Art Basel has announced that for the second year running, Art Public will turn Collins Park into an outdoor exhibition space with sculpture, video, installation and live performance. Produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, the Art Basel Miami Beach sector includes works from the show’s galleries by international artists, installed from ground level within the park to flying along the Miami Beach skyline above.
Art Public opening night will take place on December 5 with a program of special performances.
Selected for the second consecutive year by Christine Y. Kim, associate curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and co-founder of the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), this year’s edition of Art Public features a series of works grounded in their connection to speech and language. In this context, Art Public will present a new version of Ry Rocklen's “A Touch of Grace”, a flag that hangs the length of a pole and comes perilously close to the ground.
Courtney Smith and Ivan Navarro's Street Lamp
With “Black Dada Flags”, Adam Pendleton also turns to flags as a medium for dialog and lines 16 along Collins Park. Placed in separate locations in the park, two billboards by Gary Simmons will spell out the words “I wish it could be morning all day long”. Conversation will also continue in the air, as Dave McKenzie’s “Declaration” will feature a plane flying a text-based banner above Collins Park, each day at 11.45am, offering a different marriage proposal to Art Public viewers every time.
Other works include: a new work from Mark Hagen, featuring three interconnecting cement screen panels, each made out of 84 individually crafted cement units stacked together; Ruben Ochoa who will present three new sculptures appearing to defy gravity; and “Love Stream” by Randy Polumbo.
Works by Latin American artists, including Lourival Cuquinha, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, José Davila, Teresa Margolles, Raul Mourão, Iván Navarro and Miguel Andrade Valdez are also featured. Art Public will similarly feature “Twin Vortexes” by Alice Aycock, the first of six large sculptures realized for “Park Avenue Paper Chase”, scheduled to be on view in New York on Park Avenue in spring 2014. Included in the sector will be “Riser”, a new work by Australian artist David Keating, and “Poets in Miam”' by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. Finally, “I feel, you feel, we feel through each other into our selves” by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone will be on display in the park.
Art Public Opening Night, free and open to the public, will feature a commissioned musical performance by Jason and Alicia Hall Moran, interacting with artist José Davila's work in Collins Park. On that same night, My Barbarian will present an extract of their piece “Broke People’s Baroque Peoples' Theatre”. The evening will also include a choreography by Alex Israel.