MIAMI BEACHâ€"As dealers in the main fair at Art Basel Miami Beach were counting up six- and seven-figure sales from Wednesday's VIP preview, participants in SELECT, one of the numerous satellite fairs here, were welcoming guests at the Catalina Hotel nearby. The hopeful artists and gallery owners who paid $4,000 to $5,000 to transform one of the hotel's 64 rooms into a mini gallery, installation space or performance venue had different expectations than their brethren a few blocks away.
“I'm hoping to find a gallery to represent me,†said Mariusz Navartil, a Miami artist whose swirling red, black and white works were done with acrylic paint and ink pen. A few doors down, Christopher Maslow stored extra canvases in the shower and masked the toilet with a covered table that held opening night bottles of wine and plastic cups.
Ginny Sykes, a mixed media artist, had journeyed with four other women from Chicago in a bi d to gain wider exposure for their work. “I asked myself: ‘Can I afford to do this even if nothing happens?'†said Ms. Sykes, whose prices range from $80 to $1,500. Her suitemate Kathleen Waterloo said that a Washington gallery had begun to represent her after seeing her work, geometric encaustic paintings, at a satellite fair in Miami a few years ago. Ms. Waterloo, whose work is priced between $250 to $850, has been enthusiastically detailing the group's adventures, artistic and otherwise, on Twitter and Facebook.
The directors of SELECT, Brian Whiteley, 29, and Matthew Eck, 24, supervised a different fair at the Catalina last year before striking out on their own.
“Here artists can showcase their work as they'd like it to be shown,†said an ebullient Mr. Eck.
Curtiss Jacobs, a Wall Street financier who founded Renaissance Fine Art on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem, said he was impressed with t he directors' enthusiasm. He took over two rooms on the hotel's second floor to showcase alabaster sculptures by Ousmane Gueye ($12,000 to $75,000) and an installation made of butcher block paper by Dianne Smith.
Ideally, Mr. Jacobs hopes SELECT will bring in both sales and publicity, but he was philosophical. “It's a learning experience.â€
