It’s now in its 8th year, and already plans are well underway for the 9th edition of arteamericas, the Art Fair of the Americas next Spring. This event makes Miami continue to be the most interesting city to see art, and is a wonderful thing for the local economy. It’s also great for tourists and travelers wondering where the best place to see new work might be, or which city has the best 5 star hotel. Miami shines in so many respects, and it’s proving itself to be a very powerful force in the 21st century.
This fair is focused on Latin America, which is sort of like focusing on the light when looking at the sun. There are so many cultures and countries folded into the word that it seems enormously unwieldy. And it actually is unwieldy, and fantastically so. This year, the fair also opened up to Germany, Haiti, and Spain, so that the definitions could get broader and broader, and for the strange times we live in, this seems like a very appropriate move.
It’s difficult to see the names of the artists featured here and not wonder why people are talking about Latin American art being a rising trend. Because it seems apparent that it’s always been a major contributor, inheritor, and influence on the art of the rest of the world for some time. When we see works by Salvador Dali and Wifredo Lam in the same space, it starts to help connect the dots in many wonderful ways.
There are plenty of new faces here, as the bulk of the work demonstrates the wide and wild styles of the artists working on capturing a moment right now. But the previous generation’s works do come into a kind of clearer context when seen in relation. Dali’s surrealism came out of a movement that was considered to be essentially European, borrowing images from other cultures and continents (and particularly Africa).
Yet when we see Lam, it starts to seem odd that his works are so brilliantly in line with European culture, but came from a spiritual source that was and is enormously local (and also very African). It starts to seem that these things are connected, and that the movements of the 20th century were much more globally conceived, with no one in the position of claiming paternity or maternity, but there are geographies and patterns of migration that need to be written into the history.