In its 10th year of showcasing work from Latin American artists, the arteaméricas fair in Miami Beach that opens Saturday is highlighting something new: work from artists of any origin.

The new FotoAméricas section, which was open to all nationalities, is a reflection of Miami’s increasingly global reputation as an art destination.

Miami’s profile has been raised largely thanks to Art Basel Miami Beach, which marked its 10th year in December, and multiple satellite fairs that draw an international audience each year.

“You have now a much more international crowd of not only Latin Americans but Spaniards, Europeans,” fair president Leslie Pantín said. “You have [an area] that has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with all these international people that live most of the year down here in Miami.”

His own fair represents that shift, Pantín said: In its first year, “only Hispanics came.”

This year, the 52-gallery fair is expected to draw an estimated 15,000 art lovers from all over the Southern part of the state, New York — and, of course, Latin America.

Observers say that while Miami remains a city in artistic flux, its roots in Hispanic culture are deep.

“Miami is a city in search of its cultural artistic identity,” said Reed V. Horth, president and curator of Robin Rile Fine Art and curator of a Salvador Dalí exhibit that opens next week in Miami. “There are many names, shows and styles all vying to become what is quintessential about Miami. While the future remains uncertain, we are slowly becoming to Latin American art what Paris was to impressionism in the 1880s.”

Arteaméricas, which runs through Monday, is the first of three major events that focus on Latin America and its mother country of Spain to open in Miami the space of a week. On Wednesday, the five-day Dalí Miami exhibit, featuring 200 works by the Spanish artist, opens at the Moore Building in the Design District. Thursday brings the opening reception for Cuba: The Natural Beauty by photographer Clyde Butcher at the Center for Visual Communication in Miami.

The events are a testament to the built-in audience that South Florida provides for art with a Latin American or Spanish bent. With high-profile galleries and artists in the community, “it would be hard to argue any other city has had as much of an impact on Latin American art as Miami has,” Horth said.

Gary Nader, an art dealer and gallery owner, began auctioning Latin American art in the early 90s and just recently opened a show featuring masters and contemporary Latin American artists.

“When I opened my first gallery here 25 years ago, I registered ‘Miami, Latin American art capital of the world’ [as a trademark] because it’s where you find the most important things in Latin American art — in Miami,” he said.

Still, Nader said, only about 50 percent of what his gallery shows is Latin American art. And when he resurrected his auction house earlier this year, the pieces he sold were Latin American, modern and contemporary.

The presence of Art Basel Miami Beach has introduced collectors of modern Latin American art to more cutting-edge contemporary artists from the area, said art advisor Lisa Austin. And the growing population of affluent young Latin Americans are proving a solid target for those contemporary artists.

 

BY STEVE ROTHAUS, srothaus@MiamiHerald.com

Kirk Fordham, CEO of the Everglades Foundation in South Florida since 2008, has resigned to become executive director of Gill Action, a Colorado-based organization that provides funding for pro-gay political campaigns across the nation.

“Perhaps having a family has made it more imperative to get involved on a full-time basis to make sure American families have the same rights as everyone else regardless of sexual orientation,” said Fordham, 44, a one-time aide to several Republican politicians, including former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley of West Palm Beach.

Fordham, partner Mike Cevarr, a senior research analyst for Fannie Mae, and their two sons, 13-month-old Lukas and Levi, 7 months, will move this spring from Coral Gables to Denver.

“I’m giving up the sun and the surf for the sun and the snow,” said Fordham, originally from Rochester, N.Y. “It's an unexpected opportunity and I hate, hate, hate to leave my Everglades work. It's near and dear to my heart.”

His last day at the Everglades Foundation will be Friday, April 13. He starts the following Monday at Gill Action.

The Everglades Foundation, based in Palmetto Bay, will soon look to replace Fordham. “Paul Tudor Jones, our board chair, will lead the search committee,” Fordham said.

After graduating from University of Maryland with a degree in government and politics, Fordham got a congressional internship; worked for Jim Inhofe (then a U.S. Congressman, now a senator); and became Foley’s chief of staff in 1994. He stayed with Foley until 2004, then worked a year as finance director for Sen. Mel Martinez.

For three years, Fordham worked in public affairs/governmental public relations. In January 2008, he became CEO of the Everglades Foundation.

Although Fordham has been closely tied to Republican politicians, he also has cultivated relationships with Democrats. South Florida’s two congresswomen both praised him in news statements.

"Although we will miss Kirk's determined efforts to protect and restore America's Everglades, I am thrilled that I will now have the opportunity to partner with him in his new role at Gill Action,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman from Weston. “Kirk practices a bi-partisan approach to problem-solving that has earned him the respect of many friends on both sides of the aisle. As we continue our march forward to protect the right of every LGBT person to enjoy every opportunity this nation has to offer, I look forward to working with Kirk to build on the progress that has been made by groups like Gill Action."

Said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, one of the Republican Party’s most outspoken gay-rights advocates: “The Everglades will lose one of its most tireless and effective advocates, but the nation will benefit as Kirk shifts his focus to advancing equal opportunity for each and every American. Kirk is well regarded in Tallahassee and on Capitol Hill as a staunch supporter who has used his knowledge and experience in government affairs to further important causes. I look forward to working with him to ensure that our nation — and our laws — treat everyone fairly and equally.”

Gill Action fund, begun by Quark software inventor and philanthropist Tim Gill, has given $14.45 million to pro-gay campaigns since 2005. In Florida, Gill Action helped fund the unsuccessful 2008 campaign to prevent a statewide amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions, said Fordham, who made national news in 2006 when Mark Foley’s political career imploded during a sexting scandal involving teenage male congressional pages.

Fordham, who helped orchestrate Foley’s resignation from Congress after ABC News obtained copies of the text messages, later told a House Ethics Committee that he reported Foley’s antics to House Speaker Dennis Hastert three years before that scandal broke, but that Hastert did little with the information.

Some gay activists believe Fordham didn’t do enough to stop Foley when he suspected inappropriate behavior between the congressman and underage pages.

“While I appreciate Kirk’s many talents at bringing various political players to the table to move the LGBT agenda forward, I am perplexed as to why these guys just can’t say they’re sorry for what they did,” said Mike Rogers, a Washington-based activist blogger who appeared in the 2009 film documentary Outrage, about closeted gay politicians including Foley. “He said, ‘Oh, I gave the information and no one did anything with it.’ ”

Fordham says he doesn’t know what more he could have done about Foley’s “flirtatious” behavior: “I went behind my boss’ back to the House speaker to report it.”

By ELLEN GAMERMAN

A child mannequin heaves its robotic chest while a voice-over intones, “Is this death?” A performer in a horse mask appears in a dance. A projection displays a giant housefly.

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Experimental films and fleeting live performances are at the forefront of this year’s Whitney Biennial. Ellen Gamerman has details on Lunch Break.

The Whitney Biennial, one of the art world’s most high-profile showcases, strives to explore the strange and inventive. The contemporary art survey—a mix of performance, film, photography, sculpture, painting and other work—runs through May 27 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The exhibition features 51 artists, the smallest number in the event’s history. It’s designed to allow more breathing room between galleries and afford audiences a deeper look at individual artists. Some performances will rotate, and some work will be fleeting, created live before viewers.

But to come across a pair towering over a vacant lot in Midtown Manhattan, with a “Jesus Christ Superstar” billboard on one side and a porn store on the other, is a little surreal, like a portrait of John D. Rockefeller by Magritte. The two pumps, 25 feet tall, materialized this week on a lot at 46th Street and Eighth Avenue where a hotel once stood, now the only remaining patch of undeveloped land in the neighborhood. On Monday the pumps will be activated and — at least if their creator, the German-born artist Josephine Meckseper, has her way — they will cause passers-by to think about a lot more than whether there might actually be black gold coursing beneath the urban bedrock.

“I think of them as a kind of fragment, a glimpse, into what our reality is,” said Ms. Meckseper, 47, whose work often operates at the intersection of culture, consumerism and power. “They are about people struggling to have enough money to pay their heating bills. But they are also about those same people’s desire for entertainment and culture, and about the costs of those things too.”

The sculptures were commissioned by the Art Production Fund, a nonprofit public art organization, as part of its Last Lot program, in collaboration with Sotheby’s, the Times Square Alliance and the Shubert Organization, which owns the chain-link-fenced lot and has donated it temporarily for art projects.

Ms. Meckseper based the electric-powered pumps closely on mid-20th-century models used in Electra, a small town in north Texas once famous as the state’s pump jack capital. And while their red accents and arcing forms inevitably evoke Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly, she said it was important that they were pump jacks first and kinetic sculpture only second.

“The fact that they would really function is very important,” she said, standing in a light rain Wednesday morning on the rough ground where the pumps had been installed.

Until May 6 they will lumber into motion twice a day — four hours in the morning and four in the evening on weekdays; continuously for eight hours on weekends — pumping nothing but conceptual crude while appearing to pump the real thing. They will probably not succeed in drowning out the constant stream of roaring, honking traffic headed east on 46th Street, but they will make the authentic, old-fashioned din of American industry.

“The fabricator asked if I wanted to make them noisier, but I said I didn’t want it to happen artificially,” Ms. Meckseper said. “If they were out here for a few years, they would start to make that horrible screeching noise. It’s a sound that I actually kind of love.”

The 10 state finalists will be showcased in June 2012.