END OF YEAR HIGHLIGHTS FROM MIAMI
DECEMBER 2024
Miami Art Week at the beginning of December is a marathon, a smorgasbord, an epic feast, bringing together more art than one could ever possibly absorb. At Art Basel Miami Beach, there were 286 exhibitors at the Convention Center this year, which means that if you spent one minute in each booth, it would take you nearly five hours to see it all!
On the Tuesday before the Art Basel VIP opening, dealers and collectors hit the ground running, navigating the first round of art fairs while braving the notorious Miami traffic. Untitled, NADA and Art Miami all opened their doors, creating a packed agenda for those trying to shuttle between South Beach and downtown--not to mention the countless museum exhibitions, private collection visits and intimate dinner parties that took place as well throughout the week. The buzz was subdued compared to previous years. Many collectors and art professionals opted to skip Miami this time, while others delayed their arrivals until the weekend, dampening the usual frenetic energy. The general sentiment suggested a cautious and thoughtful buying mood, and collectors seemed to reserve their wallets for pieces that truly stood out, a noticeable shift from the frenzied purchasing of years past.
There were no bananas taped to the wall, no major gimmicks, but rather low-key, beautiful, innovative, and respectful art that caught the eye. It was hard to narrow down the highlights, so sit back with your egg nog and noisemakers and enjoy the work of the following artists to watch in 2025....
TALIA LEVITT
Levitt’s painting I’m (seen here and featured at Untitled) refers to her own thoughts and feelings about the meaning of motherhood and bringing another human into the world, specifically the world of a painter. Using imagery from photographs she took on her daily commute, newspaper clippings, historical trompe l’oeil paintings and fabrics from her mother and mother-in-law as referents, the resulting painting resembles a quilt or collage of acrylic paint. She first paints on the canvas, then etches a grid into the surface with a knife, upon which she then pipes acrylic paint, similar to how one might ice a cake. This technique mirrors the slow meticulous nature of textiles and embroidery, an industry in which her family proudly worked for four generations.
Talia Levitt was born in 1989 in Brooklyn, NY and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and an MFA from CUNY Hunter, NY in 2019. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2019. She was a New York Foundation of the Arts Painting Fellow, a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Painting Fellow, and received a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant.
Levitt had works at both Art Basel Miami and Untitled and sold all of her pieces.
KEN GUN MIN
LA-based Korean artist Ken Gun Min is known best for his rich, colorful paintings that exist at the dream-like intersection of ancient Eastern mythology and psychedelic naturalism. Inspired by his experience as a queer Asian man and first generation-immigrant from South Korea, Min's work often represents public and private spaces inhabited by marginalized communities in LA and Seoul. These are complicated sites of tragedy, resilience and celebration. Using specific histories as inspiration, Ken transforms his canvases into utopias bursting with lush flora, fauna, and radiating celestial forms, all painted with Korean pigments, hand beaded and embroidered. He primes his linen with a specially prepared glue used in Japanese book binding, creating a surface reminiscent of watercolor on rice paper. He then hand-embroiders the surface with glass beads, gemstones, and silk thread, paying homage to historically feminized craft movements.
Min just had a solo museum show at the MCA Denver last Spring. And in 2025, he will have an exhibition at the SCAD Museum along with a major commission at the Denver Art Museum. His work has recently joined the permanent collections at LACMA as well as the Hessel Museum at Bard.
ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA
Arleene Correa Valencia is an emerging contemporary artist interested in migration, family, and the visibility/invisibility of undocumented people in the United States. Born in Michoacán, Mexico, Correa Valencia fled with her family to the United States at age three and grew up in Napa Valley. The prolonged experience of separation when her father left to find work made a profound impact on Correa Valencia’s childhood and outlook. Her artistic practice continues to explore the grief, anxieties, and fears of repeated separation alongside the joys of reunited life together.
Her presentation at the Untitled Art Fair featured a new series of portraits that capture the complex experience of migration across the Mexico-United States border. The figures are embroidered and painted on handmade Amate, a traditional paper made with tree bark by expert artists and collaborators in Mexico. Each portrait includes reflective fabrics and discarded clothing that closely mimic original family photographs, stitching together the story of Correa Valencia’s family over the past three generations.
Her showing at the fair ran concurrently to her major solo museum exhibition, "salt 16: Arleene Correa Valencia," at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, on through June 29, 2025.
YARON MICHAEL HAKIM
Yaron Michael Hakim's new body of work, shown at NADA, included paintings on recycled sailcloth, centering on Hakim's personal and familial roots in the landscapes of Latin America. Hakim was born in Colombia, adopted as an infant, and moved across three continents as a child. This international upbringing dislocated him from his origins, leaving him with only the landscape of his birthplace as a foundation for his personal history. In this body of work, the fruits of his native Colombia are presented as anthropomorphized portraits, taking the place of the faces of his birth family, which remain unknown to him.
Hakim currently lives and works in Los Angeles and received an MFA from the University of California (Irvine, CA) in 2013 and a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art and the Peréz Art Museum in Miami.
RYAN MROZOWSKI
In Ryan Mrozowski’s paintings at Art Basel, commonplace imagery is repeated in endless variations. His subjects and motifs are intentionally banal and accessible—he frequently uses botanical subjects to explore elements of presence, absence, and perception. Foliage, fruit, and letters become abstracted in Mrozowski’s compositions, as the artist crops and repeats his motifs. Mrozowski uses acrylic paint and oil sticks to create beguiling works that use seriality and duplication to seduce and surprise the viewer. Some pieces are arranged in groups or pairs, with subtle shifts between each image that only become apparent on closer inspection. Mrozowski’s paintings reveal how the mind and the eye often work intuitively, reflecting on how meaning is created.
Mrozowski graduated with a BFA in painting from Indiana University in 2003 and completed an MFA at Pratt Institute in 2005.
DEBORAH DRUICK
Deborah Druick's paintings at Untitled addressed issues of gender definition, self-identification and female objectification using stylized figuration and saturated color. Druick emphasizes and exaggerates stereotypical concepts of precision, perfection and beauty in femininity. Her females are both representations of self as well as faceless archetypes, eliciting questions about identity, self-awareness and sentiment. She tends to explore codes of femininity while also addressing issues of willingness and consent. She often inserts her subjects into situations where self-control and self-awareness are requisites. Her work can best be described as belonging to the “New Surrealist Movement,” using a stylization of form, pattern and color. The border frames that she paints onto the canvas serve as both an additional element of pattern and a transitional bridge from canvas to wall, easing the visual abruptness of the change in surface.
Deborah Druick was born in Montreal and studied at the Montreal School of Art and Design. She currently lives and work in New York.
SRIJON CHOWDHURY
Working in oil on canvas and linen, Srijon Chowdhury explores memory and the transmission of history through his saturated, immersive paintings. His works range from small to large scale and have featured various motifs: blurred, minimalistic landscapes; patterned fields of seemingly countless flowers; isolated bouquets. He often paints variations on a single theme, repeating and altering the imagery, creating a visual analogy for the inevitable evolution of historical narratives as they are told and retold across generations. Combining interests in philosophy, religion, ecology, and art history, Chowdhury’s intensely detailed, saturated, and hypnotic narrative compositions transform the artist’s immediate environment into immersive dreamscapes where the boundaries between our physical reality and the metaphysical, mythological and the supernatural dissolve.
This amazing work, Cherry Branch, came in at nine feet long and was shown at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Chowdhury was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and lives and works in Portland, OR, where he and his wife Anna Margaret run the exhibition space Chicken Coop Contemporary. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA. He has been awarded grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, 2018; Regional Arts and Culture Council, 2018; Andy Warhol Foundation, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Calligram Foundation, 2017; and the Otis Governors Grant, 2012. In 2017, he was awarded the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artists Fellowship. Chowdhury’s work was recently showcased in the 2024 Artists’ Biennial in Portland, OR.
TONIA CALDERON
In recent years, Tonia Calderon has developed a distinctive creative process that interweaves flower pigments, oil paints, and chemical elements. Her work encourages viewers to reflect on the interplay of light, color, and fragility through an experimental process that combines unexpected materials, emphasizing the balance between fragility and nature. As part of her presentation at Art Basel Miami, Calderon displayed paintings made of oil, flower pigment, fuel, sand, glass and resin.
Tonia is a Mexican-Dutch-Indonesian painter and designer and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
TODD GRAY
Todd Gray’s photo assemblages are composed of images ranging from imperial European gardens, West African landscapes, and architecture, to rock icons and portraits of the artist himself, all carefully arranged to create critical juxtapositions that examine ideas of African diaspora, colonialism, societal power structures, and dominant cultural beliefs. In his latest body of work, Gray integrates images from his own archive to examine the history of idol worship–from ancient Rome to popular culture. The mining of his personal archive offers a view into the influence of music history, featuring recognizable figures such as Al Green and Chuck Berry, featured here and at Art Basel Miami.
Born in 1954 in Los Angeles, CA, Gray works in photography, performance and sculpture. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Houston Fine Arts Museum, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; among others. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Fellowship in 2016. In 2022 The American Academy in Rome announced Todd Gray as one of the winners of the prestigious 2022–23 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. Gray works between Los Angeles and Ghana, where he explores the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections which link Western hegemony with West Africa.
SALVADOR DOMINGUEZ
Salvador Dominguez was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. but grew up in Pomona, California. Like many first-generation immigrants, language is an important part of Dominguez’s narrative, not just in terms of communication but also in its relevance within a broader contemporary American culture.
At the center of his NADA presentation was 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 Leonardo’s Last Supper (featured above), to which Dominguez has also added some El Pato cans onto the table. These works are also woven in an untraditional way. Dominguez 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.
DR. ESTHER MAHLANGU
Dr. Esther Mahlangu is known for bold abstract paintings with geometric patterns rooted in the South African Ndebele nation's tradition of mural paintings. Passed between generations of women, the murals are painted freehand with a chicken-feather brush, without a ruler. By continuing this tradition she honors the women who used patterns as secret codes to share prayers, emotional journeys, and collective values.
In 1991, she was the first woman and first African to enter the BMW Art Car collection alongside artists like Warhol, Calder, and Stella. Mahlangu's works are in the permanent collections of such institutions including the Centre Pompidou; Hirshorn Museum, Washington DC; Brooklyn Museum; and Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
Her works were featured in the Kabinett Section of Art Basel Miami.
ERNIE BARNES
This is what Miami Basel is all about: a great, ambitious artist being featured in high style. Athlete and artist Ernie Barnes (1938–2009) painted this beast of a picture, the largest work he ever made, for Sylvester Stallone in 1988. Metamorphosis of Rocky is 20ft long and depicts scenes representing the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa’s trials during the first four Rocky movies. Stallone commissioned the painting directly from Barnes after seeing the artist’s poster designs for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
The market for Barnes’s work has ramped up since his death in 2009—culminating in his 1976 painting The Sugar Shack selling for $15.3m (with fees) at Christie’s in 2022, over 100 times more than the low end of its presale estimate. During his lifetime, Barnes sold work to some of the US’s biggest stars, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Diana Ross and Harry Belafonte.
ONE LAST THING…..
THE GREAT ELEPHANT MIGRATION
100 magnificent Indian elephants are making their way across the US to share their story with the world. The Great Elephant Migration is a global fundraising venture to amplify indigenous knowledge and inspire the human race to share space. A collaboration between indigenous artisans, contemporary artists and cultural institutions, the hope is to raise millions of dollars to power human-wildlife coexistence projects and protect migratory animals making journeys across land, rivers, skies and oceans.
Each sculptural elephant is twinned with a conservation NGO, whose work directly benefits from the proceeds of the sculpture sale. There are four sizes of elephants for sale: Matriarchs, Tuskers, Adolescents and Calves. Each member of the herd is crafted using dried Lantana camara meticulously wrapped around a sturdy steel rebar frame, and finished with a protective Tung Oil coating to ensure outdoor durability and beauty.
So far, these elephants have visited New York City; Miami Beach during Art Basel Week; and will be traveling to Texas; Montana; Jackson Hole, WY; and then on to Los Angeles, CA later this summer.
Click HERE to buy an elephant before they are all sold out!
