For the second year running, Art Public will turn Collins Park into an outdoor exhibition space with large-scale sculpture, video, installation and live performance. Produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, the Art Basel Miami Beach sector includes works from the show’s galleries, by leading and emerging international artists, installed from ground level within the park to flying along the Miami Beach skyline above. Art Public Opening Night will take place on Wednesday, December 5 with a program of special performances.
Selected for the second consecutive year by Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Co-Founder of the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), this year’s edition of Art Public features a series of works grounded in their connection to speech and language. In this context, Art Public will present a new version of Ry Rocklen’s ‘A Touch of Grace’, a flag that hangs the length of a pole and comes perilously close to the ground. With ‘Black Dada Flags’, Adam Pendleton also turns to flags as a medium for dialog and lines 16 along Collins Park. Placed in separate locations in the park, two billboards by Gary Simmons will spell out the words ‘I wish it could be morning all day long’. Conversation will also continue in the air, as Dave McKenzie’s ‘Declaration’ will feature a plane flying a text-based banner above Collins Park, each day at 11.45am, offering a different marriage proposal to Art Public viewers every time.
Other works will surprise in scale and delivery. Presenting a new work for Art Public, Mark Hagen will show three interconnecting cement screen panels, each made out of 84 individually crafted cement units stacked together. While Hagen’s work appears weighty, Ruben Ochoa will present three new sculptures appearing to defy gravity. For ‘Love Stream’, Randy Polumbo has turned a vintage Airstream aluminum trailer into an experiential wonderland of illuminated blossoms, while Pierre Ardouvin’s ‘Bonhomme de neige’ will humorously depict a melting snowman.
Works by Latin American artists, including Lourival Cuquinha, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, José Davila, Teresa Margolles, Raul Mourão, Iván Navarro and Miguel Andrade Valdez address a variety of concerns such as urban negotiations around freedom, leisure versus labor, materiality, movement and monumentality. Art Public will also feature ‘Twin Vortexes’ by Alice Aycock, the first of six large sculptures realized for ‘Park Avenue Paper Chase’, scheduled to be on view in New York on Park Avenue in spring 2014. Included in the sector will be ‘Riser’, a new work by Australian artist David Keating, and ‘Poets in Miami’ by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. Finally, ‘I feel, you feel, we feel through each other into our selves’ by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone will be on display in the park.
Art Public Opening Night, free and open to the public, will feature a commissioned musical performance by Jason and Alicia Hall Moran, interacting with artist José Davila’s work in Collins Park. On that same night, My Barbarian will present an extract of their piece ‘Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theatre’, a singing performance playfully engaging in questions of economic inequity, artistic patronage, and cultural excesses through a fake theater company obsessed with classical allusion, costume, masquerade and sculpture. The evening will also include an enigmatic choreography by Alex Israel.
On the Oceanfront (between 20th and 21st Streets) and in close proximity to Art Public, the Absolut Art Bureau will present ‘Güiro’, an art bar installation conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk by the artist collective known as Los Carpinteros – Cuban-born, Madrid-based, Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez. Open from 5pm to midnight each night, December 5-8, ‘Güiro’ will be accompanied by a curated program of live music, performances, and events including contributions by distinguished Mallorcan composer Joan Valent. For more information, please visit www.absolutartbureau.com.
List of Art Public artworks:
Pierre Ardouvin | Bonhomme de neige, 2007 Valentin
Alice Aycock | Twin Vortexes, 2012 | Galerie Thomas Schulte and Fredric Snitzer Gallery
Lourival Cuquinha Varal, 2012 | A Gentil Carioca
José Davila | Untitled (The Space Beneath Us), 2012 | Galería OMR and Travesia Cuatro
Mark Hagen | To be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Miami Screen), 2012 | Almine Rech Gallery
David Keating | Riser, 2012 | RaebervonStenglin
Juliana Cerqueira Leite | Climb, 2012 | Casa Triângulo
Teresa Margolles |Untitled, 2010 | LABOR
Dave McKenzie | Declaration, 2012 | Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
Raul Mourão | Balanço Maré I (Para Bela e Lia), 2011 | Galeria Nara Roesler
Iván Navarro and Courtney Smith | Street Lamp, 2012 | Paul Kasmin Gallery
Ruben Ochoa | Lock, Stock, Barrel, 2012 | Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
Adam Pendleton | Black Dada Flags, 2012 | Pace
Jaume Plensa | Poets in Miami, 2012 | Galerie Lelong and Richard Gray Gallery
Randy Polumbo | Love Stream #2, 2012 | Paul Kasmin Gallery
Ry Rocklen | A Touch of Grace II, 2012 | UNTITLED and Thomas Solomon Gallery
Ugo Rondinone | I feel, you feel, we feel through each other into our selves, 2012 |
Gladstone Gallery
Gary Simmons | I wish it could be morning all day long, 2012 | Metro Pictures, Simon Lee
Gallery, Regen Projects and Anthony Meier Fine Arts
Miguel Andrade Valdez | Monumento Lima translation – Collins Park, 2012 | REVOLVER Galéria
Performances taking place during Art Public Opening Night on December 5:
8.30pm | Jason and Alicia Hall Moran | AiR, 2012
9.00pm | My Barbarian | Broke People’s Baroque Theater, 2010-2012
9.30pm | Alex Israel | Miami 2012
Art Public Opening Night: December 5, 2012, 8:30pm – 10pm, Collins Park
Art Public is free and open to the public from Dec 5 – 9, 2011, 24 hours.
More information and a description of each project are available at www.artbasel.com/public.