Gallerist Anthony Spinello Has Shown Miami Is More Than Miami Art Week for 20 Years

Anthony Spinello is making things personal for his Miami gallery’s 20th-anniversary exhibition: He’s showcasing his own collection.

“I wanted to be more intentional [than typical anniversary exhibitions] and to tell a story,” Spinello told me on a video call. When he talked to Artsy from his car, wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless shirt, the dealer was in a reflective mood. “Starting with my collection adds an interesting layer, because it speaks to the intimate relationships I have with my artists,” he noted.

Spinello is an established Miami tastemaker whose gallery, Spinello Projects, has become a reliable conduit for many of the city’s most exciting artists. Since founding the gallery in his early 20s, he has built an intersectional program that foregrounds queer artists and other marginalized perspectives.

The anniversary exhibition represents the fruition of that vision: Spinello has curated a kind of living record of Miami’s art scene over the past two decades, as seen through his idiosyncratic eye. “Each work in my collection is a memory,” he said. Some 15 artists are featured in the show, including early works from Spinello’s personal archive by the likes of Farley Aguilar, alongside new works by roster artists such as Esai Alfredo.

A consistent and vociferous champion of Miami-based artists, Spinello has been at the forefront of Miami’s ascent to a nationally relevant cultural force.

When he moved to Miami in 2003, the city’s contemporary art scene was at a formative moment. The year prior, Art Basel Miami Beach—the largest art fair in America—debuted, playing a key and instant role in transforming the city into a contemporary art destination. New galleries, artist-run spaces, and design studios emerged across areas such as the Design District and Wynwood Arts District, which were launched that year. Spinello recalls a time of “a lot of space to experiment and produce, and things were affordable.”

Born in Brooklyn, Spinello moved to Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood after graduating from the School of Visual Arts and Design, renting a loft above Liquid Blue Gallery. The now-shuttered space was an early incubator of the city’s early 2000s contemporary art scene, and Spinello ended up running it after offering an unfiltered critique of a show to its owner, Jeff Morr.

After asking his mother for advice, he determined that he “liked the idea of working with artists,” but needed to “start from scratch,” and began building a program with about $3,000 in cash, several credit cards, and a Craigslist ad seeking artists. When Liquid Blue shut, Spinello wasn’t ready to leave Miami. He opened his first space in 2005 in his apartment.

One of the first artists to get in touch with Spinello was Miami-based Argentine artist Agustina Woodgate, whom Spinello first showed at Liquid Blue. Her set of 24 monoprints, Changes (2005), became the first piece he personally collected and is on view at the gallery’s current show.

The partnership blossomed: Woodgate was the first artist he presented at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012 and was one of two from the gallery to present at the 2019 Whitney Biennial alongside Eddie Arroyo. The pair are two of a raft of artists that Spinello has forged long and fruitful relationships with over the years. Artists he championed at the gallery include Artsy Vanguard 2021 alum Reginald O’Neal and 71-year-old artist Nereida Garcia-Ferraz.

Throughout his career, Spinello has rarely bitten off more than he can chew. “This business, my career, was going to be a marathon, not a sprint,” he recalled thinking to himself when he moved to the Miami Arts District in 2008 (the gallery returned to Wynwood in 2019).

“I knew if I delivered quality and consistency, [success] would come,” he said. “Creating something that resonated with the audience, building community, creating family, breaking bread—that’s what was important. Still is.”

Indeed, as Spinello matured as a gallerist, so did the art scene around him. “Miami grew up,” he told me, pointing to the rise of institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami, ICA Miami, and residency programs that connect the city to the global art world by mounting ambitious exhibitions of international artists and projects.

And while Miami’s December calendar has grown into arguably the U.S. art market’s most important art week and draws visitors around the world, Spinello touts the city’s year-round relevance. “People are actually coming to Miami, and they are coming to the galleries,” he explained. That shift, he said, became clearer during the pandemic, when many local collectors began paying attention to the bubbling scene that was already around them.