Crowds flocked to the New Art Dealers Alliance’s annual art fair at the Ice Palace Studios in downtown Miami. This is the second year that the sprawling space, with its white facade flanked by palm trees on all sides, has hosted NADA, and it’s the second time that the fair has given the Pérez Art Museum an acquisition gift.

The acquisition program gives funding for curators María Elena Ortiz and Jennifer Inacio to select work from the fair for the museum’s permanent collection, which highlights international modern and contemporary art from the US Latino experience, the African diaspora, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Within hours of the opening, representatives announced that the museum had selected Mozambique-born, Los Angeles-based artist Cassi Namoda’s painting Sasha and Zamani’s Tropical Romance, which was on view at Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, and AN ABUNDANT LOSS by American artist Nikita Gale, an installation that Reyes Projects, from Birmingham, Michigan, brought to the fair.

Cassi Namoda, Sasha and Zamani’s Tropical Romance (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles.

Gale’s sculptural works, comprised of steel, concrete, foam, and towels, explore the concept of noise, and how the materials have the capacity to both create and cancel out sound, according to a statement from NADA.

Namoda’s painting depicts two distinct East African conceptions of time personified as women: Sasha stands for sequential time, defined by the transition of present into past, while Zamani is limitless and eternal time.

Nikita Gale, AN ABUNDANT LOSS  (2018). Image courtesy of the artist and Reyes Projects.

“The quality of work at NADA was astonishing and made our selection really hard,” Inacio said. “After much consideration, we decided that the two chose works will bring important dialogue to our collection.”