Salon-Style Ink, Attitude-Free Flow

MIAMI—For the weary traveler, figuring out where to stash all your sundries in a hotel room can be a hassle. But for the wayfaring gallerist participating in one of Miami’s hotel fairs, installing art in a hotel room is a whole other story.

Kim Schmidt, the director of Marlborough Graphics in New York, was thrilled to set up shop in the Dorchester hotel’s spacious suites, where the International Fine Print Dealers Association’s INK fair presents 20 international print dealers from December 5 through December 9. “We took a salon-style approach to our space: art everywhere,” she says. Which means that while by night a gallery employee might find respite in the bedroom of Suite 153, by day the bed is laden with large, unframed pigment prints by Robert Weingarten. Those who thoroughly explore the bedroom will also find a quietly dazzling Michele Oka Doner cobweb print—appropriately hanging in a corner of the ceiling—on handmade abaca paper and priced at $2,200.

Across the courtyard’s silly reflecting pool—a nod to Muslim architecture that seems appropriate at the Alhambra but tacky in Miami—the Saint Louis–based William Shearburn offers another fine selection of modern and contemporary prints. Shearburn has been in the business for 20 years and now participates in five fairs, including INK, because, as he says, “Business today is driven more by art fairs and the Internet.” On the first day of the fair he sold a Vija Celmins woodcut priced at $12,500 to an undisclosed California museum, and Terry Eaton of Florida’s own Eaton Fine Art expressed interest in Andrew Miller’s Brown/White Cherry Tree inkjets, which come in an edition of 15 and are priced at $3,500 each.

Just down the street, 29 American galleries are crammed into the Dorset hotel for Flow, a self-proclaimed “attitude-free” contemporary art fair running from December 5 through December 9. The rooms at the Dorset are not nearly as spacious as the Dorchester suites, and their hyperstylized interiors tend to clash with the art. But while a Fernando Botero painting from KN in Chicago doesn’t blend well with the bright-green, damask-printed wallpaper and kitschy chandeliers native to the Dorset rooms, gallerist and fair co-producer Julie Baker’s hip, predominantly Californian stable looks just right. Baker is offering Nicole Hayden’s gold-flaked portraits of Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie for $4,000 to $4,500 and enchanting sculptures by Lucrecia Troncoso, who transforms household detritus such as sponges, orange peels, and paper towels into precious sculptures like Fuschia, for $600 to $800.

Baker, whose Nevada City gallery has been around for six years, emphasizes that exhibitors at flow are not just emerging galleries. For instance, Arthur Roger of New Orleans is celebrating its 30th year. Roger brings photographs by Katrina-documentarian Robert Polidori, but the gallery’s most outstanding offerings are by Leslie Dill. At first, Dill’s steel-and-aluminum sculptures, which cost $60,000, look merely like ephemera from a Tim Burton set. But closer investigation reveals that her life-size “Word Queens” are constructed from a mesh of intertwining letters taken from poems by Emily Dickinson and Tom Slay.

Exactly what makes Flow stand out from the other contemporary art fairs that are checked into hotels all along Collins Avenue is not entirely clear. Baker muses on the fair’s goal of bringing together galleries from all over the U.S.—from Culver City to Connecticut—saying, “Good art should not be limited to a zip code.” From that point of view, a hotel in Miami seems like an ideal place to meet. And, much to the relief of hotel management, fine art doesn’t steal the bathrobes.  

Katherine Jentleson is the editorial assistant at Art+Auction.