As Art Basel Miami Beach opened to VIP collectors today, politically-oriented art could be seen throughout the convention center, some of it brand new. See more in Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
Click on the first image to start the slide show.
Elizabeth Peyton, Barack Obama, 2008, Oil on board at Gladstone Gallery.
Karl Haendel began this portrait of Hillary Clinton before the election, and completed it afterward. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
Betty Tompkins, from the Woman Word painting series, 2016.
Andrea Bowers, Don't Touch Me, 2016, Cardboard and color changing LED lights.
at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
Judith Bernstein, Hoover Cock, 2015, Acrylic on canvas.
at Mary Boone Gallery.
The artist who goes by the name Pope L. started this painting, Sunny Day White Power (at Mitchell-Innes & Nash), before the presidential election last month, and finished it afterward.
Henry Taylor, Darker The Better..., 2013, Plastic bottles, black spray paint, black acrylic and nails on wood panel
at Blum & Poe.
Detail of a 2014-15 Marcelo Brodsky at Henrique Faria. At the bottom, it reads: At the beginning of 1968, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a major march to Washington D.C. to demand economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. The campaign was carried out under the leadership of Rev Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination in Memphis.
Glenn Kaino's recent large sculpture, Bridge, was too big to fit into Kavi Gupta's booth, but Kaino built this light box piece to represent the theme. Bridge is composed of hundreds of fiberglass casts painted gold, all of them representing the life size, raised arm of Tommie Smith, the runner who gave the Black Power salute after winning the gold medal in the 200 meter dash at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. A month ago, Kaino and Tommy Smith met Barack Obama at the White House, and Kaino presented Obama with drawings based on Bridge, signed on the reverse by Smith. The fair, Gupta said today, can be "a respite for people dealing with this world. Art can show us how to be engaged."
Elliott Hundley's completed Revolution, a mixed media collage piece, just before the fair. The piece, on view at Regen Projects, is part of a series he based on the playwright Antonin Artaud's play "There is No More Firmament," a vision of an apocalyptic future that Artaud left incomplete when he died in 1948. Hundley's piece, a roiling sea of images, intermixes vignettes of current political events (Ted Cruz, the Capitol building) with scenes from horror movies of alien attacks, and masks with in-extremis expressions.
A detail from Elliott Hundley's Revolution at Regen Projects.
Julia Wachtel, Untitled, 2016, Oil and Acrylic ink canvas.
at Elizabeth Dee.
A.A. Bronson's White Flag #8, 2015, is made from rabbit skin glue, champagne chalk, raw honey on linen, cotton, and cotton rope on linen, on view at Esther Schipper.
Shown opposite A.A. Bronson's flag, this Ceal Floyer piece, Ladies, 2004, made of black stickers, brings to mind the recent debate over transgender bathrooms. On view at Esther Schipper.
Sam Durant, Landscape Art Sign (Emory Douglas), 2003, Electric sign with plastic letters
on view at Blum & Poe.
An artwork by Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone Gallery.
Friedrich Kunath, It is what it is, 2014, Acrylic, Ink and oil on paper
on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery.