It all started in 1970 when three gallery owners in Basel, Switzerland combined their creative instincts, bringing together 90 galleries and 30 publishers from 10 countries to hold an international art fair.
Fred Snitzer in front of a Kenny Sharf painting at Frederic Snitzer Gallery. Photo by Laura Tanna
“I have always been an artist. In thinking back, when I was a little boy we lived in a row house in Philadelphia, and my mother would go to pick up my brother at school just around the corner. She would leave me at the kitchen table with clay. I just always drew, always worked with clay.”
That show evolved over the decades into something far greater. Today paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, digital art, and video attract artists, art lovers, collectors, and gallery owners globally for an intense few days of immersion into the highest quality modern and contemporary art — not to mention some fabulous parties. Art Basel Miami Beach debuted in 2002, still rooted in the concept that galleries play a significant part in the development and promotion of visual arts. And, how better to learn what goes into Art Basel and creating a successful gallery than speaking with someone who has had a gallery in Miami for over 40 years and has served on the selection committee of Art Basel Miami Beach since its inception.
Fred Snitzer, of the Frederic Snitzer Gallery, advises anyone coming to Art Basel Miami Beach “that there are 10 to 15 art fairs simultaneous with Art Basel…But, there’s nothing that matches the material vetted by the selection committee. I know the hours and expertise that goes into selecting literally some of the best galleries in the world. Within Art Basel there are million dollar works and there are thousand dollar works. I highly recommend it, this is the only thing to do that week, get a map, ask tons of questions and then you can go to some of the museums and other fairs.”
Asked why his gallery is always on the selection committee he says, “I’ve done art fairs in Hong Kong, Berlin, New York, LA, Aspen over the years. Maybe it is that I’m addressing an international programme, not just with international artists but of a certain calibre, a certain aspiration. Within the selection committee, they’re looking for dealers that are appropriate, that will fit with a vision of Art Basel. It has a great deal to do with academic aspiration, to aspire to be museum quality. If one could be defined by curators and a certain layer of collector, that’s what Basel is interested in.”
In 2014, Fredric Snitzer Gallery relocated to the Arts & Entertainment District near Downtown Miami. Today the Fredric Snitzer Gallery’s current space includes a 1,400 square foot indoor exhibition space, divided into two galleries, and a 2,600 square foot outdoor sculpture garden.
Born in 1950, Fred is second generation Russian/German/Austrian from Philadelphia. He remembers: “I have always been an artist. In thinking back, when I was a little boy we lived in a row house in Philadelphia, and my mother would go to pick up my brother at school just around the corner. She would leave me at the kitchen table with clay. I just always drew, always worked with clay. Early on I painted, and I just hate colour. It confuses me to deal with it. I’ve made many paintings but I’m definitely a sculptor. I cast bronze and did all kinds of things. They’re all from like the ‘70s, but they look very Giacometti.”
Known for exhibiting and representing Cuban artists, Snitzer explains that he has always identified with all things counterculture. “I had a professor in art school named Rafael Ferrer, the artist brother of Jose Ferrer, the actor. Rafael Ferrer was extremely left-wing, did all sorts of interesting art, very conceptual, made us read History Will Absolve Me by Fidel [Castro], before I ever came to Miami. So when I opened the Fred Snitzer Gallery in 1977, a year or two into it, I found this portfolio of prints by Wilfredo Lam and did an exhibition thinking to embrace the Cuban community, I’ll show a Cuban. Well, they were not happy with that Cuban. I had bomb threats, ‘cause he used to go back to Cuba all the time and was buddies with Fidel.
“When I first started to show Cuban artists the cultural impact in those days was enormous. There was a time when rafters were coming from Cuba, tons and tons of rafters. A lot of my artists were making paintings about rafters, bolsaros, boats, referencing these people desperately trying to leave Cuba. With a friend of mine we invented an artist movement called Nada before the art fairs. He had done a video with a friend of his which started with the funeral of a young rafter found dead here. The documentary was called They Would Rather Die,” about the rafters. There was a local guy who had made a deal with the Coast Guard that when a raft arrived on the shore, he would collect the raft and built a collection.”
Snitzer adds that he met this local collector, and together they put on an exhibition of the rafts, the video and paintings entitled They Would Rather Die. The exhibition got international press including Le Monde in Paris.
Wynwood Pioneer
Snitzer was 27 when he came to Miami. He majored in studio art at the Philadelphia College of Art and after graduation worked as a shop monitor in the sculpture department, then received a fellowship to Penn State, finished a Master’s, and six months later was in Miami. “I started in Coral Gables. Because my father was in the discount drug store business in Philadelphia, he knew how to buy things. I was gonna sell posters and give art lessons. He said, ‘Okay come to New York with me and we’ll buy posters, we’ll find the sources.’ He gave me some money to buy the posters, do the framing, and then again, when I started to buy better things, when I said, ‘I can buy this Chagall print for $1,000 and sell it for $2,000,’ he went with me to auctions.” Snitzer eventually bought a property with a friend in Wynwood and became one of the pioneers in Wynwood in 2000. “We stayed there for probably eight or nine years and came here.”
Here is 1540 N.E. Miami Court, where the Fredric Snitzer Gallery sits on the edge of historic Overtown close to downtown Miami. Says Snitzer, “This was extremely inexpensive, a nice space and I got a long lease with some options. Wynwood had kind of ruined me for neigh-bourhoods with a lot of activity. Food trucks, drunken kids and all that stuff was a problem at an opening. There’s nothing here essentially, which is good.” Once again Snitzer is a pioneer, though with the speed Miami is being trans-formed, gentrified, electrified into a global go-to city he may soon need another location.
He has a reputation of being a good art dealer who shelters artists from negativity and aggression in the industry. He doesn’t see artists as just producers of commodities on which to make money. He confesses, “I’m not a business person. I’m an artist who’s doing business. I’m doing the thing that I can do. I protect artists. My job is to find opportunities to work with artists, to sell their work, and the market is very complex, very complicated. I’m just trying to do the best I can with them.”
With his “The Unsung Heroes” he says, “I started with Alice Aycock, New York based, in every major museum in the world. She’s early seventies and about five years ago I started showing her work here. She’s now with Marlborough. She did a big project on Park Avenue, but we still work together.”
He sits before a Kenny Sharf painting explaining that Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Sharf brought graffiti art into fine art. The difference is that Sharf didn’t die so his price point is super accessible. “This painting is $100,000, but if it was a Basquiat, it would be 30 or 40 million dollars. So that’s an inequity that will get caught up. Now, it’s an opportunity for collectors and for me. We’ve just showed Jackie Ferrara at Basel. She’s Italian, New York based, in every museum in the world, but doesn’t have a gallery. This is for me an opportunity and for my collectors, a huge opportunity.”
Perhaps the most exciting part of Fred Snitzer’s life is not Art Basel, nor his pioneering and enduring gallery, but rather his life in education. “I started teaching at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. That school is dance, music, theatre and visual arts, high school and college, where the first two years college students get an Associate of Arts Degree from Miami-Dade College, the next two years the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the University of Florida. Our kids go to the Alvin Ailey Dance corps, to graduate school at Yale, are Academy Award winners, are in the Whitney Biennial. It’s an amazing resource that’s poor and completely unsung.”
To inspire his senior class of 20, Snitzer suggested using the budget for printing invitations to the BFA show to instead take the students to New York. Another year he went to wealthy collectors. They each gave five or $10,000. “I had money to take all these kids to Berlin. We went to galleries, museums, private collections. It was to get them to Europe to see art and artists living there. Rosa de la Cruz, a big collector in Miami, got excited and the next year funded more of it and helped us with the Knight Foundation. We’re in our 10th year now. The senior class has gone to China, Venice, Florence, Barcelona for free for two weeks. No BFA programme in the country does this.
“It started with just putting together my different hats. Not to blow my horn, it’s just about knowing the needs, being interested. I’m not a hero. The biggest beneficiary was me. I got to do all the things I wanted to do. I got to teach. I got to make my art. I have a gallery. It’s just lucky happenstance, you know?” — JP