MIAMI — In the wake of a natural disaster, attending an art fair might seem, at best, insignificant — at worst, an offensive distraction from rebuilding. But when that natural disaster floods the basement of the business you’ve worked 10 years to build and forces you to remain closed for weeks on end, an art fair suddenly becomes a very important opportunity to get back on your feet.

Enter SEVEN, the freewheeling Miami collaboration between BravinLee programs (New York), Hales Gallery (London), Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn), Postmasters (New York), P.P.O.W (New York), Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (New York), and Winkleman Gallery (New York). At least four of these galleries were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Winkleman’s space, for one, remains closed.

“They had just ripped out the floors and walls when we left,” owner Ed Winkleman told ARTINFO. Like many dealers, he lost artwork in the storm, including works by German artist Ulrich Gebert that he had been planning to present at the fair. During the cleanup process, he rented two storage units: one for waterlogged art and the other for inventory destined for Miami. 

John Post Lee, who runs BravinLee programs on 26th Street, also lost a few hundred drawings when his building’s basement flooded. Going from rebuilding his gallery to retrofitting SEVEN’s exhibition space “was like going from the fire into the inferno,” he said. “But this is more fun.”

Now in its third year, SEVEN set up shop in a new location, a cavernous converted art school in Miami’s Wynwood district. As in previous years, the event feels more like an exhibition than a fair. Works are organized by theme or medium — one room has pieces toying with religious iconography, for example, while another is devoted to maps and charts — rather than by gallery. “Everybody sells everything,” said Magda Sawon, co-owner of Postmasters. “The competitive attitude that cubicles create, you don’t really have that here.”

This year, that collaborative spirit was especially important. “If we had been trying something new this year — a different fair — I’m not sure it would have worked,” said Winkelman. Among the highlights of this year's edition is Hales Gallery’s presentation of work by three generations of artists from Guyana, including textile and bead wall hangings referencing colonial ships by Hew Locke ($30,000-60,000).

Interactive wall drawings by Brian Knep presented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts were a delightful crowd pleaser: Computers projected piles of small stick figures onto the wall that sprung into motion when the viewer pressed a big red button ($15,000-20,000). The fair also featured a number of strong video works, particuarly by women artists. A standout was Katie Armstrong’s hand-drawn animation from BravinLee that tells the story of a man who falls in love with a woman with a Frida Kahlo-style unibrow on the train ($300 for an edition of 100). 

Though gallerists are still dealing with the storm’s immediate effects, artists on view at SEVEN had already begun to meditate on its significance. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy created a small diorama-like sculpture of a tiny living room populated by doll furniture floating above soiled archives from Postmasters’ 1996 “Can You Dig It?” show. (The pioneering exhibition was one of the first to focus on new media art, and the archival material is irrecoverable, according to Postmasters’ Sawon.) Created with rubble from the gallery’s basement, the piece is fittingly titled “Under the Floor.”

“There’s a lot of work being done in response to the storm,” affirmed artist Leslie Thornton, who was displaying the final chapter of her seminal film, “Peggy and Fred in Hell,” at the fair. (The entire archival restoration edition, produced in an edition of five, comes in a suitcase and costs $150,000.) She completed the project — which she created over the course of 26 years — during the hurricane.

The video, presented by Winkleman Gallery, tells the story of two children being raised by television and concludes with the voice of a robot that has learned human emotion by watching them grow up. “I was going to do it with an actor, but then the storm came so I decided to do it myself,” she said. “I was so drained, and I didn’t write it this way, but I suddenly thought to end with, ‘Oh, the storm!’” 

To see images from the Miami SEVEN fair, click through the slideshow.

To see all our Miami 2012 coverage, click here.