Fashion
Bridget Finn Takes the Helm of Miami’s Big-League Art Fair
If you want to be immediately ushered into the back rooms of downtown New York’s pre-eminent art galleries, it helps to be a deep-pocketed collector. Or you could just tag along with Bridget Finn, the new director of Art Basel Miami Beach, as she …
If you want to be immediately ushered into the back rooms of downtown New York’s pre-eminent art galleries, it helps to be a deep-pocketed collector. Or you could just tag along with Bridget Finn, the new director of Art Basel Miami Beach, as she hopped between TriBeCa galleries on a recent afternoon.
The fair, whose 22nd annual edition opens on Wednesday with 286 galleries from around the world exhibiting inside the Miami Beach Convention Center, draws the global culturati, who swoop in for a week’s worth of art seeing, art schmoozing, and not least, art buying. Although an array of satellite fairs and pop-up shows engulf the entire city, the priciest sales are still brokered at the convention center, where a who’s who of selected dealers hold court.
In TriBeCa, a vibrant new center of New York’s contemporary art scene, Finn received the red carpet treatment as she made the rounds of the neighborhood’s galleries, scouting fresh talent and checking in on established players. Her easy rapport with gallery directors and their support staff is no surprise: She hails from their ranks.
Visitors walk by a giant Earth globe at the Miami Beach Convention Center during last year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.Credit…Eva Marie Uzcategui/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“We all traveled together for the past 15 years,” Finn explained to me with a chuckle after yet another gallery staffer greeted her like an old friend. “It’s what happens with art dealers.”
Before being hired by Art Basel, Finn, 41, worked the other side of the Miami fair. She began as an assistant with Anton Kern gallery in New York — after graduating in 2005 from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, she left any art-making notions behind, “got in a U-Haul with all my possessions, moved across the country and asked Anton for a job.” Later she jumped to the similarly top-shelf Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, running its contemporary program. In 2017 she returned to Detroit and, with the fellow New York gallery veteran Terese Reyes, started Reyes Finn, which made the quick leap to exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021.
