Miami’s SATELLITE Art Show has announced a new location in the heart of Miami Beach for its second edition. The fair, which launched during last year’s Art Basel in Miami Beach across four sites in North Beach, will be held this time around at the Parisian hotel on Collins Avenue.

The reason for the change in venue is simple: “It’s really hard during Miami Art Week to get traffic anywhere outside of South Beach,” SATELLITE founder Brian Whiteley told artnet News in a phone conversation, citing the notoriously bad vehicle congestion during the annual event. The new location is next door to Aqua Art Miami, and right in between Art Basel and UNTITLED.

A map showing the second edition of SATELLITE’s location in the heart of South Beach.
Photo: Courtesy of SATELLITE.

In his search for a new space, Whiteley, who co-founded the now-defunct SELECT fair, was looking for something that was similar to the primary original site, an abandoned Art Deco hotel, that, he says, “allowed for us to be really experimental.” He found what he needed in the Parisian, which he describes as “funky” and “dated, but in a good way.”

What will set SATELLITE 2.0 apart from the crowd, said Whiteley, its is conceptually-driven model featuring curated exhibition spaces rather than typical commercial booths. The fair will be an independent outfit in 2016, having partnered with Art Market Productions, which also runs Miami Project, for its inaugural run.

“We’re trying to put a little bit of heart and soul back in the art fair model, which we feel can be pretty stale,” Whiteley said. “It’s become standardized to the extent that people are losing interest in Miami Art Week because they just expect the same thing over and over again.”

He plans to diversify with array of performances, tech-driven projects, and new media installations.

Crowds at SATELLITE.
Photo: Courtesy of SATELLITE.

The other major 2015 addition to Miami’s art fair scene, X Contemporary, will also see some changes for its second edition. The fair’s founder, Matthew Eck, who previously ran SELECT with Whiteley, has left the art fair business, and joined New York’s Freight and Volume as head of client relations.

In Eck’s absence, X Contemporary will be run by consulting curator Michael Klein, artistic director Pamela Willoughby, and executive director Crystal Curtis. After its Wynwood debut, the 2016 edition of the fair will be held at a to-be-announced venue in Midtown Miami.

The SATELLITE Art Show will be on view at the Parisian, 1510 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, December 1–4, 2016.