With Miami Art Week now in full swing, NADA Miami opened to VIPs Tuesday morning. Almost immediately, the aisles were packed. Most of the 150 galleries showing at NADA have jam-packed their booths with paintings, many of which are middling at best, but spread among the aisles are several gems that qualify this edition, NADA Miami’s 22nd, as a particularly strong one.
A noticeable number of booths—more so than usual—are stuffed to the brim with art, with dealers seemingly taking advantage of every inch of available wall space. Could this perhaps be a sign of the state of the market? Are dealers being more concerned with the making ends meet by conducting more sales than they are with exhibiting quality works? It may be too soon to say, but as the rest of the week plays out there are sure to be more answers.
Below, a look at the best booths at NADA Miami, which runs through December 7 at Ice Palace Studios.
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Elyla at KDR
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews After showing a video work at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Elyla is now the subject of their first US solo show at KDR in Miami. The gallery has also brought one sculpture by Elyla to its NADA booth, where this work steals the show. Installed on a circular plinth, Elyla presents a pair of high heels that combines caites, a traditional hand-stamped leather sandal from Nicaragua, with rough-hewn black platform heels. A pair of ceramic snakes encircle each shoe’s heel. Elyla sees these sculptures to the deities in the artist’s imagined “Cochón” cosmology, which reclaims a derogatory term for queer people in Nicaragua as a divine word for non-heteronormative sexuality. These heels are sure to empower anyone who might wear them.
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Salvador Dominguez at de boer
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews At the center of de boer’s solo presentation for Chicago-based Salvador Dominguez is an open can of El Pato, the spicy tomato sauce that is commonplace in many Latinx households in the US. Upon closer inspection, the sculpture is made of woven pipe cleaners, a medium that the artist took up after collaborating with his mother. His familial history resonates with several larger, wall-hung works on view behind the sculpture. The largest of these is a detail of Michelangelo’s Last Supper, to which Dominguez has also added some El Pato cans onto the table. These works are also woven in an untraditional way. Hernandez works with pieces of mason line, which he then paints over with encaustic, giving the final pieces an almost pixelated effect. The use of mason line references his father’s jobs as a day laborer. In his works that take on art history from the Renaissance to Pop art, Dominguez imbues his own sense of cultural history to provide a sharp commentary on growing up in the United States as the child of immigrants.
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Manuel Hernandez at Con Altura
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews On view at Con Altura’s booth are two “mural portraits,” as the artist Manuel Hernandez calls them. These many-sided works take their shape from the unstretched animal hides onto which Hernandez has painted. At the center of each is a portrait of an Indigenous person that Hernandez has encountered going about his day in New York, where he is based—a woman named Catherine in one work here, an unnamed cumbia teacher in another. Hernandez asks his sitters if he can paint them, then invites them to his studio, where he asks his models basic questions about their lives and lets them steer the interview from there. Hernandez records each of these conversations and listens back to them as he paints their portraits. In Cumbiarella (2024), the sitter is decked out in paint-covered white paints, a rust-colored shirt, a patterned vest, aviator glasses, and a white cap; surrounding them is a group of people gathered at street vendor carts, a construction scene, hands holding art materials, two people dancing, a bustling bar in Flushing, the above-ground architecture of the 7 train, and various birds, from pigeons to a hummingbird to a duckling. Throughout are various sentence fragments that came up in their conversation: “IM ALSO A CITY GIRL,” “I FELT SAFE WITHIN THAT MESS,” “I WANTED TO BE PERFECT,” “HERE TO STAY.” In these tender portraits, Hernandez gives us insight into the inner lives of his subjects.
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Seba Calfuqueo at Galeria Patricia Ready
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Seba Calfuqueo is showing mixed-media pieces that are totally different from the alluring video she showed at the Whitney Biennial earlier this year. The eye-catching electric blue of the fabric she dragged across a lush landscape in that video here reappears as the background for some of her paintings, the largest of which shows the map of the world. Strands of copper emanating from various costal points across the water, they represent the underwater cables that crisscross oceans to provide internet access. A smaller work shows a group of Indigenous people stirring melted copper in a large pot, while another shows two colonizers (their ships can be seen in the distance) shaking hands, likely after reaching an agreement on how to trade all this metal. In yet another piece here, a group of Chilean workers appear beneath a copper orb; above them reads “cobre ya eres patria” (copper you are already our homeland). Copper mining is one of Chile’s most important industries, with much of the metal exported abroad to sustain much of life elsewhere. Calfuqueo seems to ask what Chileans really get out of any of this business.
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Wes Thompson at Martha’s
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews For the past few years, Austin-based artist Wes Thompson has used his neighbor’s old wood shop to create sculptures of one-room homes. One being shown at NADA sits upon four-foot-tall spears, the home’s interior visible through cast-iron glass windows. At the center of the home is a carved wishbone made from mesquite that Thompson’s neighbor salvaged over 30 years ago. The artist is here pondering how wood can serve as a metaphor for our own life cycle—it gets used, reused, weathered by time, and then finally disused. There’s also an unsettling undercurrent to it all: in placing this wood in a home, Thompson highlights how violence can slowly seep into places of comfort and peace over time.
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Jordan Eagles at New Discretions
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Along one wall of this booth are several blood-and-resin works by Jordan Eagles, the most eye-catching of which is FKRS-RBS (2022). That work builds upon Eagles’s “Shards” series, for which he takes the layers of blood and resin that fall to his studio floor while making other works and recycles them into wall-hung sculptures that look as though they themselves could wound their viewers. The shards here are variously black and deep red, and are made from more than 15 alternating layers of blood and resin each. Along the edges of this work, Eagles has added blood-soaked gauze. These works think of the body as a broken object, one that can be reassembled and made anew.
