text by Jennifer Piejko

“For Proust, it was the madeleine cookie. For me, it was 1980s frozen yogurt,” artist Alex Israel introduced his project Snow Beach Frozen Treats, an installation offering sweets as well as turquoise- and magenta-tinted views over South Beach. The nostalgic ice cream shop project (the artist’s family once owned a frozen yogurt shop in L.A.) was set up inside 1111 Lincoln Road, the Tropical Modernist parking structure designed by Herzog & de Meuron—a fitting opening for Miami’s annual art week.

While this year’s calendar had been somewhat more subdued than in years past, the work that made it to the city this year also felt more sensitive to the times, offering more balms and room for introspection than viral spectacle. Inside Art Basel Miami Beach, the city’s main fair, visitors were greeted with large-scale installations such as Ja’Tovia Gary’s Quiet As It’s Kept, centered in a 26-minute film made in response to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye and featuring interviews with the author and Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, author of Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison, as well as clips that call on the characters and concepts within The Bluest Eye—Lil’ Kim, historical documentary film footage, Azealia Banks, and hot takes on social media mixed with Gary’s original animations. A list of counties in Florida where The Bluest Eye is currently banned is posted at the installation’s entrance. 

Tribeca gallery Freight+Volume gave over their booth to the work of Karen Finley, one of the legendary four artists who sued the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 after their fellowships were withdrawn after their work was considered indecent, pornographic, and obscene. Finley, as well as John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, eventually won back their grants in the 1998 Supreme Court ruling, but the N.E.A., as well as U.S. public arts funding in general, reacted by retreating into even more conservative tendencies. Finley’s infamous Go Figure was on view for the 25th anniversary of the case, opening up a nude-model drawing class to fair visitors; some of the gallery’s artists were among the drawing participants in the artwork, drawing the body in protest of some of Florida’s recent rulings narrowing civil rights and a new generation of culture wars in the state. 

Painter Cynthia Talmadge made New York gallery 56 Henry’s booth a pastel-hued kaleidoscopic cube, with wall-sized pointillist paintings and a hand-dyed carpet, in Half Light, her re-creation of Color School painter Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Washington, D.C. studio, showing it simultaneously at three points in possibilities: first, the reality of her daily routine there, in 1963; second, the scene immediately following her 1964 murder, a still-unsolved case rumored to be an assassination by the C.I.A.;  and the third, what Talmadge imagines it would have looked like had the artist been working in 1969. Pinchot Meyer was enmeshed in D.C. high society as much as she was in leftist activist circles, and was seen as a threat to the former. Talmadge’s work of historical fiction underlines the fears that art, even in abstraction, can hold. 

At the Zurich and Paris-based Galerie Peter Kilmann’s booth, Los Angeles artists Raffi Kalenderian and Alberto Cuadros set up a prime destination for both having meaningful conversations as well as laughing them off: a bar, simply calling it Raffi and Al’s. Describing their collaborative work as a “Trojan horse for good times,” the mobile bar looked like a bespoke shipping crate on wheels, made from wooden stretcher bars, linen, and gold hardware and standard minibar drinks—champagne, wine, White Claws—on offer. Headshots of famed Raffi and Al’s patron, including Salma Hayek and L.A. gallerist Matthew Brown, as well as paintings by the artists and their friends and collaborators covered the bar’s surfaces and surrounding booth walls. 

After closing down the fair for the day, crowds swayed to something a little scruffier: a Lot 11 Skatepark, an open lot under a freeway. Sukeban was a one-night-only Japanese women’s wrestling tournament, hosted by Tokyo actor and writer Kunichi Nomura. Wrestlers dressed in anime-inspired costumes by Olympia Le-Tan, hats by Stephen Jones, and makeup by Isamaya Ffrench battled for a belt designed by Marc Newson. A sprawling, snaking night market took over the rest of the underpass. With every swing inside the ring, the crowds let out a roar that drowned out the endless traffic swirling around them.