On our first full day in Miami for this year’s Art Basel, we headed out of Miami Beach to the Wynnwood Arts District, a formerly industrial neighborhood that has seen a number of galleries, private art collections, and performance art spaces crop up over the past few years.
As with any of our trips, our first stop was a coffee shop. We ducked into Panther Coffee where we enjoyed a cup brewed via siphon. (We tried the Finca Nombre de Dios from El Salvador, roasted in-house using Panther’s antique Perfekt roaster.)
After our caffeine fix, we walked around Wynnwood Walls. Wynnwood is famous for its incredible street art and murals, thanks to the late Tony Goldman, a South Beach real estate developer who thought that the neighborhood’s windowless warehouses would make great canvases for murals.
Thanks to Goldman’s effort, Wynnwood is now covered with beautiful works by famous artists (Shephard Fairey and Ryan McGinness, to name a few) and some not-so-famous, but all expertly executed and beautiful to look at.
Our next stop was CasaLin, an outdoor exhibition space behind an old house that caters to Miami artists.
It’s the city’s only art space in an urban garden and we loved relaxing in the shady yard while sipping a freshly-pressed sugarcane-pineapple-ginger juice.
In full on art-viewing mode now, we made it to the Rubell Family Collection, an absolutely envious private collection of contemporary art in a beautiful building. (We weren’t just envious of the art, but also of the Bugatti Veyron park in the garden.) By then, it was time for lunch.
We wanted to do Florida right, so rather than heading to The Dutch or Scarpetta (both excellent New York-based restaurants), we ducked off the beaten path and right into Clive’s Cafe, where we had heaping plates of jerk chicken, plantains, and rice and peas for just $7. Welcome to Miami—we’re loving it.
- Laura and Ryan
Oh, I wish I could be there right now! Looking forward to reading your cronicles these days!