By Jordan Melnick | December 2nd, 2011 | 1 Comment
Few people create more of a stir when they enter the room than EVA & ADELE. You may not know them by name, but to see them is to have the image emblazoned on your memory forever. They are a fixture of art happenings around the world, including Art Basel Miami Beach, where I first spotted them in person last year. Starkly bald, both feminine, masculine, and neither, dressed identically and in high fashion, smiling, they managed to become the center of attention in a corridor lined with Picassos, Warhols, and other legends.
They were an incredible sight — a vision, really, somewhat disturbing — but for whatever reason I never got around to looking them up. But after I saw them again, at the Convention Center on Wednesday and at the Rubell house for a yogurt breakfast on Thursday, I got curious. Before I go further, here they are at the ABMB vernissage on Wednesday.

From left to right: Adele and Eva, more commonly referred to as EVA & ADELE
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By Jordan Melnick | December 1st, 2011 | 2 Comments
Every year during Art Basel Miami Beach, the Rubells, Miami’s foremost art-collecting clan, invite guests to their 45,000-square-foot Wynwood home/museum for an artful breakfast. Last year the fare was oatmeal, and you served yourself through a ritualized process that featured mounds of spoons and sugar packets, stacks of bowls, rows of milk, and a phalanx of crock pots — each component a dwindling sculpture.
This year the breakfast exhibition, organized by Jennifer Rubell, is called Incubation and it is as much cultured as cultural.

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By Jordan Melnick | November 28th, 2011 | No Comments

The Rubell Family Collection's upcoming exhibition, American Exuberance, aims to awaken its viewers to the modern American condition.
“Exuberance” is one of the many “e”-words that aptly describe Art Basel Miami Beach, both the fair itself and the larger, enveloping phenomenon that encompasses a constellation of satellite fairs, a festival’s worth of live music performances (see the Art Basel Music Guide), endless exhibitions at galleries, museums, and private collections, and, of course, a panoply of parties, shindigs, and soirĂ©es. Indeed, “enveloping”, “encompassing”, “endless”, and “exhibitionist” are also apt “e”s, as are “extravagant”, “elephantine”, and, ultimately, “exhausting”.
Getting back to “exuberance”. Don and Mera Rubell, whose private contemporary art collection, housed in a former DEA-facility in Wynwood, is one of the biggest in the world, say the word jumped to mind when they were thinking up a title for their mega-exhibition, American Exuberance, which, as we already mentioned in our Art Basel To Do List, will open on Wednesday, a day before Art Basel Miami Beach proper.
“This title was in the mood of the moment,” Ms. Rubell told me in a recent interview. Her husband added: “Although we usually use ‘exuberance’ in a very positive, upbeat manner, the word has to do, more than anything, with forms of excess behavior, and I think this show is a reflection of that.”
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