The Best Booths at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024

Jim Amaral at Instituto de Visión

When it comes to straight artist couples, men historically eclipsed women. But the opposite is the case with artist Jim Amaral, whose wife, the fiber artist Olga de Amaral, has received much more acclaim than him in the past several years. She recently got a stellar retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris this year; he has never had a survey of that scale. Jim wouldn’t have it any other way. A California native, he moved to Colombia to study medicine, quickly realized he was no good at it, and met Olga, who agreed to move to the Colombian countryside with him so they could both pursue their art.

Starting in the 1960s, Amaral started creating his own artistic language. It was heavy on eroticism, and it aimed to flip gender norms on their head. He refused to accept that feminism should only bring women into men’s roles; it was men who must also claim traditional women roles in the name of equality, he believed. Toward the edge of this Kabinett presentation are a pair of densely painted houses. They open to reveal blue orbs at their centers, along with a rendering of a man in one and a woman in the other. But my favorite is a tender pencil drawing from the 1970s that just shows the close-ups of mouths, fingers, and nails. There’s lovely erotic tension at play here.

Zilia Sánchez at Galerie Lelong & Co.

Erotic tension is also at hand in another Kabinett presentation, this one dedicated to Zilia Sánchez. While Sánchez is best known for her three-dimensional paintings, this presentation focuses on her sculptures, which reinterpret her canvases in marble and bronze. The best—and most sensual—of these is Concepto II, conceived around 1998 and realized in 2019. In the booth, the two bronze elements, each weighing 80 pounds, are placed so close together on a plinth that they almost touch, with just a centimeter or two between them. Both are ensconced in curved partitions, giving this scene a sense of privacy, as if to suggest that this were a place where anything could happen perhaps.

Rachel Youn at Night Gallery

Installed on the floor of Night Gallery’s booth is a sculpture by Rachel Youn that likewise seems to undulate with desire. At its center are two oscillating circular massagers covered with artificial plants attached with a pink cord. The two massagers are in a constant loop of pulling apart and coming back together as though they were about to kiss. It’s mesmerizing to watch. For Youn, that endless loop represents contemporary living: the tools we try to soothe ourselves with are merely short-term fixes in the path toward permanent, if unachievable, happiness.

Jimena Croceri at Piedras

Buenos Aires–based artist Jimena Croceri is one of the stand-outs in Positions, the fair’s section for solo booths. Here, she presents a series that she began while doing a residency at Flora ars+natura in Bogotá, where she made several visits to the Museo del Oro. She was fascinated by the pre-Columbian metalwork she there. Croceri’s work is similarly about touch, focusing on the small voids created when two bodies connect. She created plaster molds of these areas between, for example, two women’s chests or butts pressed up against each other, the soles of three pairs of feet touching, the recesses of a clavicles when a person raises their shoulders. From these molds, she then produced bronze sculptures that themselves appear like possible medical implements. She then re-creates the compositions from which she made the molds, now placing the final bronze sculptures in those voids, and makes a photograph to accompany the sculpture. These are parts of the body we don’t think much about, but they’ve never looked so elegant as they do here.

Melvin Edwards at Galerie Buchholz

For the past few years, Melvin Edwards has been realizing installations in barbed wire that he conceived decades ago. The most memorable of these is in a room at Dia:Beacon in Upstate New York, where visitors can get relatively close to these works. At Art Basel Miami Beach, Galerie Buchholz has brought a similar piece that Edwards remade for a show at the gallery’s Berlin space in 2023. This work, titled Now’s the Time (1970–2023), is placed out of harm’s way in a corner. Edwards has suspended a saxophone from a metal chain that extends downward; in front are around a dozen lengths of barbed wire installed in a triangular formation. The tension in this piece seems even more pronounced than Edwards’s other installations in this medium. There isn’t just danger here but perhaps joy and vibrance if the sax were to be played. It’s thrilling.

Mimi Smith at Luis De Jesus

Mimi Smith, an artist associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, offers one of the most striking showings in the Survey section, for historical presentations. On view are several of her “Television Drawings,” dense transcriptions of the morning and evening news broadcasts from the 1970s and ’80s that are framed within renderings of TV sets from the era. Nearby are four clocks from the 1980s and ’90s that tackle social issues like healthcare access, environmental justice, and poverty. Woman’s Work is Never Done, Health (1995), for example, is pink-painted clock with a black-and-white photograph of an open fridge with a caption bearing the work’s title on its face. At one o’clock, there’s domestic violence; at two, breast cancer; at three, abortion rights and safety; at five, AIDS; at eight, infant mortality.

But the most powerful work in this booth by LA’s Luis De Jesus is her three-part installation Slave Ready: Corporate (1991–93). At its center is a pinstriped women’s business skirt suit; to this Smith has lined its edges with steel wool pads, a commentary on how women were still expected to perform domestic labor during the era, even as they ascended the corporate ladder. To the right is another clock piece with a woman holding up her finger as she says “Just a Minute, Please,” while at left is one of Smith’s “Error Message” paintings, a series depicting the problematic language used in early computer language that were built around “master-slave” input functions. (In the ’80s, Smith learned these complex languages.) The painting reads simply: SLAVE READY.

Miriam Inez da Silva at Gomide & Co.

This Kabinett presentation spotlights Miriam Inez da Silva, a Brazilian artist whose oeuvre has been under reconsideration over the past several years thanks to a major retrospective and catalog in 2020 by another Brazilian gallery, Almeida & Dale. Miriam, who went by her first name to subvert patriarchal hierarchies, was long marginalized within Brazilian art history, with some considering her a naïve artist. But she was a keen observer of the changes in Brazilian society during the country’s dictatorship and in the years after its end in 1985. Though she studied under Grupo Frente artist Ivan Serpa (also featured in Gomide & Co.’s booth) at Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Miriam turned her attention to her native state of Goiás, in central Brazil, and the social, cultural, and political changes happening there, especially for women.

Her paintings synthesize popular culture, mythology, Catholicism, and Afro-Brazilian religions. One shows a woman and man in bed, along with the caption “The woman who ripped the pillow and bit her husband’s nose because she dreamed about R. Carlos,” referring to the famous Brazilian singer-songwriter Roberto Carlos. The samba musician Paulinho da Viola features in another, with wings as he rests precariously on a cavaquinho.  Another shows a shepherd as an angel flying above a herd of cows he is corralling, while several feature sailors interacting with mermaids. In one, a nude Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with a snake to their left and peacock to their right, hold up a saint on a cloud.

Agosto Machado at Gordon Robichaux

In the Positions section, Agosto Machado presents shrines and altars to his friends, long since departed. (The Museum of Modern Art recently acquired a Machado piece similar to these.) At Art Basel, the artist has brought together a sundry of personal items that he has amassed over the decades to create moving tributes to drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger and one to Warhol superstars Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis. In these dense installations, Machado has arranged textiles, prayer cards, matchbooks from places where he performed with them, books about their lives, their images (some of them by Peter Hujar), a compact case, I Ching cards, fans, masks, subway tokens, jewelry, tassels, and artworks by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Uzi Parnes, Steve Dalachinsky, and Bruce Eyster.

The most fascinating of those on view, however, is a new work, Desire (Altar), which features, among other trinkets, a rosary and prayer beads, a box of amyl nitrite (early poppers that came in a vial to be broken), and a painting of a nude man’s torso by Bill Rice. Machado has draped a yellow fabric with red script over the painting’s right side, where there is a depiction of the buff man receiving a blow job. This modesty isn’t for the sake of Art Basel visitors, though; this painting lived in Machado’s apartment for years, and he at one point decided to cover it up. Machado’s works are rich in queer history, much of which would have been forgotten were it not for elders like him who have kept it alive. The poignant tension between joy and grief, love and loss, sacred and profane is ripe in these works. That’s not something you see at most art fairs these days.