Celebrating the Success of Yale School of Art Alums at Miami Art Fairs

In December, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean Kymberly Pinder left the chilly terrain of New Haven to visit Miami, where she spent time getting to know the work of Yale School of Art alums participating in the annual art fairs in Miami. Work by alumni was abundant throughout the city at Art Basel Miami, Untitled, NADA, the Perez Art Museum Miami, local galleries, and other locations.

With the assistance of Jill Westgard, the school’s Director for Development and Alumni Relations, Dean Pinder hosted an intimate community brunch for alums, attended by artists from the 1999 through 2019 MFA cohorts, representing all four areas of graduate study at the school.

Among these alums was Farah Al Qasimi (MFA ‘17), whose solo booth with New York gallery Helena Anrather, was a particular favorite of local attendees. Through Art Basel in Miami Beach (ABMB)’s Legacy Purchase Program, Miami Beach residents voted to select two photographs and a wallpaper by Al Qasimi for acquisition by the City of Miami Beach. Her subversively scenic wallpaper simultaneously contrasts and complements the artist’s striking photographs—all emerging from Al Qasimi’s recent series investigating possibilities of paradise. Al Qasimi’s works are now installed inside the Miami Beach Convention Center, as the most recent addition to the city’s Art in Public Places program.

Another significant public acquisition of SoA alum work came through Danielle De Jesus’s (MFA ‘21) participation in the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair, for which curator Ebony L. Haynes (also an SoA visiting faculty member) chose eight solo presentations by emerging galleries for NADA’s Curated Spotlight. Exhibiting with the inclusive New York-based gallery focused on artists from Latin America and the diaspora, Calderón, De Jesus’s 2021 painting Two Men and Their Blue Gate was selected by the Pérez Art Museum for acquisition to their public collection. Rich in color and deceptively complex in composition, the acrylic-on-vinyl-table-cloth work features two men with bicycles gazing forward, framed behind and within the titular blue gate.

The Yale School of Art extends its most sincere congratulations to Farah, Danielle, and all of the artists showing at the fairs, galleries, and museums in Miami last month. This Miami excursion was just the first of many trips by Dean Pinder in support of graduate alums, as she works to cultivate a sense of community amongst artists in the years and decades after their time in New Haven and at Yale.