Miami Art Week Preview 2024; Nicholas Galanin Installation Grounds Luxury Fantasyland

If you were an Indigenous person in the Western Hemisphere living in a coastal area during the 15^th, 16^th, or 17^th centuries, one of the worst things you could see were sails. Ship’s sails. Sails powering colonizers from Europe to the “New World.” Colonizers who brought murder and slavery along with them.

You may not have known this initially, thinking perhaps these people were friendly. They were not.

They landed all up and down the East Coast of what is now called America and throughout the Caribbean. They landed in what is today Florida. Juan Ponce de León claimed the area for Spain in 1513.

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979; Tlingit/Unangax̂) returns the sails of conquest to the shores of Florida during Miami Art Week 2024 with his monumental, site-specific installation erupting from the sand on Faena Beach: Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente).

“I think of the sails as a form of empire,” Galanin told Forbes.com. “Even in our communities here in Alaska, some of the first visible documentations that have been orally passed down in our communities are of seeing those sails from afar.”

Trouble coming.

Spanning 90-feet long and 30-feet high, Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) will be on free public view from December 3 through December 8, 2024, between noon and 8:00 PM behind the Faena Hotel at 3201 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. The artwork brings a necessary dose of reality to what is otherwise a weeklong fantasy land of luxury and parties for the super-rich to celebrate their dominion over the world hosted under the guise of fine art.

Galanin’s installation, as has become his signature, critiques the space it inhabits.

“Every location has layers of history and chosen history, narratives that are either upheld and told and shared, or erased, and Miami is no different,” he said. The story typically erased, “Conquest or colonization tied to things like capitalism, tied to conversations of oppression within communities that still have to navigate empire.”

The name “Miami” comes from the Mayaimi tribe once living there, “mayaimi” translating to “big water” or “sweet water,” likely a reference to Lake Okeechobee, 85 miles northwest of present-day Miami.

“Language is a telling tool of what is upheld or not upheld in communities,” Galanin said. “Access to land and the relationship to land from an Indigenous perspective, that is also really telling. When (places) get heavily developed, when (places) get completely transformed, where language is not present anymore, or where place names or even harvesting rights are also completely removed, how do Indigenous communities still retain visibility, even sovereignty?”

South Florida’s most prominent Indigenous people today, the Seminole and Miccosukee, have retained–reimagined or rescued might be more accurate terms–their visibility and sovereignty in no small part through gambling. It was the Seminole Tribe of Florida setting up a bingo parlor and then defending that operation on the basis of tribal sovereignty against Florida’s anti-gaming laws all the way to the Supreme Court in 1981 that set in motion the popularization of Indian-owned casinos across America. The casinos remain an economic lifeline for Indigenous communities nationwide.

Partially buried in sand in the form of a Spanish galleon’s masts, sails, and rigging emerging from below, Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) connects the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land with the initial invasion of the “Americas” to extract wealth for European aristocracy.

The present day’s global aristocrats invade Miami for Art Week not by galleon under the power of sail, but by private jet under the power of fossil fuel. Miami is the busiest place in the world for private jet traffic during the event. Yacht traffic isn’t far behind. Yachts and private jets being the two most expensive, unsustainable, resource-heavy, and polluting modes of personal transportation.

Burn The Ships

When vile Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés led an expedition to Mexico in 1519, he ordered his ships to be scuttled on the beaches. This was done to “motivate” his exhausted crew, preventing retreat. Cortés’s actions sent a clear message: there was no turning back. The Spanish expression quemar las naves (burn the ships) means to eliminate the possibility of retreating before a problem.

The masts and sails of Galanin’s galleon evoke a decisive moment, symbolizing a point of no return, where past actions force a commitment to a new, uncertain future. This act, like burning one’s ships, speaks to the irreversible choice to move forward without the option of retreating, of charting a new course and never going back, and the act of giving oneself to a cause or belief.

Spray painted on Seletega’s sails in Spanish and English, the first languages to colonize the Americas: “What are we going to give up to burn the sails of empire? Qué vamos a renunciar para quemar las velas y los aparejos del imperio? What are we going to build for our collective liberation? Qué vamos a construir para nuestra liberación colectiva?”

These questions ask visitors to consider their roles and responsibilities in shaping the future. Between champagne toasts, spa appointments, and luxury retail therapy, it’s not difficult imagining the consensus answers among Miami Art Week patrons being “nothing.”

Find Art And Soul At Miami Art Week

The shoppers at Miami Art Week, of course, don’t speak for the artists with work showing there. The opulent global ecosystem created by the art world to sell collector-grade contemporary art doesn’t bear their fingerprints. And make no mistake, if a Miami Art Week visitor can avoid being sucked into the swanky “brand collabs” and stay focused on art, treasures abound.

Art Week features more than a dozen fairs, but Art Basel Miami Beach is the straw that stirs the drink. It stands as the most significant contemporary art fair in the world. Hundreds of elite international galleries will be set up at the Miami Beach Convention Center pitching their artists.

Find Brazilian gallery Carmo Johnson Projects presenting a solo booth (P8) of work by MAHKU-Huni Kuin Artists Movement (Acre, Amazon, Brazil). These new paintings are related to MAHKU’s Huni Kuin ancestry, and depict translated and transformed Huni Meka Chants, the ceremony in which ayahuasca medicine is consecrated.

AfriKin Art Fair–a mashup of Africa and kinship–at the Scott Galvin Community Center is free to attend and features contemporary fine art from across the continent.

With its history hosting Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, James Brown and other African American luminaries during Jim Crow when Miami Beach was segregated, Historic Hampton House makes for a powerful visit any time of year; it hosts special exhibitions during Art Week. Overtown is another historic center of Black Miami. Start a visit at the Black Archives Historic Lyric Theater Cultural Arts Complex and spend time walking the neighborhood enjoying its murals.

Running throughout the year, Art of Black Miami emphasizes truth over transaction.

Calle Ocho–Southwest 8^th Street–through Little Havana has centered Miami’s Cuban community since the mid-20^th century. Look. Listen. Eat. Little Haiti, likewise, proves a grounding influence after corruption among the wealthy and spectacular on Miami Beach.

Miami Beach does have a soul. Art Deco lives there and is best explored on tours offered by the Miami Design Preservation League.

The Rubell Museum presents the finest collection of contemporary art in the southeastern United States–Basquiat, Haring, Kehinde Wiley, Yayoi Kusama, Rashid Johnson, Anselm Kiefer, Cecily Brown, etc.

The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami presents a full slate of major solo shows representing artists from around the world coinciding with Art Week. Admission is always free.

Street art, graffiti, and murals throughout the once decrepit Wynwood District helped put Miami on the international art scene. A taste of that energy will be recreated at the Night Swim Rooftop Bar at citizenM Miami Worldcenter Hotel December 5 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM when Secret Walls Paint Battle hosts a live event pairing teams of artists competing against each other before an audience in real time. RSVP required. Miamian José Parlá will also be painting live. Visitors to the Pérez Art Museum Miami can see him December 7th and 8th working on a site-specific mural at the museum as part of his “Homecoming” exhibition.

In Wynwood, the Art of Hip Hop’s “Cey Adams, Departure: 40 Years of Art and Design” exhibition includes a wall installation of more than 50 iconic album covers he created for major Hip Hop artists such as Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, The Notorious B.I.G., DMX, and Jay-Z. Adams was the founding Creative Director of Def Jam Recordings who started out as a young tagger on the streets of New York City in the 1970s.

Back in Miami Beach at 3501 Collins Avenue near the 36^th Street Park, an unforgettable site will be found directly on the beach: a 100-strong herd of Indian elephants. Amplifying indigenous knowledge and sharing a message about human-wildlife coexistence and conservation worldwide, The Great Elephant Migration continues across America.

Each elephant, life-sized and representative of a specific, individual animal, was created by a community of 200 indigenous artisans from the communities of India’s Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. The collective has recreated every elephant they live alongside using Lantana camara, one of the world’s worst invasive weeds. Elephants are twinned with a conservation NGO whose work will directly benefit from the sale of their sculpture. The installation is free and open to the public.

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