Amid the glitz and spectacle of Art Week, a new mural festival in Miami's historic Little Havana is striving to make sure homegrown artists don't get overlooked.
The Littlest Art Fair is spearheaded by hip hop education nonprofit PATH and Daniel Fila. The Miami artist, also known as Krave, already platforms local talent at El Fresco, his incubation space for creators.
The new festival was originally going to be a micro-fair on one of El Fresco's regular weekly slots in December, but as more events and partnerships emerged in the run-up to Art Week Krave's team decided they could curate and host a bigger festival.
Events like Secret Walls, a live painting competition, will highlight the neighborhood and the talent it harbors.
“It is unfortunate that a lot of what's happening here year-round and the people that are participating year-round are overlooked,” he said. “And I'm one of them … I've never been in Art Basel or any of the major art fairs, but now look, we're making one.”
Raymond Adrian, aka Gemz, has known Krave since they were in 9th grade together, tagging walls and doing graffiti art. Gemz is the creative director at the Perez Art Museum Miami, and always comes to help out Krave because he pushes for local art.
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He straddles the line between established high-value art and local, community-oriented art. He says that money and galleries have divided the two sectors, as people come looking to flip art for sales instead of fostering artists and collectives.
This leads to people making art for profit and not for the sake of art itself.
“And that starts to dilute local artists,” he said. “It’s almost like the housing market, but with art.”
Gina, also known as La Fibra, says spaces like El Fresco and the Littlest Art Fair are so important circumvent the focus on monetization and give artists, especially newer ones like herself, a platform.
“ The monetization of creativity happens with big festivals like Basel, where you pay thousands of dollars to get a booth, and you may not even sell your artwork,” she said. “What you're doing is instead of proving your creative value or expressing yourself creatively, what you end up doing is… proving that your work is worthy of being sold and making people money.”
For Krave, the Littlest Art Fair is the culmination of the last two years of El Fresco and Vinyl Tuesdays. He’s proud that they’ve been able to build an ever-growing group in Little Havana through grassroots methods.
“So now it's no longer, ‘Hey, will you put me on,'" he said. “It's like, 'No, we'll put everybody on'… there's no ‘no’ at our doorstep.”
The Littlest Art Fair will have a Vinyl Tuesday neighborhood jam, a mural walk through Little Havana, and a discussion about AI and art, among other events.
IF YOU GO
What: Littlest Art Fair
When: Miami Art Week, December 2-6
Where: El Fresco, 535 SW 12th Ave, Miami, FL 33130, and other locations in Little Havana
Information: Here
