The curator and gallerist’s Miami Art Week satellite event unites collectors, artists, and innovators with its equity-focused programming
Immediately following the press preview days of Miami Art Basel in December, a discreet group of writers, photographers, and enthusiasts escape the incoming brand activation apocalypse for the quieter West Palm Beach. The city, located just an hour north from Basel’s home on South Beach, is home every December to gallerist Sarah Gavlak’s New Wave Art Wknd. In her interactions with the city in the past two decades, she has carved an artistic community that brings together creatives, collectors, and other players through her eponymous gallery, residency program, and programming open to all.
Gavlak first took notice of Palm Beach while working as a gallery assistant at Gagosian’s iconic 980 Madison building in New York City at the start of her career. “I noticed that a lot more of their contemporary works were being shipped down here [to Palm Beach]… and I know somebody down here. So I went down to visit that friend, and I thought, Why isn’t anyone doing a contemporary art gallery here featuring artists who appear in the Whitney Biennial or [institutional] things like that?” In 2005, Gavlak opened her eponymous gallery along West Palm Beach’s section of the Dixie Highway with an exhibition by Wayne Guyton, his first solo show in the US. The gallery has shown works by the likes of Marilyn Minter, Lita Albuquerque, and Jose Alvarez, keeping a focus on representing women artists and artists of color. The gallery’s operations have expanded in recent years, with a satellite space in Los Angeles’s Arts District, and plans for another location soon to come.
The Gavlak world continues to shape the city, even inspiring other galleries to open locations in Palm Beach—including New York’s Acquavella. “I think there were a few great collectors here in the beginning that have grown. For example, there wasn’t a curator of contemporary art [at the Norton Museum of Art] when I first got here, so there was no programming. That’s an incredible change, one can impact the community here.” That communal spirit took full form in 2018 with the New Wave Art Wknd, a weekend-long event that pulled together a number of figureheads in the fine arts across Palm Beach. “There was a gap during the weekend between Thanksgiving and Miami Art Basel. And so I said, I’m gonna do my own weekend. I hosted a talk with Jane Hauser and Eric Shiner at Jane’s house about his Warhol book. We had an opening of the gallery, [and then] the Bunker opened, which was kind of it.” The Bunker in question is Beth Rudin DeWoody’s Bunker Artspace, a trove of over 10,000 works from the eponymous collector housed in a ’20s pencil factory. The collection stands tall in the creative community of Palm Beach adjacent to the gallery scene. Both local institutions remain consistent collaborators to date, with the Bunker often hosting talks for the festival, as well as holding the opening of new retrospectives and shows to coincide with it.
This year’s edition kicked off with a panel on public art and community sensitivity set in West Palm Beach’s rapidly changing downtown, a series of new buildings that have popped up around the city’s Brightline, and yet another marker of the community’s shifting identity. Another highlight of the weekend was an elegant gala held in the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, home to both the titular Alabama-born and Florida-educated sculptor’s personal home and studio. The weekend finished with a tour and presentation in the new Gavlak location, a cavernous space set into a long industrial strip, operating alongside Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and TW Fine Art. Land artist Lita Albuquerque, who once installed a series of 99 spherical blue sculptures on the Antarctic Shelf in a work called Stellar Axis: Antarctica (2006), welcomed visitors into the Gavlak space with a speech that trended towards a guided mediation, instructing attendees to hold hands in a circle as she spoke about the individual’s place in the universe.
This year’s New Wave Art Wknd programming also highlighted the New Wave Residency program, a six-week residency program that Gavlak created to foster emerging artistic voices without traditional gallery representation. The weekend featured current artist-in-residence Tiffany Alfonesca alongside previous participants textile artist Angela Anh Nguyen and video artist Javier Castro. Speaking on projections for the future, Gavlak aims to have “more panel discussions in the community, and really start to make the gallery a year-round destination.” She also seeks to open the New Wave Residency up to artists practicing within more non-traditional mediums.“I’d love to have a choreographer or a poet or a composer. Those artists are especially challenged for what they do in terms of resources, so I’m open to it not just being visual art.” While the residency’s programming centers building equity in the arts, it takes on greater significance when considering the much older mission of Gavlak gallery itself—to platform a breadth of early-career artists alongside Basel, a global art event.
As Miami Art Basel has become an equal parts commercial venture and art fair, Sarah Gavlak has created an art weekend that combines industry and creativity while remaining close to her clear vision of equity. In doing so, she continues a much larger tradition of changing Palm Beach and South Florida’s artist and collector community for the good, an ideology that will hopefully continue to grow and flourish even in our uncertain times.