The Design Tourist aka Karen LeBlanc in the Wynwood District, Miami
During the week of Art Basel Miami Beach, the city is electric with creative energy. All around the Wynwood district, street artists are at work painting buildings with new murals for Wynwood Mural Fest.
Street artists drawing the attention of TV cameras as they paint fresh murals in the Wynwood District of Miami for Mural Fest.
Wynwood Walls is like a street art museum, free and open to anyone who wants to walk around and admire the murals. The concept began as a vision for outdoor art space by developer Tony Goldman, founder of Goldman Properties.
Street artist painting a fresh mural at The Wynwood Walls
His concept started with six painted buildings that he commissioned artists to paint in the area which eventually became the core.
Mural at the Wynwood Walls in Miami
Over the next decade, the painted walls proliferated. Each year during Art Basel Miami Beach, new murals are unveiled creating a destination of urban art.
The Design Tourist videographer filming a street artist painting a fresh mural for mural fest in the Wynwood District, Miami
I met up with Zack Lawrence, production manager for Wynwood Mural Festival on opening day as vendors were setting up tents and food trucks in anticipation of huge crowds later that evening.
Street artists painting a new mural at the entrance to mural fest in the Wynwood District, Miami
A team of street artists were at work painting a mural at the entrance to the festival grounds, one of many fresh murals coloring the buildings of the Wynwood District.
The Wynwood District in Miami
“The Wynwood arts district is an area of Miami that was founded originally by artists. They are bringing this graffiti and mirrorless culture into the city in a major way. They’ve purchased a lot of the properties in the area. They own a lot of the warehouses and they collaborate with a lot of the businesses around this area to create this ethos that exists in this neighborhood. It attracts people from all around the world every single year to paint large murals. A lot of these people are world-famous painters and muralists,” Lawerence says.
Mural in the Wynwood District in Miami
“We’re here for the art and we’re trying to plant a flag in the neighborhood that really makes us a mainstay. We want to continue to put this event on, as well as other events to represent the entire collective of artists and businesses in the neighborhood,” Lawerence says.
Mural in the Wynwood District in Miami
During Art Basel Miami, some of the biggest names in graffiti and street art come to the Wynwood District to paint walls that are divided into zones curated by art experts. I met up with one of the curators, Gleason LeRoy, who selected street artists to paint walls in his zones. “So, the zones are actually different collectives that actually have been painting their own zones every year. We came together as one for the Mural Fest to kind of take back the neighborhood from everybody else. It’s not about competing with each other, but to unify and really give it that artists feel,” LeRoy says.
Mural in the Wynwood District in Miami
Art Basel Miami, as the anchor of Miami Art Week, serves as the marketing season for street artists who travel from around the world to paint murals for Mural Fest and capture the attention of more than 200,000 visitors filling the streets.
The Wynwood Walls in Miami
“A lot of these people come with different stylistic choices in different ways that they communicate their message of art,” Lawerence adds.
The Wynwood District in Miami
Art Basel Miami brings together art in all its iterations and the Wynwood District offers that unique opportunity to experience creativity outside the bounds of traditional art fairs and galleries. It’s an outdoor art museum that is free and always open to the public.
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Learn more about the artists and art objects featured at Design/Miami in new episodes of The Design Tourist filmed at Miami Art Week.
The overarching theme at both shows was about creating awareness and connecting with humanity. At Spectrum Miami, I ran into two strange-looking characters clad in rags roaming the show as social sculptures. They were wearing Ghillie Suits, camouflage garb traditionally worn by snipers outdoors to blend in with their surroundings.
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On Sundays, eat dinner early. The kitchens at most restaurants close early so finding a place for a late-night dinner can be challenging. My advice is to dine before 9 pm. 
For this writer and bibliophile, I had planned the ideal morning. The 
Writers toil alone and words aren’t particularly selfie material. I wondered how the founders managed to fill an entire museum with something others want to see and experience sans the social media lure of competing attractions? The museum supersedes the visual limits of words by capturing the behind-the-scenes struggle— a writer’s daily summoning of the personal muse in hopes of entering that ethereal dimension of creative flow where all sense of time is lost as the words pour forth.
On the Road became a defining work of the Beat Generation, a loose collaborative of artists and writers who rejected the mainstream in favor of the experimental and spiritual. 
My other favorite exhibit was Mind of a Writer. This walls of this inspirational gallery are filled with quotes from famous writers about their creative process and craft. 
The gallery offers insights into how a writer thinks as well as the daily discipline and habits necessary to get the work done. 
I was intrigued by the raw honesty in many of the quotes that capture a writer’s self-doubt and fear that they will never be published— that lurking dread that they have gambled away their time on a manuscript that no one reads. 
Another highlight of my visit was the First Lines exhibit, a wall of handwritten first sentences of novels written by accomplished authors. 
Many of these authors crafted their first lines for stories that have yet to be written.
Whether you consider yourself an author, a journalist, a creative writer or diarist, we all have a shared experience that is made tangible among the museum’s galleries and personified through the literary greats featured. I highly recommend a visit to the American Writers Museum to experience Chicago’s literary treasure. 
