Reviews: 2015
Buoyant City
Everyone has a plan to save Miami, ranging from Dutch water experts to Danish architects, Harvard grad students, Swiss urbanists, New York engineers, not to mention all the hydrologists and climatologists from around the world who’ve been weighing in on the subject of sea-level resiliency and climate change. Meanwhile, Miami continues to build higher and higher towers in flood-prone areas as if waiting for something, some deus ex machina, to come to the rescue and make it all right. Florida is the flattest, lowest state in the...
read moreOpening Miami to
Chinese Contemporary Art
In a 1988 article in Connoisseur Magazine, I was described as “an occidental orientalist” for being the first to open a New York gallery presenting a totally new phenomenon – Chinese contemporary art. I was perceived as a cultural explorer into the unknown. Chinese and contemporary — to most people the very idea oxymoronic. To them Chinese art was something frozen into strict genres — classical landscapes, folkloric apple-cheeked children, social realism. So the early part of my career I had to work extra hard to open the eyes of Americans to...
read moreLeslie King Hammond – Making Order Out of the Chaos
Lunching recently in the BLT restaurant at The Betsy Hotel, South Beach, Leslie King-Hammond paused in mid-sentence, mischief in her eye, “I’m an angry black woman,” she declared, smiling. The two white men at the table, one a reporter and the other Jonathan Plutzik, The Betsy’s owner, nodded in appreciation. But neither doubted King-Hammond’s seriousness for an instant, the jovial infectiousness of her energy notwithstanding. For the fifth consecutive year, Hammond, graduate dean emeritus at the Maryland Institute College of Art...
read moreInfinity City and Beyond
Sam Wilkinson’s sculptures and drawings were recently exhibited at Francis Naumann Fine Art in New York City. The exhibition included small sculptures and intricate drawings of robots and mechanical beings — inhabitants of what Wilkinson describes as “my mechanically based mind.” Since childhood — Wilkinson is twenty-one — he has been obsessed by certain repetitive forms and patterns that find their way into his drawings and sculptures. His characters have an imaginative life as well as an aesthetic one. Often...
read moreThe End of Architecture
It’s hard to find much in the way of inspiration or direction from mainstream architecture these days. Indeed, the profession seems largely on the defensive, lurching towards a nervous breakdown, as big-name architects become global branding tools and conglomerates too big to fail. To the general public they come across as arrogant and aloof with their lingo and fancy eyewear, hopping time zones, perennially jet-lagged, priorities skewed. President Xi Jinping of China called for an end to “Weird Architecture” in 2014....
read moreHolly Lynton’s Bare Handed
In Bare Handed, Holly Lynton’s photographs explore the relationship between man and his/her environment through the perspective of small farmers attempting to resist the increasing corporatization of the agricultural industry. In a world where the term “sustainable” has become a trendy buzzword, Lynton attempts to connect the viewer to honest hand-crafted tradition, as contrasted with the sanitized offerings of Whole Foods. This photographic journey is not merely a timely essay; Lynton escaped the hustle of the city years ago for New...
read moreNo Boundaries at Pérez Art Museum Miami: Discussion with Henry Skerritt – Art Historian, Curator
No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) brings together the work of nine Aboriginal Australian artists: Paddy Bedford, Jananggoo Butcher Cherel, Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Tjumpo Tjapanangvka, Billy Joongoorra Thomas, and Prince of Wales (Midpul). Each of these men is a leader within their community and while they began painting late in life, their works explore complex and innovative modes of abstraction.
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