Art + Culture Diaries #5
Art Basel & two variations on collaboration with “the walls”….
By the time the month of December rolls around in NYC, it’s time to hit the beach - out of town. So why not mix a little business and pleasure. Enter Art Basel Miami 2007. The amount of satellite art fairs at this years event swelled to over 20 between Miami Beach and downtown Miami. The sheer numbers were overwhelming so depending on your objective you either go with the flow or set up a strict schedule. Needless to say, my travel partners, the artists Toofly and Alice Mizrachi, and I planned our trip last minute, missed flights and/or arrived without knowing our local hosts. So we stuck with a strategy based on spontaneity - since it seemed to be pre-determined by the cosmos. When you go with the flow, you never know what might go down, so as it happens we ran into some fellow graffiti artist friends, who ran into to some artists, who had a blank wall they were scheduled to paint the next day, they told Toofly to grab a can of spraypaint and she proceeded to commemorate her presence in Miami. Hailing from Queens, but known in the 5 boroughs for her “around the way girl” character, Toofly has payed her dues in black books, on walls and at NYC’s School of Visual Arts since her start in the rebellious artistic spirit of the 90’s street graffiti movement. Her inspiration, found in NYC’s urban landscape, fuels her skilled drawings that translate raw feeling into street masterpieces.
After a night on the streets with the girls, we spent a relaxing day that turned into an evening at Kehinde Wiley’s annual Fish Fry poolside at the Sagamore. The relaxed event offers folks staying through Sunday a chance to leisurely mingle with fellow artists, eat, drink and savor their last hours in warm weather. It was here that I got to chat it up over cocktails with the artist, Thom Flynn. Based in DC, Flynn excavates materials for his work (layered paper on wood panel) from billboards and street posters found on abandoned buildings and contstruction sites in any major metropolitan city. Invoking the power of the spontaneous stroll through the city, Flynn’s work flips the script on the advertising overload of today’s consumer culture, while at the same time, offering a new riff on sample and re-mix aesthetics via his re-use of found materials and the cyclical nature of his work.
