Mural in progress, photo by Nadia Bouzid
By the first Friday in December, there’s already new work going up in Wynwood. Across the bay, Art Basel’s first previews are on Wednesday, with the vernissage on Thursday. Here, some of the most interesting days are the ones before the fairs open. There’s a point when a wall you’ve known for years is being painted over and you can still see enough of the old work to remember what the block looked like the last time you were there.
A lot of people use Wynwood Walls as shorthand for all of this. It’s an outdoor museum with its own program on Northwest Second Avenue. Wynwood Mural Fest is a separate effort, with painters working this year along Northwest Fifth Avenue and on stretches of Northwest 23rd Street, among other blocks. The distinction matters if you’re trying to understand where the art is being made. Some of it happens in a courtyard set aside for that purpose. Some of it happens against the side of a building you’d otherwise walk straight past.
Those buildings had a life before the murals. Wynwood was a working neighborhood with factories, garment businesses and warehouses. When galleries began opening here in the 1990s and early 2000s, they could take on spaces with room to show large work. The painters working outside got something out of the same architecture. A warehouse can give you a long wall with very little to interrupt a painting. That sounds like a small thing until you look at a newer building and count how often the ground floor is broken up by a lobby, a garage entrance or a row of shop windows.
Astronaut mural in progress outside Billionaire Boys Club in Wynwood, December 1, 2023 photo by Nadia Bouzid
By 2015, the City of Miami had changed the zoning in the arts district to make room for more housing and commercial uses while trying to retain its industrial character. Four years later, Wynwood 25 opened just west of Second Avenue with 289 rental apartments and shops at street level. That puts hundreds of homes within a short walk of Wynwood Walls. It also gives the street a reason to be busy on a Wednesday in August, when the people coming and going are much more likely to live there than to be in town for a fair.
The cultural map was already shifting by the time those apartments opened. Emerson Dorsch, one of the galleries that helped make Wynwood an arts district, had moved to Little Haiti in 2017. The Margulies Collection is still in its warehouse on Northwest 27th Street, where Helen Levitt’s New York street photographs have been on view since October. The move and the exhibition tell you more about Wynwood than a tally of murals could. One part of the art scene can establish itself somewhere else while another keeps doing the work that made an old building worth visiting in the first place.
Wall space marked for Wheelbarrow and Wynwood Mural Fest, photo by Nadia Bouzid
On Northwest 25th Street, there’s another version of that story this December. At number 240 there are apartments over shops. At 299, the founders of the Museum of Graffiti are opening The Art of Hip Hop, with work by the people who made the photographs, album covers and graphics that gave the music a look. The exhibition includes Miami photographers Derick G and Esdras Thelusma. Raize’s portraits are going up outside. The same street can support more people living in Wynwood and give an exhibition about its culture a place to open. Whether the next building on that street makes room for anything comparable is a decision somebody still has to make.
For a business looking at Wynwood, December shows what the neighborhood can draw. The better test of a particular block is what brings someone there on a normal day. A museum, a cluster of apartments and a mural people come to photograph all put people on the sidewalk, but at different hours and for different reasons. That matters a great deal if the storefront you’re looking at is one turn off Second Avenue. In a neighborhood people talk about as one destination, that turn can be the whole difference.
When the fairs close, some of this week’s work will still be on the buildings. The photographs from December 1 will keep something else. They show the short interval when the old painting is still partly there and the next one is being worked out. Wynwood has been through that change more than once, and at more than the scale of a wall. The interesting question on any of these blocks is what the next version leaves room for.
Work in progress on Raize’s mural outside The Art of Hip Hop on Northwest 25th Street, photo by Nadia Bouzid
key fairs, venues, and schedules:
photo by Nadia Bouzid
photo by Nadia Bouzid
No Vacancy, Miami Beach: November 16 - December 14
Venue: Iconic Miami Beach hotels
"Beyond Sonorism" Exhibition: December 3
Venue: Etra Fine Art 6942 NE 4th. Ave- Little River
AfriKin Art Fair: December 3 - 10 (VIP Opening on December 3)
Venue: Scott Galvin Community Center -1600 NE 126th Street, North Miami
CHROMA: December 5 - 19 (Opening Reception on December 5)
Venue: Lucid Design District
Satellite Art Show: December 5 - 9 (VIP Preview on December 5)
Venue: Lincoln Road, South Beach
Art Basel Miami Beach: December 6-10 (VIP Preview December 6 & 7)
Venue: Convention Center Miami Beach
NADA Miami 2023: December 5 - 9
Venue: Ice Palace Studios, 1400 N Miami Ave, Miami
Art Miami: December 5 - 10 (VIP Preview on December 5)
Venue: The Art Miami Pavilion, One Herald Plaza, NE 14th Street and Biscayne Bay
CONTEXT Art Miami: December 5 - 10 (VIP Preview on December 5)
Venue: The CONTEXT Pavilion, One Herald Plaza, NE 14th Street and Biscayne Bay
Design Miami/: December 5 - 10 (VIP Preview on December 5)
Venue: Convention Center Drive and 10th Street, next to Art Basel at the Miami Beach Convention Center
FAENA Art: December 5-10
Venue: Faena Art District
Prizm Art Fair: December 5-10
Venue: 7300 Biscayne Blvd
SCOPE Miami Beach: December 5-10
Venue: On the beach at Ocean Drive and 8th St, Miami Beach
Miami River Art Fair: December 6-8 (VIP Preview December 6)
Venue: Penthouse at Riverside Wharf 125 SW North River Dr, Miami, FL
Untitled Art: December 6-10 (VIP Preview December 5)
Venue: On the beach at Ocean Drive and 12th St, Miami Beach
Aqua Art Miami: December 6-10 (VIP Preview December 6)
Venue: Aqua Hotel, 1530 Collins Ave, Miami Beach
Red Dot Miami: December 6-10 (VIP Preview December 6)
Venue: Mana Wynwood Convention Center
Spectrum Miami: December 6-10 (VIP Preview December 6)
Venue: Mana Wynwood Convention Center
Fridge Art Fair: December 6-10 (Grand Popsicle Gala December 6)
Venue: Courtyard Miami Coconut Grove, 2649 S Bayshore Dr
Pinta Miami: December 6-10
Venue: The Hangar in Coconut Grove, 3385 Pan American Drive, Coconut Grove
HIVE: A Culinary & Cocktail Village: December 7-10
Venue: Wynwood
A Copper Experience: Art Basel Miami Edition: December 8
Venue: Yeelen X gallery space in Miami's Buena Vista