Art Basel Miami Beach Comes To a Close | TakePart Social Action Network™

Art Basel Miami Beach Comes To a Close Posted by Jon Popham on December 8, 2008 at 12:31 am

The sun sets on the Art Performs installment of ABMB in Miami Beach's Collins Park

Today marked the end of this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach and the surrounding satellite fairs in South Florida. However, as hoped, there are plenty of stories of great, socially aware artwork to be told from this massive showcase of international creativity.

My first stop today was at the Aqua Art Miami at their Miami Beach location which had taken over the Aqua Hotel on Collins Avenue. There I was particularly impressed with the exhibition of contemporary Chinese artists Yang Yongliang, Han Bing and Zhang Xianyong by the Limn Gallery out of San Francisco.

Next up was a venture over to the Wynwood Section of Midtown Miami where dozens of satellite fairs have set up tents and occupied spaces. The Photo Miami fair displayed photographs from galleries and artists all over the planet, but the most provocative exhibits I found dealt with homegrown issues set in the Southwest of the United States. Photographer Matthew Moore’s exhibit Rotations, on the encroachment of suburban sprawl on lands he and his family had farmed for generations in the Arizona town of Goodyear, just west of Phoenix showed through aerial photographs (see below) the unabated stretching out of American metropolitan areas. Moore’s work, presented by the Lisa Sette Gallery out of Scottsdale, shows the lands of his childhood home being turned into the homes of hundreds of others as the Phoenix Metro Area continuously expands. One can’t help but question the sustainability of such unfettered growth, particularly in an area that is virtually uninhabitable without a large, steady water supply, brought across hundreds of miles via canals from the Colorado River. As Moore points out in literature from the Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona has already seen civilizations such as the Hohokam Native Americans disappear as a result of exhaustion of available resources in their environment.