Arts

Art made for different beats

There’s jazz in the photographic imagery hanging in the unlikely venue of a dentist office waiting room. There is music in the truncated snapshots, in the blurred visions, in the dimmed light, of hands and arms in motion, spinning records, a television screen, a plate with bits of food. It’s some earlier work of Adler Guerrier, first seen at the Miami Art Museum (a Knight Arts grantee) a decade ago, and the exhibit in the dental office of art collector Dr. Arturo Mosquera does indeed include a jazz soundtrack. A video, infused with the music of Mingus and Ellington, sets the literal tone in the corner. This smallish exhibit,  “after/for/with (Mingus, Ellington, MJQ),” is a quiet way to revisit this artist’s work in — to stretch the jazz metaphor — an off-beat setting.

Guerrier, who has been seen in the Whitney Biennial, the Tate Liverpool, The Studio Museum in Harlem and now shows with the David Castillo Gallery, found expression in a variety of forms; collage, drawing, sculpture, video and photography. He addresses geo-political subjects and the histories that go into making up such racially and culturally complex tapestries as our own here in Miami. On Thursday evening, Guerrier will lead a discussion that could tap into all of this or venture into other territory as well; with Guerrier there is a free flow of concepts and ideas that is encouraged when contemplating the work and when discussing it.

Free flow was an apt description of some of what went on at the Wynwood Art Fair last weekend, an inaugural street art-centric fest, a fundraiser, really, for the Lotus House women’s shelter. The participating galleries, organizations and performers stepped out for a moment from the standard commercial confines and let things move at their own pace.

Like at Gallery Diet, where two New World School of the Arts students, Sebastian Duncan Portuondo and Chad Cunha, made a “life painting” with objects found off the streets and with help from the public (below).

Or in the maze made by Alvaro IIizarbe for the Carol Jazzar Gallery, which made more than several big and little people dizzy (below).

Guerrier leads an informal walk-through of his exhibit at Art@Work, the office gallery of Mosquera at 7:30, Thursday, Oct. 27, 1245 Galloway Road. (S.W. 87th Ave.), Miami; 305-264-3355.