Art Basel Miami Beach 2021: Survivor’s guide to traffic, parking and 5 events you can actually attend
After taking a pandemic pause in 2020 from in-person gatherings, the contemporary-art juggernaut known as Art Basel Miami Beach returns in full force Dec. 2-4 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Boasting 253 galleries this year, Miami Art Week’s main attraction is nice and all — duct-taped bananas notwithstanding — but veteran Art Basel crawlers know better. The many satellite fairs and pop-ups swooping into Art Basel’s orbit are more intoxicating, more soul-nourishing and slightly farther from the feeding frenzy of millionaire art collectors.
So take our advice: Navigate Art Basel week judiciously and take a cheat sheet with you — this one, for example. Here’s everything you should know about parking, what to pack, avoiding the highways and – why not? — how to skip the main fair and still enjoy yourself.
Traffic and parking
Heading to Miami Beach? The biggest traffic headaches are I-195 (MacArthur Causeway) and I-395 (Julia Tuttle Causeway), the east-west flyovers feeding into Miami Beach, so take the less-crowded Venetian Causeway.
The rest of Miami: Travel during off-peak hours (not Monday-Friday rush hour or weekends) to avoid more stress. And don’t exit I-395 at North Miami Avenue, often clogged with tourists trying to reach Midtown, Wynwood and the Design District, but instead take Federal Highway. Don’t even think about parking on Wynwood’s main thoroughfare, Northwest Second Avenue, so clogged with vehicular traffic and tourists between 22th and 29th streets that you’ll be stuck there for hours.
If driving by car: Avoid this if you can, since navigating and parking can be tricky when half of known civilization has descended on South Florida. Heading to Miami Beach? Visitors may get lucky at the 17th Street Garage ($2 an hour, $15 flat rate) across the street from the Fillmore Miami Beach (1700 Washington Ave.) (Don’t forget to arrive early, though.) Parking downtown? Try the Omni Center garage (1645 Biscayne Blvd.; $25 all day) or the Perez Art Museum Miami garage (1103 Biscayne Blvd.; $15 flat, $11 if you’re a PAMM member).
Need free rides? Uber and Lyft are notorious for surge pricing, especially during weekends, so consider the free Metromover (5 a.m. to midnight Monday-Sunday), which loops around downtown Miami and hits the Arsht Center, Perez Art Museum and Frost Museum of Science. A free Miami Beach trolley will run 8 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Sunday with stops linking Midtown and Wynwood to the convention center, with stops every 30 minutes.
Use surface lots and street meters: For painless parking in Wynwood, Miami Beach and beyond, download the Miami Parking Authority’s Pay by Phone app for Android and iPhone. After parking, launch the app, punch in the location number and duration, and you’re done.
Five Miami Art Week events you can’t miss
Cube Art Fair (Dec. 1-5) and “Humans + Machines: NFTs and the Ever-Evolving World of Art” (Dec. 2-4)
For better or worse, the art world can’t stop gushing about nonfungible tokens — NFTs — that online phenomenon in which digital art and internet memes are bought and sold like cryptocurrency. We don’t pretend to understand the value of NFTs, or why someone would pay $400 for a 52-minute recording of fart noises, but we know these transactions happen online, not IRL. Just when we thought nothing could outstrip the weirdness of a banana duct-taped to a wall, at least several Miami Art Week pop-ups and three physical, in-person art fairs will celebrate the rise of the NFT. The biggest is probably the Tezos NFT exhibition, which has carved out a 2,500-square-foot space at Art Basel Miami Beach at the Miami Beach Convention Center (1950 Convention Center Drive). Subtitled “Humans + Machines: NFTs and the Ever-Evolving World of Art” (Dec. 2-4), the exhibit will feature panel speakers and starry-eyed idealists telling you to invest in NBA highlight videos and Nyan Cat. Yes, there will also be physical artworks on display. Not to be outdone, the Cube Art Fair (Dec. 1-5) will display NFT artworks on 50 giant billboards on the streets of Miami, including the Design District, Wynwood, downtown, on the wall of the Intercontinental Hotel and inside the Miami Opa-Locka airport. Info: CubeArtFair.com.
“Our Friend, Jean” (Nov. 29-Dec. 4)
Let’s forget, for a moment, the irony of an Art Basel exhibition-auction about Jean-Michel Basquiat, the late Brooklyn artist who famously railed against capitalism and its hapless, powerless victims. Instead, consider this as a history lesson: “Our Friend, Jean” in Wynwood will present 21 early works from the self-taught art eccentric including drawings, writings, mixed-media collages and even the clothes he wore. The works are on loan from Brooklyn’s The Bishop Gallery, and Basquiat’s friends — his former girlfriend Alexis Adler and New York graffiti icon Al Diaz — will be on hand to share intimate stories during walk-throughs of the gallery on Friday, Dec. 4. The show will be paired with live music performances, live painting by PunkMeTender and a live NFT auction — NFTs are everywhere this year, folks — of rare Basquiat photos from the collections of Adler and Diaz. Info: BLK Studios, 2060 NW First Ave., Miami; 305-619-3735
“Five Echoes” by Es Devlin and Chanel (Nov. 30-Dec. 21)
London-based stage designer and artist Es Devlin already has the whiff of celebrity, after a career spent crafting astonishing sets for The Weeknd, Louis Vuitton, Lorde and for Beyonce’s Formation Tour. So her Miami Art Week collaboration with fragrance house Chanel, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its No. 5 scent, is no surprise. Es Devlin’s “Five Echoes” is a huge sculptural installation that will transform Miami Design District’s Jungle Plaza (3801 NE First Ave.) into a “multisensory labyrinth of five pathways animated by light, color and sound.” (And it will smell like perfume, one assumes.) The project will include over 1,000 plants, shrubs and trees planted for the occasion, which will later be replanted inside Miami-Dade County parks once the display closes. Info: Noon-8 p.m. Nov. 30-Dec. 21, Chanel.com.
“Agents of Change” at Wynwood Walls (opens Nov. 30)
A rite of passage for any serious art-lover seeking spectacle, this Wynwood Walls shindig organized by Jessica Goldman — daughter of Wynwood arts pioneer Tony Goldman — belongs on everyone’s dance card. Each December for Art Basel, Goldman’s iconic open-air complex on Northwest Second Avenue is transformed into a wonderland of fresh murals from global artists new and veteran. (You may recall Shepard Fairey’s constant presence there.) This year’s theme, “Agents of Change,” will showcase 13 fresh murals by AIKO, Diogo “Addfuel” Machado, Bordalo ii, David Flores, Scott Froschauer, Joe Iurato, KAI, Kayla Mahaffey, Mantra, Ernesto Maranje, Greg Mike and Farid Rueda. The 13th mural will be created by a local artist picked from an open-call contest. “Agents of Change” will be paired with a solo show by FAILE, a Brooklyn art duo, inside the next-door GGA Gallery. Info: Wynwood Walls, 266 NW 26th St., Miami; 305-531-4411, TheWynwoodWalls.com.
“Yacht The Basel: The Art of the Cheetle” at Seafair at Bayfront Park (Dec. 4)
Even if a Cheetos-themed exhibition sounds weird, trust us: It’s hardly the oddest thing that’s happened at Miami Art Week. (Behold, a Kanye West inflatable bounce house.) Created by LL Cool J’s lifestyle brand Rock the Bells, in partnership with the snack company that gave us Chester Cheeto, is a hip-hop-themed exhibit featuring eight artworks made entirely out of Cheetos orange dust. (Yes, that powdery residue that clings to your fingers.) These probably fragile artworks come from American street artist Lefty Out There (who’s collaborated with Megan Thee Stallion and Bad Bunny), and will be on display aboard the SeaFair megayacht docked at Chopin Plaza next to InterContinental Miami Hotel. After live DJ sets from Just Blaze, DJ Millie, DJ Stevo and C-Stylez, the yacht will set sail after sunset and begin serving “Cheetos-inspired cuisine,” cocktails and a live performance from Dallas singer-songwriter Kaash Paige. And remember: No touching the artworks, or you’ll be caught orange-handed. Info: SeaFair megayacht, 100 Chopin Plaza, Miami; Eventbrite.com.
