Set on the corner of Indian Creek Drive and 67th Street is the small and impressive Miami Project 5—the fifth edition Miami Project with 19 galleries produced by Art Market Productions and headed by Jeffrey Wainhause and Max Fishko.
Inside, we found a relaxing atmosphere full of diverse works, and were first drawn into the gaze of tanning ladies from Peter Mendenhall Gallery (California) and the submissive and subliminal messages within a work presented by Cardoza Fine Art (Houston). From there, we saw strokes of brilliance in Giant Summer and Giant Summer II by Jane La Farge Hamill, She Knows by Howard Fonda, and the newly famed piece that was recently published in The New York Times’ “Sunday Review” by Dan Gluibizzi titled Now Wait—all presented by FMLY (NYC). We were struck around the corner by a piece by Ti-Rock Moore appropriately titled Flint at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (New Orleans). Showing discolored water pouring from a public water fountain, the piece, above its horrid stream of undrinkable water, showed the moving words “Colored People.”
At Hal Katzen Gallery (New York), we caught some large wall piece by Richard Serra and Alex Katz’s sculpture titled Chance of women holding half beach balls. Close by, Gary Snyder Fine Art (New York) showed several of Vivian Springford’s wonderful acrylic on canvas works, and around the bend, we got lost in the warps of Crystal Wagner’s Paroxysm Bloom II at Hashimoto Contemporary (California). From there, we caught ourselves smiling at the sweet California Bicycle by Mersuka Dopazo and Teresa Calderón and the glorious landscapes by Laurence Jones at Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery (New York). The two characters in Rob Matthews’ work at David Lusk Gallery(Nashville & Memphis) then had us questioning gender roles and multitasking abilities, and in Julian Lorber’s This Is How We Play Now at Nicole Longnecker Gallery had us dodging steel spikes in the art world dugout.
Taking shelter, the sweet washes in Mike Smalley’s oil and graphite on linen works had us back at ease, ready to take in a few of our final favorites on the way out: the gift shop’s THANK YOU TOTE, produced in San Francisco by Open-Editions and designed by artist Lauren DiCioccio—an effort to ban the single-use plastic shopping bags; unique pencils, prints, pins, erasers, and books by a variety of eclectic artists; and the newsstand—topped off with The Wall Street Journal, Miami Project 5’s special handout, and on the top left, our Whitewaller Miami art fair guide.
