Report from Miami Art Week 2017

In our report from Miami Art Week 2017, Tanja Hollander, Nancy Davidson, Tania El Khoury, Sara Driver and Amy Sherald talk about the roles that social media art, inflatable sculpture, interactive performance, documentary film and figurative painting played during Miami Art Week and Art Basel 2017.

Tanja Hollander is an artist who lives and works in Auburn, Maine. No need for a ticket to an art fair or a museum to experience her social media project Are You Really My Friend? during Art Week. You could participate by visiting a small pavilion inside the Botanical Garden on Miami Beach. The vast archive of the project is currently on view in its entirety at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

For the multi-media installation Per Sway that she presents at Locust Projects in Miami, Nancy Davidson created inflatable symbols of power and control that mirror the bizarre and horrifying political climate in the world today. Based in New York, Davidson is an interdisciplinary artist known for anthropomorphic weather balloon sculptures that explore the architecture of the body.

Miami Dade College Live Arts program invited artist Tania El Khoury to share a dozen haunting stories from the Middle East. Based in London and Beirut, Tania choreographed two intimate interactive performances for venues on Miami Beach. As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a one-on-one encounter inside a small room at the New World Center. Gardens Speak is a theatrical experience for groups of ten at the Fillmore Theater.

New York based filmmaker Sara Driver takes us back to a seminal time in New York City history with her new documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sara was part of the independent film scene in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Besides making her own feature films, she’s recognized for producing early film projects by her partner Jim Jarmusch. After screenings at the 2017 Toronto and New York festivals, Magnolia Pictures plans the film's release in theaters for 2018.

Joining us Live on UNTITLED Radio, Baltimore based painter Amy Sherald talks about her work and the impact of recent art news. This year, her figurative paintings came to the world’s attention and doubled in value when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Sherald to paint the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. Our conversation leads to Naima Green's writing on the subject in the New York Times.