The art deco pastels of Miami’s South Beach mix and mingle with an emerging inner-city contemporary arts culture.
Miami once called to mind glitz, crime, palms, beaches, permatanned retirees or TV shows based on such themes. Forget what you thought you knew about this candy coloured playground.
The city’s unique blend of glamour remains, but today Miami is all about culture. Two days into the splendour of the sixth annual Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) – the warm-weather sister to the venerable Swiss art fair – Miami is abuzz with contemporary art. Thousands of artists, including Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono, Jane Holzer and Marc Newson (Design Miami Designer of the Year 2006), have descended on the city along with dealers and collectors in a high-octane confection of culture, cash and flash.
The Miami Beach Convention Center hosts 200 galleries (from more than 30 countries) officially, but art can be found all over the city. The Catalina Hotel has converted rooms into mini galleries. Art Positions gives emerging artists space in converted shipping containers on the beach. The Botanical Gardens has audiovisual installations. Artists and galleries not on the official program flock to satellite fairs such as Nada, Pulse and Scope in downtown Miami. Emerging artists set up anywhere they can find.
Even so, the pastel boomtown hasn’t lost its party reputation. Each night brings another round of parties, like Dita Von Teese’s burlesque performance atop the Delano Hotel pool, or a Swarovski dinner at the decadent Setai. In any of the big hotels in Lincoln Road you might well stumble into a Champagne-swilling party of A-listers.
It lasts for just four days each year, but Art Basel was a masterstroke in putting the South Florida city onto the international culture map. But you do not have to attend Art Basel to experience Miami’s cultural evolution. Beyond the fair, Miami offers a sophisticated cultural landscape and is shaping up as one of the most dynamic and forward-thinking cities in North America.
Last year the long-awaited Carnival Center for the Performing Arts was unveiled in the heart of downtown. Designed by Cesar Pelli, the venue cost some $US473 million ($608m) to build. It has a 2400-seat opera house, 2200-seat concert hall, studio theatre, educational facilities and outdoor areas filled with site-specific art. Pelli’s design included several entry points and facades in a clever preemptive response to the downtown explosion. However the area develops, the centre will cope.
The city residents who established the Carnival Center aren’t the only ones betting on downtown Miami. Like South Beach in the late 1980s, when there was a frenzy to purchase and revamp the historic art deco buildings, star architects like Frank Gehry are drawn by the potential to leave their imprimatur on the city skyline.
Expected in 2010 is the Museum Park Complex on 12ha of downtown’s Bicentennial Park. The facility, to include Miami Art Museum (MAM) and Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium, will be designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and will overlook Biscayne Bay. The Isamu Noguchi-designed Bayfront Park, created in the 1980s, is also set for a makeover with plans for more public art and enhanced pedestrian access.
Downtown remains a frontier of sorts, with pockets of urban blight visible amid the development frenzy. But there’s no denying the momentum.
Beyond the Performing Arts Center, the predominantly Puerto Rican community of Wynwood is made up of low-rise industrial buildings and warehouses.
Lured by cheaper rents, gallery owners, artists and designers have moved in, creating a hip locus known as the Art District. During Art Basel, satellite fairs in the area are a viable way for galleries and curators to gain exposure.
Wynwood is also home to a couple of excellent private collections, the Rubell Family Collection and the Margulies Collection. Both are open to the public and offer an enormous range of influential works.
A few blocks north across Biscayne Bay from South Beach, the Design District is similarly exciting. In the last five or six years, derelict warehouses and factories have been transformed into high-end stores like Fendi Casa and Vitra, and fashionable clubs like The District. Weekend evenings are popular, a welcome change from the expensive, overtly commercial nightlife on South Beach.
the litmus test of a happening city is the emergence of hip new neighbourhoods, Miami certainly gets an A-plus. Other areas developing a buzz are the Overtown and Omni neighbourhoods. Miami has had many boomlets, crashes and reinventions before, but many are betting on the longevity of this current evolution. As Miami’s mayor Manuel Diaz has said, “Miami folks are very accustomed to looking to the future.” Glorious weather, too.
Stay
Pelican Hotel
826 Ocean Drive.
The Raleigh
1775 Collins Avenue.
Setai Hotel
2001 Collins Avenue.
Shop
Base
939 Lincoln Road.
+1 305 531 4982.
Fendi Casa
90 NE 39th Street.
+1 305 438 1660.
Intermix
634 Collins Avenue.
+1 305 531 5950.
Niba
39 NE 39th Street.
+1 305 573 1939.
Eat & Drink
Joe’s Stone Crab
11 Washington Avenue.
+1 305 673 0365.
Mokaï
235 23rd Street.
+1 305 695 0288.
Nobu
1901 Collins Avenue..
+1 305 695 3232.
Soyka
5582 NE 4th Court.
+1 305 759 3117.
Sultan Kabob
1903 Collins Avenue.
+1 305 531 8598.
See and Do
Carnival Centre for the Performing Arts
1300 Biscayne Boulevard.
+1 305 949 6722.
Website
The Design District
The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse
591 NW 27th Street.
+1 305 576 1051.
Rubell Family Collection
95 NW 29th Street.
+1 305 573 6090.
South Beach
The majority of Miami’s best hotels are located at SoBe as it is affectionately called by locals.
Wynwood Art District
Source: Qantas The Australian Way April 2007
Updated: August 2008