Every year, Art Basel Miami Beach headlines are dominated by six-figure sales, viral spectacles, and celebrity sightings at afterparties. But at BmoreArt we love the hidden gems as much as we love the icons. Mostly, I personally prefer going to fairs where I can actually afford to buy (some) of the art I fancy.
So two underdog artist-run hotel fairs have always held a special place in my heart: Art Gaysel (“Miami’s Queerest Art Fair” hosted at The Hotel Gaythering since 2015) and the nomadic Satellite Art Show. This year, the latter cleverly set up camp at the Collins Ave Geneva Hotel, right next to Aqua—another long-running hotel fair that lost a bit of its edge and charm when it was acquired by Art Miami a few years ago—but brought built-in foot traffic of potential collectors to the block.
While the bigger commercial fairs are more curated and consistently “pretty,” the chaos of artist-run Art Gaysel and Satellite is half the fun. I’d rather walk into a jam-packed hotel room and find a handful of great, affordable artworks mixed in with some “bad” art than be underwhelmed by boring booths at fairs where we’ve come to expect polished excellence and can’t afford 95% of it anyway. I love most galleries and gallerists and curators (and pick my battles with a lot of the rest of the mainstream art world’s workings) but there’s a special thrill you get from finding and buying an artwork directly from an artist in a loud hotel room or open studio night.
I imagine it was probably even more thrilling for whoever bought the insanely skilled Rene Farias‘ oil painting “La piedad” off of a sex sling in a cruisy hotel room for a mere $2,500 last week at Art Gaysel!
The vast majority of collectors and art professionals who came to Miami last week deprived themselves of experiences like this! So I made it my personal mission to drag as many as I could to these two fairs, and everyone was floored by the accessible pricing, convivial vibes, and surprises behind every door.
If you weren’t among the people lucky enough to catch the fairs, here’s a small sampling of what you missed, starting with Art Gaysel:
Michael-Birch Pierce is a fiber artist (who also teaches at VCU) who has returned to The Gaythering year after year to offer live embroidery portraits on merino wool. And while they do offer faces, their best-selling commissions are $65 portraits of the sitters’ penises. What’s that famous John Waters quote about not sleeping with someone if there are no books in their house? I think a Michael-Birch Pierce embroidered dick pic should be the new standard for Miami Art Week hookups on dating apps.
I dragged artist Lydia Pettit to Art Gaysel after interviewing her in her Art Basel booth, and she commissioned an embroidery of her breast, which Birch cranked out in an impressively short session.
A different friend—who is also an editor for a cultural publication, actually—had also never been to Art Gaysel. But when we entered Kory Alexander‘s room, my friend recognized the LA-based artist’s work because he had bought one of his quiet paintings of swimming pools online years ago during the COVID 19 pandemic—they reminded him of sunny Miami memories while cooped-up in his apartment in overcast, chilly New York.
Adam Chuck’s tiny, detailed oil paintings (above) have an interior glow and smooth surface (despite their painterly nature) that suggest a phone screen. Most were priced at $300 or less. Meanwhile, LA-based Amit Greenberg (below) blew up found vintage personal ads to poster-size for a limited edition of giclee prints. Transposed to a more “precious” material and scale, they feel less like yesteryear’s kitsch and more vulnerable and tender. These seemed to be selling well ($650, edition of 10) when I swung by.
Meanwhile over at Satellite Art Show, organizers cleverly transformed their temporary space with cardboard wallpaper that disguised the hotel lobby, as well as a piece of packing material to block out th “S” on the Hotel Geneva’s “SCOOTER RENTALS” sign.
My favorite room was probably from the Puerto Rican artist Lionel Cruet, whose solo exhibition CLIMATECTRL conflated climate anxiety and displacement with voyeuristic desire through a series of backlit faux-windows.
Likewise, curator Mishka Gavora brought a strong concept to her Plum Gallery exhibition A Realm of One’s Own, which featured organic forms vaguely reminiscent of early AI glitches in artworks and design objects in dialog with the hotel architecture. I loved Jarred Goldfischer’s bright ceramic tiles of fossilized bugs cleverly installed in the hotel bathtub.
