The last time British performance artist Millie Brown captured her Art Basel Miami experience for Vogue.com a couple years ago, she had taken the year off from participating. (Somehow she managed to turn heads all the same, thanks in no small part to a gleaming mesh dress by Mark Fast). This year, though, Brown, whose work you might recognize thanks to the likes of Lady Gaga—Gaga commissioned Brown to enact one of her milky paint vomit performances onstage with her in 2014—took centerstage at the fair.
With the help of director Mary Rozzi, Brown performed a new piece titled “Self-Pollination” in the Faena Bazaar last week. Surrounded by a veritable rainforest of tropical plants, the artist was seen reclining naked and covered in bees, as the sounds of the sun as captured by NASA were heard playing softly in the background. To keep her bees happy, Brown was misted at intervals with honey water by a local beekeeper and appeared surprisingly serene, like an Ancient Greek sculpture in repose. “I had the queen bee on me the entire time—she was placed in this glass box on my body—so all the other bees formed around her,” Brown says speaking from her home in Los Angeles some days after the event. “I basically turned my body into a beehive because the whole piece is about seduction and human nature, and how that correlates to nature on a grander scale.”
Brown took the opportunity to play fashion queen bee at the fair over the weekend, packing her suitcase with a slew of attention-grabbing outfits. (Outside of her own performance, the biggest highlight was Mickalene Thomas’s installation, a reinterpretation of the living room of her childhood home. “I dressed to match the sunsets the vibrant Cuban influence and colors throughout the streets,” Brown says of her wardrobe which included a hot pink Valery Kovalska trench-dress and a lavender Mark Fast gown with an exceptionally fluffy trail. “The brightly colored architecture and the sunsets were basically the inspiration.”
Below, take a look at these and more of the fashion highlights from Brown’s Art Basel Miami experience.
