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Art Basel Miami Beach: Rubell Family Collection

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ridiculous: Art Miami

The Rubell Family Collection was teeming with hundreds of beautiful people, taking art selfies and eating bread and butter. It was 10 am on Thursday, December 3, during the height of Art Basel Miami Beach week. Who were all these people? They arrived by bus, by car through Miami’s dense traffic, and on foot to check out the Rubell’s newest thematic exhibition No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection.

Visitors lined up to sample hundreds of pounds of freshly cut bread and butter from Jennifer Rubell’s newest food-based art performance, Devotion, sawed by a man drenched in sweat (Alban de Pury, son of Simon) and buttered by a young woman (his fiancee Fanny Karst) who appeared angelic in an ivory dress. There was a giant mound of salt behind her on the stage, so that each visitor could salt their own piece after it was handed to them. It was simple and delicious.

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Traveling further into the space, No Man’s Land presents an ambitious cacophony of paintings, large-scale installation, photography, and video.

Giant soft sculpture by Solange Pessoa, in hair and fabric, filled two large downstairs galleries, while a dense group show by the art world’s best known female practitioners like Barbara Kruger, Isa Gentzken, Cady Noland, Janine Antoni, Lisa Yuskavage, Cecily Brown, Elizabeth Peyton, Marlene Dumas, with approximately 100 others from the RFC, filled the rest of the museum.

Besides addressing inequalities in an art world where men completely dominate museum exhibitions around the world, No Man’s Land is an opportunity for an ambitious conversation to evolve. Large scale works filled the show and were mostly given adequate room to breathe, and specific narratives – the female gaze, an obsession with ‘soft’ or organic materials, struggles for identity, and unspoken secrets – influenced one another subtly and reinforced a collective power.

No Man’s Land falls squarely on the shoulders of past RFC curatorial initiatives which appear, at first, obvious, banal and possibly irrelevant (28 Chinese, American Exuberance, 30 Americans) featuring large groups of artists united by terms of country, race, or ethnicity. However, the simplicity in selecting such a large number of artists from the collection allows a great deal of lattitude–both for the participating artists and the viewer–in cross-cultural understanding and empathy.

The broad survey approach, couched within a category that seems obvious at first, actually presents a rich and diverse pool of ideas and approaches where individuals are neither token members of their group nor representatives for others. Paradoxically, by grouping minority and female voices together, the RFC has created opportunities that other exhibition venues have not: to be viewed as a single individual creator, to represent only oneself, while benefitting from a collegial support system.

No Man’s Land proves by its very existence that there is no one kind of female artist. There is no one single thread or thought or idea that links us all together. There were no artists presented who singularly define their practice through a self-identification as female; instead the RFD presents a selection of  of highly ambitious and accomplished works by approximately 120 contemporary artists who are shaping the art world and also happen to be women.

Author Cara Ober is the Editor at BmoreArt.

Photos by Cara Ober & Stewart Watson

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Devotion, A Performance by Jennifer RubellIMG_4831

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IMG_4828Guests lined up for bread

IMG_4865Solange PessoaIMG_4830IMG_4858

Book StoreIMG_4859 IMG_4857IMG_4863 IMG_4862 IMG_4867

IMG_4936IMG_4870Cecily BrownIMG_4877

IMG_4933 Jennifer Guidi
IMG_4931Suzanne McClelland
IMG_4929RH Quaytman
IMG_4927Naomi Fisher

IMG_5035 IMG_4923 Natalie CzehIMG_4922Rachel Harrison
IMG_4920IMG_4917 Marina Rheingantz
IMG_4914 Jennifer RubellIMG_4913

IMG_4911 IMG_4910IMG_4906 Sonia GomesIMG_4905IMG_4903 Lucy Dodd
IMG_4901 Katherine Bernhardt
IMG_4899 Elizabeth Peyton
IMG_4897Catherine Opie
IMG_4895Janine Antoni
IMG_4893Hay Kahraman
IMG_4887Cady NolandIMG_4886 IMG_4885 IMG_4884IMG_4880Miriam Cahn
IMG_4879IMG_4876IMG_4874 Lisa Yuskavage
IMG_4872 Stewart Watson & Marlene Dumas
IMG_4855Barbara Kruger
IMG_4853Anicka Yi
IMG_4852 IMG_4851 IMG_4850 IMG_4849IMG_4847 Helen Martin
IMG_4845IMG_4841Isa Gentzken

IMG_4842IMG_4839Solange Pessoa
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The Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, on view in Miami from December 2nd, 2015 through May 28th, 2016. This exhibition will focus on and celebrate work made by more than a hundred female artists of different generations, cultures and disciplines. These artists will be represented by paintings, photographs, sculptures and video installations that will entirely occupy the Foundation’s 28-gallery, 45,000-square-foot museum. Some galleries will contain individual presentations while others will present thematic groupings of artists. Several installations have been commissioned specifically for this exhibition.

Photos by Thomas Bowen

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