Traveling to Miami in December was a whirlwind of a research trip/scouting expedition for CAM, involving seeing as much art as possible in a mere four days. During this frenetic visit, in which each new art experience threatened to overtake the one prior (in keeping with the old psychology adage about the “magic number seven,” or our ability to store seven chunks of information within our short-term memory), I took copious notes bookmarking what I found to be the most memorable booths and artworks, of which, for our curatorial purposes, there were fortunately many. Here is a shortlist that will surely inspire our work at CAM in the coming months and beyond.

Art Basel Miami Beach

• Overduin & Kite’s gorgeous, pastel-hued booth — one of my absolute favorites across all the fairs — featuring a theatrical multi-part installation by France-based British artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Los Angeles-based painter Dianna Molzan’s ebullient, bunting-like shaped canvases

• Japanese minimalist (and one of the founders of Mono-ha) Nobuo Sekine’s fluorescent infinity-shape pencil drawings from 1968 at Blum & Poe

• The text-based prints of Luis Camnitzer, the éminence grise of Cuban conceptualism, at Alexander Gray’s terrific booth

• Trevor Paglen’s surveillance photographs of near-imperceptible predator drones against a wash of pink and blue sky at Metro Pictures

• Ross Knight’s precarious sculptures made of paper-like rawhide and other delicate materials at TEAM Gallery

NADA

• Tokyo-based Take Ninegawa gallery’s booth was fresh and lively all around, particularly Shinro Ohtake’s kaleidoscopic dime-store assemblages and young painter Shinpei Kagashima’s rich abstract landscapes

• Sigmar Polke’s suite of performative lithographs from 1968 at Leo Koenig and a giant new painting by the reliably cunning Nicole Eisenman

• Most everything at the booth of San Francisco gallery Altman Siegel (who represent current CAM exhibiting artist Emily Wardill in the United States); standouts were Will Rogan’s documentary-like black-and-white photographs and Devin Leonardi’s nearly all-black portrait painting

SEVEN

• Winkleman gallery featured a suite of William Powhida’s cranky yet hilarious (and oh-so-accurate) drawings lamenting the artist’s co-conspiracy with the art world itself; also of note were Christopher K. Ho’s abstract walnut box framed paintings

• Ronald Feldman Fine Arts’ juxtaposition of British-Israeli artist Yishay Garbasz’s photographic series detailing the landscape along both sides of the Israel/Palestine border against another series, Becoming (recalling Eleanor Antin’s own Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972), depicting the artist’s sex change over the course of two years; the overt political tones in both series could not be more different yet at the same time were equally compelling

PULSE

• A minimalist black-and-white painting from 2008 by Israeli artist Michal Rovner (best known for her haunting films) at Los Angeles’s Shoshana Wayne gallery

• Orly Genger’s Brice Marden-esque oversized drawing at Larissa Goldston’s booth, which provided a nice foil to her labor-intensive practice involving large-scale painted and crocheted/knitted ropes

Bonus acknowledgments to Los Angeles/Chicago-based Intelligentsia coffee, which provided much-needed caffeinated fuel at NADA, as well as the be-hammocked lounge area in the courtyard outside of Pulse, which offered a different kind of respite: impromptu r&r after epic days of art viewing.