Collectors will have many options to experience in addition to Art Basel Miami Beach. Here are four standouts.
Days before Art Basel Miami Beach opens, satellite fairs during Miami Art Week are vying for collectors’ attention on the final stretch of a densely packed art market calendar. Four fairs stand out among the many options that feature a diverse offering of emerging art, gender-bending works, oversize installations, culinary experiences and abundant socializing.
AfriKin Art
AfriKin, a fusion of “African” and “kinship,” was founded as “Miami’s premier contemporary Africana art fair” to showcase the “ingenuity and potential of the people of African origin,” its founder, Alfonso Brooks, wrote in an email. The fair, in North Miami, presents more than 30 artists in a broad spectrum of art and scholarship. Pieces will include Benin bronzes, photographs and textiles.
This year, the eighth edition of AfriKin Art is devoting a section to Dr. John Henrik Clarke, an African American historian and professor who, in the 1960s, pioneered the creation of Black studies in academia. Also, the California-born artist Michael Chukes presents sculptures that honor the “female spirit,” while photographs by the Cameroonian artist Angèle Etoundi Essamba are, in her words, a “medium for challenging and redefining the perceptions and roles of Black African women in both historical and contemporary contexts.” Photographs by Delphine Diallo, a French and Senegalese artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, aim to redefine portraiture by infusing artificial intelligence-enhanced images with spiritual and mythological elements.
NADA
The 21st edition of the nonprofit New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair is back at Ice Palace Studios, an ice plant that was converted into a film production studio in the 1920s. This year’s Curated Spotlight section showcases eight artists selected for their “exciting multimodal creative practice,” according to the guest curator Jenée-Daria Strand of the Public Art Fund, formerly of the Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art.
Among Ms. Strand’s picks are paintings by a Miami painter, Dustin Emory, that explore the effects of confinement, and abstract needlepoint landscapes by Azadeh Gholizadeh that draw inspiration from the weaving traditions of her native Iran.
“These landscapes represent my fragmented memory of places, which become pixelated images when I reconstruct them,” Ms. Gholizadeh said in a phone interview from Seattle, where she lives and works. “This is needlework reborn as a rebellious act.”
Scope Miami Beach
The 22nd edition of Scope includes more than 110 exhibitors, with 70 newcomers. In a first-time collaboration with Straat, a museum of street art and graffiti in Amsterdam, Scope’s urban art program known as Walls is showcasing an exhibition of monochromatic artworks titled “Not So Black and White,” emphasizing the concept of nuance in a polarized world.
The artist Connor Tingley, in collaboration with Curren Caples, a skateboarder, explores the intersections between music, skateboarding and painting. The Claire Oliver Gallery from Harlem is showing a monumental (25 feet tall by 20 feet long) steel sculpture titled “A Blue (Collar) Horse,” by BK Adams, a modern-day Trojan horse painted with car paint. And the British artist Lucy Sparrow is presenting “Feltz Bagels,” a novel take on the bagel shop. Ms. Sparrow herself is serving up handmade felt bagels for purchase, in 13 varieties including poppy seed with cream cheese and everything with pastrami and pickles. All the trimmings are sewn by hand.
Untitled Art
In its 12th edition on the beach in Miami Beach, Untitled Art showcases about 160 galleries from 39 countries presenting works by 600 artists. The curatorial focus revolves around two themes: “Gender Equality in the Arts” and “Curating in the Digital Age.”
With 60 percent of exhibiting artists and 35 percent of exhibitors identifying as female or nonbinary, the fair is leveraging the soft power of art in Florida’s present-day political environment to create a “balanced and inclusive artistic landscape,” Untitled’s founder, Jeff Lawson, said in an interview. “We wanted participants that are representative of a conversation that is not all going in one direction.”
Victoria Miro Projects, the online space of the London-based Victoria Miro gallery, is showing new works by Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist; the Canadian painter Cindy Phenix; and Emma Talbot, a British painter. And thanks to Untitled’s digital partner Vortic Art, exhibitors can generate virtual 3-D views of their booths on Vortic Art’s website. The restaurant reservation platform Resy is another fair partner, treating V.I.P. guests to culinary delights “curated” by an award-winning chef, Stephanie Izard, and served on the beach.
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