For 2024’s Art Basel Miami Beach, Andrew Edlin Gallery will feature recent works by gallery artists Karla Knight, Ray Materson, and Esther Pearl Watson, two seminal paintings by Joe Coleman, selections from the estates of Beverly Buchanan, Paulina Peavy and Abraham Lincoln Walker, and a 2011 assemblage by Thornton Dial, Jim Walter Number Four, which references an Alabama coal mine, and is reproduced on the cover of the gallery’s 2012 exhibition catalogue, Viewpoint of the Foundry Man. We will also debut new ceramics by Venezuelan artist Samuel Sarmiento (b. 1987).
The gallery will also participate in the fair’s Kabinett sector for the first time with a presentation of the elaborate, miniature embroideries of Ray Materson (b. 1954). While incarcerated for drug related offense from 1987-1995, Materson began his art career using unraveled sock threads to create intricate, index card-sized narratives portraying diverse subjects from family mementos to dark scenes loaded with political overtones.
Highlights from our booth include Joe Coleman’s towering 2015 painting Doorway to Whitney, a seven and a half foot-tall ode to his wife and muse, Whitney Ward. Using his trademark one-bristle paintbrush, it took Coleman over seven years to execute this work. More modest in size, but no less powerful is Coleman’s 2021 portrait Hunter S. Thompson.
Beverly Buchanan’s Bailey Lyles’ House (1991) is one of the artist’s largest and most renowned of her “shacks,” an image of which graces the cover of the Montclair Art Museum’s ShackWorks catalogue (1994). Paulina Peavy’s haunting 6 x 4 ft oil painting (Untitled, c. 1930s) was exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939.
The gallery will also include an untitled work by Henry Darger (c. 1960s) that features collaged newspaper clippings of American comedian Red Skelton and the Beatles.