Hank Willis Thomas at Art Basel Miami Beach Public

APT artist is Hank Willis Thomas with other twenty-five international artists transform Collins Park with 27 site-specific installations

Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, returns for his third year curating the show’s Public sector. Under the theme ‘Metaforms’, 27 large-scale and site-specific installations and performances by leading and emerging artists from over 11 countries will turn Miami Beach’s Collins Park into an outdoor exhibition space. Produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art for the fifth consecutive year, the sector will include significant works by Olaf Breuning, James Capper, Tony Cragg, Melvin Edwards, Sam Falls, Sylvie Fleury, Katharina Grosse, Matt Johnson, Jacob Kassay, Kris Martin, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Athena Papadopoulos, Ishmael Randall-Weeks, Sterling Ruby, Michael Sailstorfer, Tomás Saraceno, Tony Tasset, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Francisco Ugarte, Timm Ulrichs, Marianne Vitale, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Hank Willis Thomas, Robert Wilson, Yan Xing and Xiao Yu.

Nicholas Baume’s curatorial premise, ‘Metaforms’, will consider how art making is, at its core, a process of transformation. The manners in which artists conceptually and physically reimagine objects or symbols will be explored, and in doing so add new layers of significance to what was once familiar in order to reveal unexpected truths.

As in the past three years, a selection of artworks will remain installed in Collins Park until February 1, 2016 as part of ‘tc: temporary contemporary’, a city-wide temporary public art program which is present by the Bass Museum of Art in partnership with the City of Miami Beach.

A series of live performances will be presented on Public’s Opening Night on Wednesday, December 2. Xavier Cha’s ‘supreme ultimate exercise’ (2015) will be comprised of parallel performances contrasting manipulations of the athletic form, including both the slow, controlled and fluid movements of a female tai chi master adjacent to a choreographed tractor tire routine enacted by male bodybuilders. Controlled physical exertion also marks Pope.L’s elaborate and sorrowful production; four large men speed through the park on skateboards, while lying prone, before crawling laboriously onto a small wooden stage to sing ‘America The Beautiful’. Channeling the Wildean pun of ‘the earnest Ernest’, Ryan Gander’s work features a dandy hobo who will engage the audiences in scripted conversations that reveal iterations of the artist’s fancied and conflicted selves. The work, ‘Ernest Hawker’ (2015), was a Performa Commission curated by Mark Beasley for Performa 15. Public’s opening night will also feature a special evening rendition of Yan Xing’s flirtatious performance.