Watching and Waiting. The show runs at Museo Marino Marini from March 30 to June 5.
Enrique Martínez Celaya
Watching and Waiting: Enrique Martínez Celaya Selected Sculpture, 2005–2023
at Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy
March 31 - June 5, 2023
The exhibition, curated by Giorgio Verzotti, pays specific attention to the sculpture of Martínez Celaya, almost in dialogue with the works of Marino Marini. For the first time, the artist transforms, for this exhibition, the flickering images of his paintings into concrete objects in bronze, concrete, wax or wood, which share space with the viewer and intensify their personal involvement. Thus sculpture becomes a powerful medium through which Martínez Celaya explores highly personal and intimate concepts that characterize the emotional journey of life, such as memory, loss, vulnerability, fortitude, the ephemeral and hope.
Martínez Celaya's sculptures are presented as fragments of a story or a poem which, in their physicality, occupy the space in which the visitor moves. They seem to be a permanent version of what is usually a fleeting act: crying, sitting down, raising an arm, sheltering. They perform the function of witnesses, intensified by their immobility. Immobility that does not want to be impassive, but rather resistance, determination, waiting and patience, as the title of the exhibition itself underlines, Watching and Waiting.
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"What Are You Buying Art For?" Fredric Snitzer Reflects on 45 Years of Art in Miami
Douglas Markowitz interviews Fredric Snitzer for Miami New Times to get insights into the gallerist’s career in Miami over the past 45 years.
José Bedia
Viaje Circular at MARCO, Monterrey, MX
January 27 - July 2023
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey presents José Bedia, Viaje Circular, a retrospective that proposes a journey through the artist's own production and the ancestral cultures that influence him. The exhibition, curated by Taiyana Pimentel, director of MARCO, and José Bedia Fuertes, director of the artist's studio, brings together 102 works of art, mostly paintings, drawings, and installations.
The title of the exhibition refers to an introspective journey in terms of culture and identity since Bedia's art blurs the borders between the original peoples of Latin America from the symbolic, the primal, and the sacred, making the past act as an active value in the present. In this way, the artist generates a symbiosis between primitive cultures and contemporary art.
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Fredric Snitzer Gallery's 45th Anniversary and 20th participation at Art Basel
Interview of Fredric Snitzer at Fredric Snitzer Gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, celebrating his 20th participation in the fair and his gallery’s 45th year of operations.
This video interview was produced in collaboration with ScreenPartners.
A festival of art in Miami: Art Basel
Wendy Guerra walks through a living museum in Miami during the days of Art Basel. A visual, contemporary, and colorful journey where galleries, artists, collectors, and works are set in motion.
Rafael Ferrer
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today at MCA Chicago
November 19, 2022 - April 23, 2023
The 1990s were a period of profound social, political, and economic transformation. From the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc to the rise of transnational trade agreements, the decade’s large-scale shifts ushered in an era of international connectivity and social upheaval. In the cultural sector, art exhibitions expanded and turned global, and dialogues around identity, especially by those who have suffered systemic oppression, were featured front and center in cultural debates. The forces of this pivotal decade also had a major effect on the production, circulation, and presentation of art from the Caribbean.
Taking the 1990s as its cultural backdrop, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today is the first major group exhibition in the United States to envision a new approach to contemporary art in the Caribbean diaspora, foregrounding forms that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place. It uses the concept of weather and its constantly changing forms as a metaphor to analyze artistic practices connected to the Caribbean, understanding the region as a bellwether for our rapidly shifting times.
The exhibition is curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Assistant, Isabel Casso, former Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Nolan Jimbo, Susman Curatorial Fellow. It is accompanied by an expansive catalogue featuring scholarship as well as extensive plate sections reproducing exhibition artworks in full color. It includes essays authored by Carlos Garrido Castellano, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Aaron Kamugisha, and Mayra Santos-Febres, as well as a roundtable conversation with Carla Acevedo-Yates, Christopher Cozier, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Teresita Fernández.
The exhibition is designed by SKETCH | Johann Wolfschoon, Panamá.
Traveling to ICA Boston, October 5, 2023 - February 24, 2024
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The Best Booths at an ADAA Art Show Filled with Memorable Presentations
by History’s Most Under-Recognized Artists
Rafael Ferrer at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Booth D11
Miami’s Fredric Snitzer Gallery has a tight survey of the 89-year-old Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer, who is now based in Greenport, New York. For this presentation, the gallery, which will also do a solo show for Ferrer during Art Basel Miami Beach later this year, has brought together a grouping of painted portraits from the 1980s to 2020—a surprising choice, given that this is an artist better known for his Minimalist and Conceptual artworks. Some sections of these striking portraits have loose brushwork, while others have a tight flatness.
