ARTNEWS
Thousands—probably tens of thousands—of artworks pass through the Miami area during Miami Art Week at the start of every December, with hundreds of dealers showing at more than dozen fairs. Art Basel Miami Beach’s website alone lists almost 3,000 artworks at this year’s fair, and those are just the ones that exhibitors have gotten around to unloading. Much of that work will only make a single Magic City appearance. After that, the works will end up in a collector’s home, or a distant museum, or, alas, a gallery’s storage spaces.
But Miami, like any great metropolis, is also home to a robust number of public artworks—pieces that are on view year-round—and some are truly remarkable. Amid the hustle and bustle of Basel week, stepping away from the fairs to these displays can provide a refreshing little tonic. Below, a quick look at public works on view throughout the region by Urs Fischer, Beverly Buchanan, Ed Ruscha, and more.
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At the Miami-Dade Library, which is only about a mile from the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Ed Ruscha has a jaw-dropper of a piece from 1985—eight panels, each 16 feet long—that quote Claudius in Hamlet: WORDS WITHOUT THOUGHTS NEVER TO HEAVEN GO.
In 2012, Ocean Drive recounted that the city almost canceled Ruscha's piece because of its cost ($140,000, which seems like a bargain now) and untraditional form. Two years later, Ruscha was commissioned to paint 60 lunettes throughout the building, which bear series of words like HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE and WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY.
The whole library, in effect, is a site-specific Ruscha piece—a heavenly one. Interestingly, as Ocean Drive reported, this second commission was also almost scuttled because some of the lunettes are bilingual, bearing words in both English and Spanish, and they were to be installed after the controversial passage of a measure that allowed only English-language signs. Ruscha prevailed on the grounds that his artwork did not count as official government signage. (And that law is no longer on the books.) Taken together, Ruscha's paintings invite—in a deadpan tone undergirded with sly humor—library patrons to ask tough questions about what they read, write, and think.
Local real-estate macher Craig Robins has filled his burgeoning Design District with artworks by figures like John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, and, here, Urs Fischer, who has contributed a bus stop similar to those found in Miami. A steady drip of water falls from the roof onto the skeleton below. I'd love to see this installed outside the offices of the head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York, but seeing it in a luxury shopping center with valet parking has its own unique charm. (For more on the piece, Rachel Corbett has a great interview with Fischer, who reveals that Edward Hopper was an inspiration.)
Miami-Dade Community College, situated roughly in between the Pérez and the Ruscha-filled library, has a formidable collection of postwar abstract geometric sculpture by figures who are slightly out of favor these days, like Ronald Bladen (pictured here) . . .
. . . and Kenneth Snelson. One can visit and imagine an alternate universe where history played out just a bit different and they ended up being the dominant figures of their era—a strange but not at all unpleasant universe.
Finally, a short drive from the Design District, in Brownsville, is Beverly Buchanan's quiet, moving permanent sculpture Blue Station Stones, 1986, a series of stones set within a grouping of trees next to the Earlington Heights Metrorail station. (Another transportation option.)
Laura McLean-Ferris has written an illuminating essay that touches on the work, discussing how Buchanan's weathered, rough-hewn sculptures allude to architecture in a Afro-Caribbean graveyard in the neighborhood. Greenery was nearly obscuring some of the 18 stones when I visited, and I couldn't find any explanatory marker, but once you espy them, they stick with you. Wonderfully out of place in their surroundings (the station, nearby homes) and generously subtle, they cause you to begin to consider all the history that taken place on the site, and all of the decisions—political, economic, ideological—that have shaped it.