For its 19th edition, Art Miami, the city’s oldest art fair, is sporting a grand facelift and embracing the latest art forms, all the while retaining its signature accessibility. On the evening of December 2, the fair welcomed loyal locals and visiting collectors into the six connected tents that form its sprawling new structure, which, at 125,000 square feet, is the largest of the Art Basel Miami Beach satellite fairs; several of the others are clustered around it on the grounds of the mixed-use development dubbed Midtown Miami.

“In tough times, having critical mass and being able to make it convenient for collectors is even more important,” explained Nicholas Korniloff, who took over as show director in late March. Korniloff brought with him a history of overseeing art fairs in Palm Beach as vice president of DMG World Media’s International Fine Art Exposition (IFAE), and, ever mindful of the competition for collectors’ limited time and attention, in Miami he is striving for “an ambiance and scale that is big enough to keep people here.”

An outdoor café and indoor lounge help do the trick, allowing visitors to rest and refuel without leaving the fair. (The latter boasts a loft that gives VIPs an unusual vantage point overlooking the maze of booths below.) The fair’s spacious aisles and wide sightlines also make the experience easier on the eyes.

Korniloff acknowledges that this year’s ultimate count of 96 exhibitors, roughly half of them new to the fair, falls short of his goal of 115 and includes noticeably fewer international participants than the selection committee had hoped. Still, he notes that there were more than 300 applicants, up from some 180 last year. The committee sought a more diverse range of artwork than what Korniloff describes as the “highly edited version of the contemporary market” — represented by other satellite fairs that focus on more cutting-edge pieces — and looked to maintain a discriminating level of quality even while inviting a second wave of applicants after some of those who had originally accepted backed out.

One of the freed-up spaces was offered to prominent Miami collector Martin Z. Margulies, who accepted the invitation, saying he was “happy to have the association with some very, very good dealers,” adding, “I have done business with some of them and know the consistency of the quality that they bring.” Based on the exhibitor list, Margulies, a longtime fairgoer, appraised this edition as Art Miami’s best yet, and perhaps the finest of all the satellite fairs. “I think they have a coup here,” he concluded.

The collector filled his modest booth with a 2007 installation of enigmatic figures, some dressed like harlequins, entitled Les Saltimbanques, by the young Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong. Margulies showed the piece last year at his Warehouse exhibition space in Wynwood — which now features large-scale installations by Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, and Nigerian photographer George Osodi — and saw displaying Les Saltimbanques as an opportunity to give de Jong greater exposure.

The booth is also a chance for Margulies to sell the glossy new books documenting his collection, with proceeds going to his wife Constance Collins Marguliess Miami-based charity to help homeless women and children, the Sundari Foundation — which was also the beneficiary of a cocktail reception at Art Miami's VIP preview that evening. “It benefits a local charity, not just a name charity from out of town,” noted Margulies, insisting nonetheless that the remark was not a pointed dig at other fairs.

Local loyalty aside, the exhibitors and the more than 2,200 artists represented at Art Miami are hardly limited to South Florida , the U.S., or even the West. Mixed among the many New York galleries are dealers from other North American and European cities as well as a few Latin American locales.

The large, open booth of Parisian gallery Pièce Unique had one of the few red dots visible on opening night; it accompanied a large, white-patterned 2007 abstract canvas from Japanese artist Yayoi Kusamas “Infinity Nets” series, purchased by an established client from Europe. Kusama’s large paintings at the booth are priced in the $180–250,000 range, with a number of smaller ones starting at $35,000 still available. But the real showstoppers are the artist’s 2001 stuffed sculpture wistfully titled Death of an Illusion, as well as a trio of monumental outdoor sculptures by the young French artist Cyrille André, who is making his Miami debut after showing at the OPEN sculpture exhibition in Venice a few months ago. The trio in black polyester resin includes a towering male form with antlers, L’Homme-Cerf, and a larger-than-life dog, Grand Chien, both created in 2008 and selling for $23–50,000.

A larger, more ambitious project in progress by American artist twins Doug and Mike Starn, Big Bambú, is making an appearance near the fair’s entrance at the booth of Stockholm-based Wetterling Gallery. Two documentary videos and a digital rendering show the construction of an intricate structure that the Starns have created by lashing together thousands of bamboo poles. The 50-foot-high architectural installation, begun in September, is contained within the former Tallix Fine Arts Foundry in Beacon, New York, and will continually evolve over the course of the artists’ two-year residency there. Copies of the documentary videos (not editioned as stand-alone works) will be packaged with D17, the duo’s first painting, which was done this year and depicts a detail of the bamboo network traced on vellum and overlaid on an inkjet rendering, for $25,000.

Large-scale moving images get further attention in the fair’s Art Video/New Media lounge, a new section that proved popular at the opening despite the frigid temperatures caused by air-conditioning being piped into the already chilly viewing rooms. Curator Asher Remy-Toledo collaborated with six international art institutions — from the nearby Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation to the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv — to organize the lounge’s program.

Videos by rising Israeli artist Sigalit Landau exploring the creative process play inside the CCA’s viewing quarters, while projections of hypnotic footage by Miami-based Lebanese artist Theresa Diehl flank the entrance to this sector. Diehl creates a soundless depiction of the “contradictions of everyday life” in the Middle East by juxtaposing the dreaminess of a call to prayer at a madrasa with a crowd of youth that began to riot as she filmed in Tripoli in May 2007. She later digitally blurred and slowed down the action to downplay the documentary nature of the footage and instead evoke a “state of suspension” that encourages the viewer “to focus on the moment as it exists…to study every gesture.”  

Surprisingly critical commentaries on China at a crossroads are presented by the separate Iberia and Ullens Centers for Contemporary Art in Beijing. A crowd stood transfixed before Mist, a 2008 digital animation by Zhang Xiatao, which envisions armies of insects infesting the industrial infrastructure that is transforming the Chinese landscape and then marching into Tibet — the whole work a kind of symbol of the global affront to the spiritual soul of ancient Chinese culture. Feng Mengbos video game Long March! Restart riffs on Chairman Mao’s infamous historical event.

The use of new technology to examine the effects of globalization is indicative of the current ethos — a sentiment “embedded in this particular moment,” according to Remy-Toledo. “Art has become a commodity that has robbed the soul of art.” That this large space devoted to critical works — showcased by nonprofits, no less — steals the show from the commercial center of the fair may itself represent a prophetic shift in focus.