Dispatch from Art Basel: Mansions, ransom, and maybe a kidnapping?

Last summer, a woman got in touch with me and offered to show my paintings at a new fair during Miami Art Week. I’ve only been showing for a few years, so I was thrilled for the opportunity to hang my work anywhere near Miami’s infamous Art Basel. 

The fair organizer — let's call her Brenda — charmed me from the moment we first spoke on the phone. Like me, she lives and works in a rural city. Unlike me, she had an international reach. As her young children chirped in the background, she told me about her connections in Miami, New York, Basel, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and London. 

Brenda's model felt fresh: rather than invest in a brick and mortar gallery in a city with ridiculous real estate costs, she rented temporary spaces around the world during major art events, turning exclusive real estate into inclusive social clubs that tempered the chaos of overstimulating, gargantuan fairs. She had only done a few prototypes here and there, but she was about to grow, and fast. 

Her boutique “exhibition experiences” wouldn’t just be glamorous, relaxing, and fun, they would smash open the art world’s cis-gender white male establishment and introduce a diverse pool of talent to a serious collector base she had fostered through her decades of experience in the New York art market. On top of that, a portion of her profits would raise money for environmental nonprofits. Although artists were responsible for shipping costs, she would generously only take 15% of sales, rather than the customary 50%. Sounds great, right?

She explained how she booked three sprawling mansions in Miami's Venetian Islands for Art Basel. She would take down the priceless art already in the mansions and replace it with the work of 70 emerging visual artists from around the world. Her guests wouldn’t just buy art, they would relax poolside, do yoga, take cooking classes, and sign up for intimate workshops. 

There would be jet skis. Jet skis! Who wouldn’t put their faith in art jet skis?

So, with great excitement, I shipped off six paintings to Brenda's fair. 

Meg Lionel Murphy, Prevail, acrylic on panel.

A few days passed, and I got another call from Brenda. She wanted to tell me — “in full transparency” — that her team could not locate my six paintings. Her team was on site, but none of the staff received the work, even though the shipper claimed it was signed for on the property. She told me the work must have been shipped to the wrong address. 

She said her team pored over security footage on the property and could prove the artwork was never delivered. I panicked.

The next few days were spent on the phone with the shippers (who were helpful), the police (who were unhelpful), and the fair organizers (who seemed frazzled). I googled the mysterious all caps name that signed for the work. (Could NNEJIA be the last name Mejia?) I google-mapped addresses connected to that name around the mansion. I googled myself to death, everything I could think of, in order to find a few houses nearby the mansion that might have signed for it. 

Brenda and her team had gone pretty quiet at this point. But, with the googled information I sent over, they told me they were going door to door trying to find who might have the work. They found nothing. 

Brenda told me she was working directly with the shipper's corporate investigation team. Who knew shippers had investigation teams? I didn’t. Sounds very official. Meanwhile, I was working with the local office that would have delivered the package, and they were able to prove what they had been saying all along: they delivered the paintings. On time. To the right mansion. In fact, the delivery driver said he even worked construction on the house when it was built, so the delivery stuck out in his memory. And the company's records showed that, when the packages were signed for with their system, a GPS signal stamped the location. It showed the paintings were inside the mansion's front gates.

When I asked if they had ever spoken to Brenda, they said they had been trying to get ahold of her but were never able to. Their records showed she had never gotten in touch with them or with their corporate team. That seemed... odd.

After the shippers offered proof the paintings were in the mansion, the fair organizers suddenly agreed—Yes! The paintings were in the mansion, but they — THE FAIR ORGANIZERS — actually, were not. The truth was, they admitted, they had never been in the mansion... because the previous renters refused to leave. And now these renters would not release the paintings unless they received a $10,000 ransom! 

Brenda and her team had not wanted to alarm me, so they lied. I became alarmed. 

The police said I needed to be in Miami for them to do anything, so I left early. 

Meanwhile Brenda sent an email to the participating artists. The fair was supposed to open the following day. It would still happen, she promised, but not in the mansions — because of permit issues. She didn’t know where it would happen, but promised it would still happen. Don’t worry!

She also casually mentioned that there was a ransom for one of her artist’s work. I was officially worried.

Meg Lionel Murphy, ​This Is War, acrylic on panel.

While I telephoned for help from the fetal position, my friends started using hashtags on Instagram to find other artists involved with the show, because one retroactive red flag — among many — was that she never listed the names of participating artists in any of her materials. 

I begged Brenda several times for the name of the owner of the mansion. I needed all the information possible. She wouldn’t. So I threatened legal action (because that’s what my friends told me to do) and started working with the police (which meant I was on hold a lot as they figured out what to do with me). Finally Brenda gave me the name of a realtor, who then gave me the name of the homeowner (an unfriendly French man, it turns out).

The realtor let me know that everything Brenda had promised was at one time true. Three mansions! Yoga! Cooking classes! Jet skis! She simply never paid them. In fact, the realtor used his own money for a down payment on the rental fees because he believed so strongly in the mission of the fair. Turns out he was the one who told her that he would not give the art back until she paid him $10,000 for his deposit to the homeowner. When I got him on the phone he was devastated and wanted to talk about how wonderful she seemed, right? She was so great. Did I believe it was for real? Yes I did. It was the first support group of many, as I found more artists washed up in Brenda’s incompetent, delusional wake. 

She knew the show was off but never told us not to send our work. There were lies upon lies upon lies, including one so outrageous it involved a kidnapping in Brazil. All I know to be true is that three days after the fair was supposed to open, there was no fair. It was just me, my best friend, an unfriendly Frenchman, and a bunch of boxes filled with thousands of dollars worth of art — all in a driveway of a mediocre mansion in North Miami (far away from the Venetian Islands and the bustle of Miami Beach). Oh, and sprinklers. There weren’t jet skis, but there were sprinklers, raining over the art. 

“Can we wait here until the others get here?” I asked the unfriendly Frenchman. The other artists would be joining me soon, to pick up their art and send it back to Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and who knows where else. 

“No,” he said. “Wait on the curb.” 

So we did. With the boxes. Most of them were ripped open, scuffed, and soggy from the sprinklers. Some of the boxes were missing completely. One artist is still missing $35,000 worth of sculpture.

I got my paintings back. And then I sent them back home to rural Wisconsin. 

Some of the artists want to sue this woman and the art fair that never was. I don’t. A part of me feels like if she is not held accountable — not internet shamed — that maybe in another city, far, far away, this fair can happen, the right way, without lies and ransoms and police involvement. And people like me, far, far away from the art world, can have a chance to be seen.

Yes, I am a sucker. 

The artist standing victorious, having at last recovered her soggy boxes of art.

Meg Lionel Murphy compulsively paints heartbroken womxn that magically grow larger, stronger, and scarier than the world around them. As the paintings grow in number, she grows just a little larger, stronger, and scarier too. When not painting, she divides her time between working as the Art + Story Director of Pollen and volunteering as Editor-in-Chief of Paper Darts Literary Magazine. You can find her work at www.meglionelmurphy.com, on instagram at @meglionelmurphy, and at Co-Exhibitions Gallery, this February, for her first solo show. All images courtesy of the author.