Monday, December 3: The Calm Before, Redux
Considering what was to come, the work week began softly, with a few small, choice events. Sheila Elias hosted the annual kickoff party in her huge North Miami studio, a short distance from the Museum of Contemporary Art. I had been invited in previous years, but this was my first viewing of her space. While working in many media, including installations of images hung on clothes lines (previously shown both in a laundromat off Lincoln Road and also outdoors, at The Yard at Casa Lin), Elias tends to favor photography and painting. Her work, generally figurative, excels at celebrating the human body in motion, capturing the energy of dance, of free fall, of sky diving, and of the body suspended in water, freed from the constraints of gravity and inertia.
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I ran into Marivana and Emanuel Viscuso at the Elias studio. Sometimes I call them the "Viscusi". They are a brother and sister team from Milan (although the family has its origins in Sicily) who relocated to Miami years ago. He is active in local Italian events and organizes a yearly Sicilian film festival. She is a bold chanteuse, often performs at art events, and is the owner of the Art Temple, an on-again off-again art/performance space housed in a large former religious school and rectory complex in North Beach. We decamp to the home of William Berke in the nearby gated community of Keystone Point, for a show of neo-surrealist canvases by Chicago based painter Curt Frankenstein, a ninety year old native of Germany and Holocaust survivor. The show, and a video interview of the artist, were organized by Steven Berke, the son of the house, and would soon travel (during the actual days of Art Basel) to the lobbies of two luxury buildings in Miami Midtown, the Charter Club and Blue.
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