Art Basel Miami: NADA Gets a Nod on Opening Night

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The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) opened the doors to the fourth edition of its Miami art fair on Tuesday night for "Primera Vista," the opening night preview and benefit for the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The 82 participating galleries from 20 countries showcased a range of emerging talent with work ranging from affordable small-scale pieces to large installations.

The non-profit organization’s only fair, NADA fills the Ice Palace in downtown Miami through Sunday, although in prior years, dealers sold their booths out on the opening night, launching the careers of young artists to collectors eager to discover fresh talent.

This year’s edition upholds the fair’s indie aesthetic, with ripped-from-the-sketchbook drawings and unframed digital photographs. A series of meticulous ink drawings by Mario Maffei at the Naples gallery T293 proved popular, with Iron Dog and Zombies with AIDS already sold for $2,252 and $2,390 respectively, and several more on reserve.

New York’s Guild & Greyshkul sold a number of Stephen G. Rhodes’ $2,800 editioned C-prints with digitally collaged images of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans (each spraypainted with an X like those used to mark houses that had been inspected).

The 29-year-old Louisiana-bred artist, who now works in Los Angeles and will have his first solo show in New York at the gallery next month, bracketed the photographs with a series of “empty portraits” that feature ghostly plumes of flourescent-green smoke painted against black backgrounds.

At the center of this single-artist booth were a large painted box sprouting snake tails and a video projected on a green-screen-backed panel. Titled The Man and the Snake ($5,500, edition of 5), the video was filmed in the style of an old SciFi B-movie and stars the artist in colonial dress.

Another single-person booth featured rising video artist Laurent Grasso’s L’éclipse, a digitally constructed horizon with an unnaturally glowing yellow moon against a vermillion sky. It filled a darkened viewing booth that the artist and Galerie Chez Valentin constructed specially for the fair. While the 10-minute-loop sunset is not overtly political, Grasso said, “I was working with the idea that the army could use a false miracle to gain control of people.”

Political themes were more direct and dominant at New York’s ZieherSmith, although Scott Zieher—who studied American art at Sotheby’s with partner Andrea Smith, the new president of NADA—said the Americana theme was not planned. He explained, “I show a lot of artists who are frankly pissed-off.”

Rachel Owens expressed her frustration with Fundamental Breach, a $7,500 sculpture in which a beleaguered eagle forms the spout of what Zieher described as a “dysfunctional fountain that looks more like bunker surrounded by sandbags.” Meanwhile, Wes Lang resurrected “Honest Abe” Lincoln in a traditional bronze bust ($20,000), a painted portrait and a caricature on a canvas collaged with cut-out drawings from the artist’s childhood archives.

Among NADA’s 26 first-time exhibitors were publishers of art journals and multiples in a new section devoted to editioned work. Styled like a literary magazine, The Siennese Shredder pairs poetry with limited-edition images. Recently launched at the CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, the periodical will be sold by D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers for $25 ($20 at the NADA booth).

The Brooklyn-based North Drive Press, which just sold out of its third annual edition of multiples and interviews with artists, commissioned whimsical new works for the fair, including Frank Renson’s hand-painted plastic tortillas and Amy Sillman’s seven-day pillboxes. Available for $20 each, the clear yellow pillboxes are packaged with a phrase guide for the art season, including such stock platitudes as “It’s a critique,” “challenging, difficult work” and the frank “inexplicable, hideous, probably dissing us—but who can tell.”

Yet innovation was rare at this year’s NADA fair, where few flashes of inspiration stood out among the amateurish materials and knock-offs of Louise Nevelson’s totems, Felix-Gonzalez-Torres’s mounds of candy and Mona Hatoum’s crib—seen in the razor-blade-studded Cot by Lucy Wood for €6,000 at Amsterdam’s Upstream Gallery.