Purvis Young (1943-2010) was an outsider artist who lived in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Liberty City, Miami. The paintings, at the Rubell Family Collection in the Wynwood Art District, appear, at first, to be haphazardly constructed and rather makeshift until they reveal themselves to be the workings of an artist of acute insight into the human condition. The exhibition’s 14 sections delve his multiple and fierce obsessions which range from history and politics to the mystical realm of angels and holy men. Moved by the tragedies of his time, be it the civil rights movement, urban violence, drug use, social decay, Young made his materials from found objects, tape, doors, wood, anything he could lay his hands on. Every now and then, there are glimmers of pure mastery, like a small boat on the water, an allegorical doomsday that reminds me, in its textured darkness, of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Then there are the jail cells, which ingeniously meld minimal abstraction and social commentary along a singular and passionate plane.

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Amidst a tremendous amount of great art on display at  Art Basel Miami Beach this year, three curated sections threw up new discoveries and mined historical blind spots. In Survey, 16 historical projects presented individual artists across a spectrum of cultures, generations and approaches. Hackett Mill, a gallery from San Francisco, showed terrific late paintings by David Park made shortly before his untimely death in 1960. One of the founders of Bay Area Figuration, Park’s late paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, and carry an indelible charge of innocence. Their chromatic structures have been largely pared down, with an equal economy of brushstrokes, which are nonetheless, expressive and authoritative. Positions, meanwhile, is devoted to  emerging artists, showcasing  14 ambitious new projects this year,  including a dynamic installation by Tschabalala Self at Thierry Goldberg which  sets up a bodega interior as the setting for her signature paintings, replete with a checkered floor and hand drawn “wallpaper.” Self, who was part of the group show, “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” at the New Museum last year, works at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality to comment on black feminisms and futures. Her large canvases with rough-hewn collage made of fabrics exhibit black bodies in action. Tiffany Chung, a Vietnam and US-based artist who shows with Tyler Rollins, New York, stands out in the Nova section of solo, two- or three person shows. With concise methodology, her  woven maps and detailed line drawings , elegantly translate research data regarding war, natural disasters and migration into art that is poetic and political. 

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An hour’s train ride away on the spanking new Brightline from Downtown Miami, and not far from the action in Wynwood and Miami Beach, the Bunker Artspace is the brainchild of art collector and West Palm Beach denizen, Beth Rudin DeWoody. This wonderful, weird creation is the newest entrant to the world of Miami private collections, joining those of the Rubells, the Margulies’s, the de la Cruzs, and opened in 2017, during the last edition of Art Basel. There are multiple rooms spread over two floors with more than 500 works, elegantly curated by Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow. DeWoody has a penchant for the creepy crevices of the human psyche, so this collection is not for the faint of heart or the prudishly inclined. While some permanent displays are holdovers from the previous year, exciting new additions include exhibitions by two guest curators with a sharp focus on women: Her is HERE curated by Eric Shiner, Director at White Cube; and Tales from the Crate Room curated by E.V. Day, artist and winner of the prestigious Rome Prize 2016. There was also a brilliantly and funny performance, Inner Course: The Agony of It All, by the collaborative duo, Rya Kleinpeter and Tora Lopez at the opening on December 2. The two role-play Lucille Ball, complete with hilarious orange wigs, in a scene that recalls the actress’s bedroom from the hit TV show, I Love Lucy. Reading to each other from a mountain of books that propagate patriarchal myths about womanhood and feminism, they periodically break into theatrical false tears in response to the agonies of misogyny.

The Bunker Artspace is open by appointment. Located at 444 Bunker Road, West Palm Beach, FL 33405.

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My first stop on the Miami art trail this year was the Scope Art Show. Booths felt cramped and the aisles were far too narrow, making it difficult to step far back enough to see the art on display. There was also too much posturing on politics, rather than thoughtful critique. Most of it —unluckily for me —included hideous Trump visages. A super-realistic portrait by the street artist Shuglo shown at the fair highlights this disturbing trend perfectly. It’s a super-realistic rendering of a news image, which records the exact moment at which Trump puckers his not-so-sweet lips to utter the word “huge.” A garish neon sign covering half his face, spells out the word in elegant cursive. A noble exception was the standout solo presentation of paintings and part-assemblage sculptures by Curaçao-origin artist, David Bade, at Amsterdam dealers Annelien Kers. His figurative paintings channel a nightmarish contortion of animals and humans twisted into a dystopian sexual fantasy. The largest of these paintings combines shocking pinks and lime greens that feel at once icky and seductive. Trump makes an appearance here too, in a sculpture —but it’s deliciously subversive. The Commander-in-Chief’s head melts into a gooey mop with a jaundiced mane for hair.

Miami Beach Pavilion, 801 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, 4-9 December, 2018

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Most people know Judy Chicago from her magnum opus, The Dinner Party (1974-1979), so beautifully installed at the Brooklyn Museum. But her exhibition that opened last night at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami, inaugurating fair week in the city, has visitors reeling. The myth of Chicago as a radical, feminist icon has always, somehow, preceded the work. This modestly scaled show cracks that myth wide open with its joyous proliferation of vulvas. Chicago, it seems, has always known that the most effective way to smash patriarchy is for a woman to embody her sexuality and project it back into the world. There is so much that is good here. You really need time to savor the ceramics and works on paper, the real knockouts in this show.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 61 NE 41st St, Miami, FL 33137, December 4, 2018 – April 21, 2019.

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