Political statements at Art Basel Miami Beach are sparse but strident – The Art Newspaper

Almost one year into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, few galleries at Art Basel’s US fair seem interested in overtly broaching the increasingly draconian political climate—albeit with some notable exceptions.

Arguably the most talked-about piece at the fair (beyond Beeple’s pack of billionaire-headed robot dogs) is the perennial prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s monumental provocation on Gagosian’s stand. The piece, Bones (2025), is a Carrara marble sculpture of an eagle crashing to the ground, a heavy (and heavy-handed) metaphor for the state of the nation. Installed in an alcove painted a dark burgundy, the piece has been attracting flocks of selfie-takers. The work was still available, for an undisclosed price, as of Thursday morning, a representative for the gallery said.

“When Maurizio nails it, Maurizio is the best at capturing in one image what’s going on,” Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs, tells The Art Newspaper. “The metaphor of the current status of the country—that I dearly love, because I’ve been spending ten years of my life in this country—that metaphor is perfect for the time that we’re living in, and to be presented like that in Miami at the end of the year, it’s great.”

For the most part, however, political themes are not a focus for most exhibitors at Art Basel Miami Beach. Several galleries are showing works featuring American iconography, typically with an apolitical or ambiguous tone. A Lonnie Holley sculpture of a replica Statue of Liberty suspended in water appears as part of a Kabinett presentation devoted to the Alabama-born artist on Edel Assanti’s stand. Pace is serving up a large Robert Indiana pin-up painting, Ms America (2001). White Cube displayed two works incorporating American flag iconography, a David Hammons African American Flag (1990) priced at $2.25m and a work by Cady Noland, Untitled (Walker). The gallery was still in talks with potential buyers for both pieces as we went to press.

Platforming politics

Cristin Tierney, whose eponymous New York-based gallery is presenting one of the most explicitly political stands at the fair, feels that the lack of thematic risk-taking is a reflection of “a challenging year for the art market” more than anything else.

“Our first priority as art dealers is to take care of our artists, take care of the partners who trust us to do right by them and their art,” Tierney says. “Most of the galleries here are making those choices about what to bring to an art fair based on a variety of factors. But one of them is: what’s the best I can do for my artists?”

The political statements that are present at the Miami Beach Convention Center are sharp and pointed. Nicholas Galanin’s works on the Peter Blum Gallery stand include Object Permanence (2024, priced at $200,000), a sculpture made from the charred remains of a knockoff totem pole carved in Indonesia, reflecting on past and contemporary abuses against Indigenous cultures. The artist, who is of Tlingit and Unangax ancestry from Sitka, Alaska, burned the object himself and documented the process in a separate photographic work, Reenactment (Inversion) 2 (2024), priced at $35,000. Galanin is also showing a textile work, Imperial Prayer Rug (2025), which interprets the point of view of a military drone as a commentary on the global surveillance state as a form of neo-colonialism (and priced at $135,000).

“A lot of his work certainly is a response to the administration, not only in the US but all over the world,” says David Blum. “We’re giving the artist a platform to show what he wants to put out into the world.” At the end of the fair’s first day, none of Galanin’s works had been sold.

The Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth and Council is displaying a conceptual work by Andrea Fraser, a stack of posters featuring a list of words that have been banned by the Trump administration from usage on government documents and websites. The work is an edition of ten and the price is not being disclosed.

“Andrea really wanted this work to be shown in Florida. She thinks it’s important to remind audiences of the realities of this administration,” says Kibum Kim, a partner at the gallery. “So far we’ve only had a positive response, no MAGA people trying to remove it.”

‘Why not have a message?’

In the fair’s Meridians section dedicated to large-scale work, the New York gallery Freight + Volume staged an engrossing work by Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson riffing on the mind-melting nature of the Trump era. The Last Library IV: Written in Water (2020-25) is a trailer-sized cornucopia of banned books, boxes full of hidden documents, pithy posters and timeline charts related to both technology and art history. The work is being offered for $250,000 according to gallery director Nick Lawrence, who noted interest from several institutions.

The artists referred to the piece as a “three-dimensional mind map” built from nuggets of information scavenged from headlines, internet rabbit holes, conspiratorial conversations and other dubious sources. “This is the water we’re swimming in,” Paulson says of the piece. “Maybe someone’s gonna walk through this and have an epiphany. Maybe someone’s gonna feel like, ‘Oh, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell my uncle.’”

Cristin Tierney’s presentation features paintings, sculptures and even performance art relating to American politics past and present. The gallery organised the stand around next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence, with an eye towards institutional buyers. Several works were on hold by Wednesday afternoon, with institutional sales pending, according to gallery representatives.

“Nobody even knows what the heck the Declaration of Independence says, certainly not our president,” Tierney says. “There are a lot of collectors, curators and members of our community who are thinking about the big questions with regard to our government, where our country’s going, what we stand for, what we really believe the United States is about. And this booth reflects that.”

Featured works included a Jorge Tacla painting of the Pentagon building, BREAKING NEWS 5 (2025, priced at $48,000), and a Dread Scott canvas featuring a world map that strategically leaves out most of the US and blocky text spelling out the piece’s title, Imagine a World Without America (2007/2025, priced at $75,000). A piece by Julian V.L. Gaines, Emmett’s Last Ride (2022, priced at $35,000), features a pair of US flags on the tailgate of a Ford truck, referencing the abduction and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.

In a corner of Cristin Tierney’s stand, the artist Tim Youd is busy at work all week on one of his typewriter performances, which involves typing the entirety of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1973 book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 onto a single sheet of paper. Appropriately, the gonzo journalist’s account of the 1972 US presidential election reaches its climax at the Miami Beach Convention Center, which held both the Democratic and Republican party conventions that year.

“There’s no reason that art fair booths can’t be more curated than they are,” Tierney says. “Why not have a message? Why not give people something to think about?”

• Carlie Porterfield and Kabir Jhala contributed reporting