At Untitled this December, 20 galleries and nonprofit spaces will exhibit in subsidized booths through the fair’s Nest program. It is a small detail beside the parties and preview invitations, but it says something important about what you get to see during Miami Art Week. Some dealers need help affording the opportunity to put the work in front of you.
Eva & Adele | photo by Nadia Bouzid
A fair booth is a considerable commitment before a painting sells. There is the space itself, then shipping, installation, travel and accommodation. Those expenses influence which galleries participate and what they bring. An unfamiliar artist’s absence from a major fair tells you very little about the quality of the work. The gallery may simply have made a different financial decision.
That makes the smaller fairs worth approaching with some curiosity. Calling them “satellites” is geographically convenient, although it encourages the idea that everything outside the Convention Center is a lesser version of what is inside.
Untitled will bring 163 exhibitors from 39 countries to its beachfront pavilion at Ocean Drive and 12th Street. Among them are galleries from places that receive less routine attention than New York, London or Paris, including kó from Lagos and TERN Gallery from Nassau. You can spend the week confirming tastes you already have, or leave room for a dealer whose program you have never encountered.
The fair is also making gender equality a curatorial focus. Nearly 60 percent of its exhibiting artists identify as women or nonbinary. That commitment arrives at an interesting moment: the latest Art Basel and UBS collecting survey reports that works by women account for 39 percent of the surveyed collectors’ holdings, down from 42 percent a year earlier. These are different populations and measures, but they give some substance to a conversation that often stops at the exhibition announcement. Visibility and ownership do not necessarily move together.
There is another detail in the survey worth remembering when someone describes collecting as an entirely instinctive pursuit. Although only 10 percent of respondents identified themselves as investors, 38 percent reported reselling work during 2022 and 2023. People sell for many reasons, including changes in taste and space. Still, the financial life of a collection deserves a more honest conversation than the familiar insistence that nobody thinks about money.
None of this is a reason to skip Art Basel. Its 277 galleries offer an extraordinary amount to examine, particularly if you move beyond the names you recognize. The fair’s Survey sector is devoted to work made before 2000, while Positions concentrates on solo presentations by emerging artists. Those distinctions are useful when deciding where to spend your attention.
Galerie Minsky and Weinstein Gallery, for example, are sharing a presentation of Leonor Fini that includes paintings, previously unexhibited drawings for theater and opera sets, masks and her 1939 Anthropomorphic Wardrobe. That gives you considerably more to investigate than whether a painting matches your existing impression of the artist. A fair can be a place to reconsider someone you thought you knew.
The useful conversation with a dealer starts there. Why these works together? Where do they sit within the artist’s practice? What has the gallery shown before, and what will it continue to support after Miami? You learn more from a precise answer than from being told an artist is attracting “a lot of interest.”
There will be plenty of opportunities to enjoy the social performance around all this. The people watching is part of the pleasure. But an invitation list is a poor substitute for choosing what deserves your time, and a crowded booth should not do your looking for you.
Leave some room in the schedule to return to a work. Ask to see more from the same body of work. Follow up with the gallery after the fair, when the conversation has fewer interruptions. The most useful thing you take home from Miami may be the name of a dealer you trust enough to keep calling.
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