A Tale of Two Aquas

MIAMI—The Aqua Fair, now in its third edition, is becoming a familiar part of the Miami fair circuit. Or at least half of it is—the half at the fair’s original home, the Aqua Hotel on Collins Avenue, which offers the classic Miami hotel-fair experience: gallerists working out of little bedrooms surrounding a sun-drenched courtyard with palm trees and a hot tub. But success means that Aqua has spawned a twin: Aqua Wynwood, over in the warehouse district of Miami proper, which is also home to Scope, Pulse, NADA, and a number of other fairs.

There was a striking difference between the two today: The hotel was thronged, but the warehouse, where Aqua’s opening took place last night, felt somewhat hungover, with dealers acknowledging that with its previews and vernissage, today was really Art Basel’s day—and therefore Miami Beach’s—and the circus wouldn’t pass this way again until tomorrow at the earliest.

There was little difference, however, in the quality of work on show. Of course any fair can be a little hit-and-miss, but Aqua has a deservedly good reputation for bringing together gallerists who, despite being at differently stages in their professional development, share a feeling for the innovative, eccentric, iconoclastic, and poetic. It has become one of my favorite fairs.

I know I can depend on a lot of the participants here for that combination of stimulation, surprise, and down-to-earth entertainment that I think makes a really good gallery: Adam Baumgold from the Upper East Side, eyewash from Brooklyn, Curator’s Office from D.C., Morgan Lehman and Michael Foley from Chelsea, and Katharine Mulherin from Toronto: None of them disappointed me. Morgan Lehman has a beautiful, poignant photograph, Ice Cream Parlor (2007), from the series “Asylum” by David S. Allee, for $6,000 in an edition of five. Michael Foley has an equally beautiful Martin Klimas, Untitled (Rider) (2005), at $8,500 in an edition of 5.

I had high hopes for the Aqua dealers I hadn’t encountered before, given that they were rubbing shoulders with some of my favorites. I was not disappointed. There’s a gallery here from Milwaukee called Hotcakes that shows a mix of local and not-so-local artists at real bargain-basement prices. I was very taken by Betsy Walton’s little pictures, like Winter is Coming (2007), and Samuel Baxter’s matchbox-sized photographs, which Hotcakes sells from a vending machine back in Milwaukee and which are available here for $5 each. Yes, $5. I was so taken aback that I broke a personal rule not to mix writing about art with acquiring it and bought three of them.

Elsewhere I enjoyed Emily Prince’s drawings at Eleanor Harwood ($1,200 each) and Károly Keserü’s exquisite grid-based paintings and smaller works on paper at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art. I was also impressed by the School of Visual Arts’s booth, the first art-school booth at any of the Miami fairs, which offers work by alums commission-free. I would particularly recommend Cesar Chavez Lechowick’s Duchess’s Train at $950 for the first in an edition of 10.

Business was steady at the Aqua Hotel today, but a little slower at the warehouse, apparently. Richard Lang of Electric Works said that he’d been a little anxious about attendance until he made a number of significant sales mid-afternoon. These included two copies (from an edition of 10) of Katherine Westerhout’s portfolio of photographs Winter Light, which went for $6,000 each. I was hardly surprised, however, that Rashid Johnson’s eye-catching White Girl had a couple of red dots next to it, though the good folks at James Harris admitted that those sales had been made before the fair opened.