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Being tapped for New York’s Whitney Museum Biennial — a sweeping survey of ”where American art stands today” — isn’t an instant ticket to art-world fame and fortune. But it is the next best thing. Just ask Miamians Hernan Bas, Dara Friedman, Luis Gispert and Mark Handforth, all of whom saw their international profiles, as well as their artwork’s price tags, soar in the wake of their inclusion in Biennials over the past decade.
The trend should no doubt continue for this year’s selectees: William Cordova, Adler Guerrier and Bert Rodriguez. Three is a record number for Miami, more than any other burg outside New York and Los Angeles. And for those seeking a quick indicator of this city’s post-Art Basel status, it’s a sea change from the 1980s and ’90s, when the only South Floridians to receive the Biennial’s curatorial nod were (posthumously) Carlos Alfonzo and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
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… Adler Guerrier’s untitled (BLCK — We wear the mask) mines the same turbulent era of U.S. history as Cordova’s piece but to a much more engrossing — and poignant — effect. Guerrier wondered why there hadn’t been a forceful artistic response to the 1968 riot that tore through Liberty City. So he created BLCK, a fictional art collective whose faux-vintage posters and sculptures sprawl across a wall while an old TV set plays news footage of civil-rights marches being superseded by Black Power protests. Hampton appears onscreen, as does Mark Rudd, one of the prominent Anglo radicals Hampton dismissed as a ”masochist” for courting violence.
Guerrier is just as conflicted by such dueling impulses, and he quotes and riffs on the period’s insurrectionary slogans in BLCK’s placards even as he ultimately rejects them in favor of a more nuanced strategy.
