Fairs and Events
5 Artists to Watch During Miami Art Week 2022
By Shira Wolfe
A much-anticipated event in this year’s art world’s calendar, Miami Art Week 2022 is about to commence, running from Monday, November 28 through Sunday, December 4. Among the art fairs striking down in Miami for the week and hosting galleries and exhibitions are Art Basel Miami Beach and Untitled Art. Both art fairs are hosting a great selection of on-the-rise female artists this year.
Young Female Artists on the Rise
We made a selection of 5 exciting female artists to watch who are exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach and Untitled Art. As this is just a small selection of the excellent artists represented during Miami Art Week 2022, we encourage you to explore all the participating art fairs and the other exciting artists on view. There are a lot of special programs and performances aimed at new perspectives and diverse voices and many emerging artists who will be making their mark on the art world in years to come.
Erin M. Riley at Art Basel Miami Beach
Erin M. Riley is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She makes elaborate, raw and layered tapestries, a practice she loves because weaving is a skill that takes time and patience and is continuously challenging. Her tapestries are imbued with the energy put into the process, and the images she weaves reflect on personal memories, relationships, trauma and the broad range of women’s experiences. She frequently uses images from her childhood and her own body but also incorporates texts from newspaper clippings, telling intimate and universal stories through the images and texts she interweaves.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, Riley will be showing her large work questions & answers (2022) at the Meridians sector of the fair with her gallery P.P.O.W. (New York). The tapestry, which includes sentences like “He would grip her so tight she would bruise” and “You’re a young lady now” depicts one of the houses she grew up in and shows elements from Riley’s childhood intersecting with her naked adult body covered in tattoos. Pain, trauma and empowerment all meet in this whirlwind work that feels almost like a scene from the tornado hitting Kansas in Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz and spinning reality, memory, home and all its objects into disarray.
Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich at Art Basel Miami Beach
Through her artistic practice, Athabascan and Inupiaq artist Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich from Alaska explores the many different Indigenous realities she and others experience. She has rarely shown her work outside of Alaska, and her participation at Art Basel Miami Beach marks an interesting moment for the artist to broaden the impact of her work and add to a deeper understanding of the cultural, social and artistic experiences and expressions of Indigenous people.
Gingrich’s practice is centered around carving sculptures and masks of the wildlife that is so important to her from her own natural surroundings. She learned to carve at the Native Art Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where Native practitioners teach traditional Native Alaskan arts. For her, creating these masks of seals, foxes, caribou, fish and birds is a process of continuing the tradition of honoring these creatures that her ancestors started a long time ago. The masks are beautiful and dreamy, suggesting an entire spirit world behind them. Gingrich often adds beads that she strings through the eye holes of the masks and connects to their mouths, representing connection, blood flow and transformation. In some cases, a hidden spirit is represented streaming from the mouth of an animal. Gingrich is represented by K Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and her work will be shown with this gallery in the Nova section of Art Basel Miami Beach.
María José Arjona at Art Basel Miami Beach
Colombian artist María José Arjona lives and works between Bogotá and New York City. Her artistic practice is focused on long durational performance, in which her body serves as the medium to understand various issues related to society, anthropology, philosophy and politics. Testing her own physical and psychological endurance and playing with time, which she considers the most critical element in performance, she challenges her audience to consider their own reactions to and involvement in her work. She was also one of the performers selected by Marina Abramović to take part in her retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 2010, The Artist is Present. Arjona’s body of work can be divided between her single standalone pieces and her performance cycles.
During Art Basel Miami Beach, Arjona, represented by Rolf Art Gallery, will create an installation and performance in the Meridians section. An installation of chairs will be suspended from the ceiling, while Arjona will do a 6-hour daily-long durational performance titled Silla reflecting on the movement of the body as a form of political choreography. Magalí Arriola, Art Basel’s curator for Meridians in 2022, gives more context to the Meridians section this year: “Sculpted bodies, sexualized bodies, performing and singing bodies – brown, black, and white bodies– have made themselves present in this new edition of Meridians, challenging art historical canons and their relationship with the representation of power, opening new perspectives for art’s activism around gender and race, and infusing optimism and hope to how we might envision our future.”
Jade van der Mark at Untitled Art
Dutch artist Jade van der Mark grew up in the Dutch village of Bergen, the artist colony where the Bergen School of Artists developed between 1915 and 1925. She was nine years old when she exhibited her first paintings in the goat stables of the little farm where she lived. After studying Textile & Fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Den Haag, Van der Mark worked in the fashion industry with designers such as Viktor & Rolf. She was awarded the Dutch Fashion Award at the Milan Fashion Week in 2016 for her unique paintings which she turned into wearable items of clothing. Van der Mark studies the vibrancy of urban life and creates large-scale portraits of city dwellers, always tracing the human connection between people from all walks of life. Topics like overpopulation, mass consumption, diversity and the fast-paced nature of daily city life are all imbued in her paintings. As someone who has seen the fashion world from the inside, her paintings often make reference to more problematic sides of this glamorous and consumer-driven world.
Van der Mark works with thick coats of oil paint on her monumental canvases, using bold colors and creating a sense of depth that is almost sculptural. Each layer can take up to a week to dry, meaning she works on some of her canvases for up to eight months. At Untitled Art during Miami Art Week, Van der Mark will show 12 artworks in a solo show with Ronchini Gallery.
Rachel Garrard at Untitled Art
British artist Rachel Garrard, currently living and working between New York and Mexico, creates magical paintings composed from natural substances such as quartz, ash, or rock powder pigment, which she collects during her travels and hand grinds herself. She then applies these powders to raw linen in a labor-intensive process of layering them onto the fabric to create almost mystical experiences. Moving seamlessly between scientific research and esoteric practice, she has gradually developed her own symbolic language connecting the internal with the universal. In her site-specific, ephemeral installations, Garrard interweaves her symbols with natural phenomena, playing with the always-changing forces of nature.
During Untitled Art, Garrard will create a temporary installation on Miami Beach called Pathways Beyond Time, presented by Colector Gallery. Through large rusted steel sculptures appearing from the sand, she will make reference to ancient traditions and reveal the symbolic qualities of the environment while interacting with the surrounding elements of the ocean, the sand, and the people engaging with the artwork. Aside from this installation, new paintings by Garrard will be exhibited with Colector Gallery at Booth A52 at Untitled Art.
Relevant sources to learn more
Find more rising stars in the art world in our article about painters on the rise at the recent Frieze London 2022
Discover the highlights of Art Basel 2022
The 2022 Venice Biennale at a Glance: Highlights & Awards
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