Basel Is Back!

South Florida’s beloved art festival, Art Basel, returns to Miami Beach after taking a year off from the pandemic. The fair will consist of a hybrid option where people can view and purchase the art online. The leading global arts fair in the Americas is also located in Basel, Switzerland and Hong Kong. This year’s show will showcase exhibitors from 36 countries and territories, offering lineups of more than 250 leading galleries worldwide. Paintings, sculptures, photography and digital works will all be on display. Art Basel will take place from Dec. 2 – Dec. 4, 2021, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. 

With safety being a top priority, visitors are required to wear their masks the entire time and show a negative COVID-19 test or proof of vaccination along with completing a self-reported symptom screening prior to entering.  

Installations range from rare and historical 20th Century masterpieces to works from today’s most promising and talented artists. The Conversation series provides a platform for dialogues to occur on current art topics. This allows art historians, curators, museum directors and critics from across the globe to voice and share their opinion on pertinent topics like collecting, producing and exhibiting art. The fair will present 16 large-scale artworks; 25 breathtaking exhibitions and 10 panels as part of the series.  

The theme for this year’s Art Basel is "Regions,” focusing on how humans interact with nature and situations around them. Topics include Womanhood, Nature, Race, Indigenous communities and Colonialism. One piece that stands out is “Unsettled Minds” by artist Sungi Mlengeya. Mlengeya is a Tanzanian self-taught artist that uses her medium to create minimalistic portrait paintings which focus primarily on black women and negative space. During her artistic journey for this series, she interacted in-depth with four black women from East Africa whom she continuously goes back to visit during her career. The focus of this work is to explore their lives and their views on womanhood. She also gains insight into their response to societal expectations, their choice to comply or not comply with those norms. Mlengeya looks into the influence of their lives, the triggers that shape their thoughts and the importance of the subjects’ freedom to define their own meaning of womanhood and femininity.  

 For more information visit: Art Basel