Museum Quality Public Art Calls the Miami Beach Convention Center Home

The Miami Beach Convention Center will be the epicenter of the international art scene from December 5 through 8 as it hosts the 17th Annual Art Basel. Art devotees strolling the main exhibition hall will visit over 200 galleries displaying quality modern and contemporary art pieces from over 4,000 artists from 35 countries.

A series of permanent works of art commissioned by the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places will welcome the multitude of art enthusiasts to the art fair. The requisite for this site-specific, permanent works of public art project was straight forward — it needed to appeal to the Miami Beach culture. From an astounding 524 applicants, the Art in Public Places Committee chose six artists for their engagement with what makes Miami Beach unique. “One thing that we are very proud of here at the City about these projects, is that there is a consistent curatorial theme throughout the works. Every project commissioned speaks directly to Miami Beach,” said Brandi Reddick, Cultural Affairs Program Manager.

The works by artists Franz Ackermann (Berlin), Elmgreen & Dragset (Berlin), Ellen Harvey (Brooklyn), Joseph Kosuth (London/New York), Joep van Lieshout (Rotterdam), and Sarah Morris (New York) are a testament to the City’s commitment to presenting preeminent public art.

Produced with a municipality-funded percent-for-art contribution of $7 million, the initiative represents the largest municipal project of its kind installed in the United States. “The projects all speak the same language, flow in a coherent, creative fashion, play off each other, and are integrated in relationship to the building and to each other,” says Reddick. Today, after the $615 million renovation, the Miami Beach Convention Center has become a leader in its field. Patrons attending events at the convention center will stroll about museum-quality works of art inside the venue and surrounding public green spaces. Reddick added, “These works could exist nowhere else because they are site specific to Miami Beach. So when people look at them, reference them, it creates a sense of place. Creating an event-space like no other convention center in the United States.”

About Sands, 
Franz Ackermann. 
Photo Credit – Robin Hill, Miami Beach Convention Center.

About Sands by Franz Ackermann
Location: Southeast corner exterior walls. Rendered in vibrant colors and abstracted forms of sand, hourglasses, and roadways About Sands is Ackermann’s impression of the city’s tourism industry, commerce, Urbanism, and daily life. Ackermann makes vibrant paintings and installations centered on themes of travel, tourism, globalization, and Urbanism. The places he depicts have a generic quality, and yet they look strangely familiar; non-places where the traveler’s desire replaces the local culture.

Bent Pool, 
Elmgreen & Dragset
. Photo Credit – Robin Hill, Miami Beach Convention Center.

Bent Pool by Elmgreen & Dragset
Location: Convention Center Park. With Bent Pool, the artists confront the conventional sculptural traditions of what an outdoor sculpture can be. This work turns an everyday domestic object into a monumental arch; a swimming pool, modified in its design and isolated from its functional context. Elmgreen & Dragset often reconfigure the aesthetics and contexts of familiar spaces and objects to challenge people’s perceptions of them so they can experience them in new ways.

Atlantis
, Ellen Harvey
. Photo Credit – Robin Hill, Miami Beach Convention Center
.

Atlantis by Ellen Harvey
Location: Grand Ballroom Lobby. Visitors will see their reflection in a dark watery 1,000 square-foot hand-painted design, sand-blasted into mouth-blown glass, filled with ceramic melting color, laminated to glass mirror with a white painting of a diagonal satellite view of Florida reaching from the Bay of Biscayne through the great watershed of the Everglades to Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. Divided into two sections, visitors enter the Grand Ballroom at the intersection between the man-made and the natural landscape — at the border between the Everglades National Park and the outskirts of Miami.

LEARN MORE ABOUT DENNIS LEYVA, MIAMI BEACH PUBLIC ARTS ADMINISTRATOR

DENNIS LEYVA worked at the City of Miami Beach for 22 years. As the Public Art Administrator for 15 years before retiring in 2019, he worked as the City’s liaison to the Art in Public Places program. His primary focus was curating and commissioning site-specific projects for public spaces throughout Miami Beach. During his tenure a total of twelve projects were commissioned with budgets ranging from $5,000 to $2.2 million for individual examples of public art. The works commissioned variously reflect the geography, architecture, and history of Miami Beach. FIU Inspicio interviewed Leyva and shared with us this video. 

Located World, Miami Beach
, Joseph Kosuth. 
Photo Credit – Robin Hill, Miami Beach Convention Center
.

Located World, Miami Beach by Joseph Kosuth
Location: West Lobby. The work is configured in its geographic location to the rest of the world. The work is about how a community defines itself both within and without borders. Located World, Miami Beach, is part of a series of works Kosuth has also done in Europe and Japan that signify a sense of place through the abstraction of quantified meaning and query the impulse of the “will to know” specifically where we are.

Humanoids
, Joep van Lieshout. 
Photo Credit – Robin Hill, Miami Beach Convention Center
.

Humanoids by Joep van Lieshout
Location: Collins Canal Park. The series of nine abstract sculptures are placed throughout the park, along the canal, and among the trees. They appear as abstract figures, which use the park and the natural environment as their habitat; creating a subtle statement about our relationship to nature and our origins. The Humanoids invite visitors to engage, stimulate social interaction, and contemplation.

Morris Lapidus
, Sarah Morris
. Photo Credit – Robin Hill, Miami Beach Convention Center
.

Morris Lapidus by Sarah Morris
Location: Northeast and Grand Staircase exterior walls. Morris Lapidus is an expansive, site-specific creation and one of the largest permanent installations to date covering over 7,000 square-feet of exterior wall. Executed in custom fabricated porcelain tile. Morris Lapidus challenges the intent of the commercial space of the Miami Beach Convention Center, demanding that the spectators look beyond the boundaries of their immediate field of vision. The work is a reference to the architect Morris Lapidus, praised for designing some of Miami Beach’s most glamorous hotels.

The permanent installations “will add to the city’s legacy as a vanguard for municipally funded public art,” commented Reddick. These six commissioned pieces are very large in-scale; even for these famous artists and will continue to delight visitors and locals well after Art Basel 2019 is over.

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