News — AQUA Art Miami

Sergio Farfán’s cubistic-pop paintings hang on walls all over the world. Now his name hangs on a plaque adorning his alma mater’s wall of fame. 

Back in September, Sergio was one of four new additions to the Leyden High School Alumni Wall of Fame, where he joins the ranks of notables including two-time Super Bowl-winning NFL head coach Mike Shanahan and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jonathan Cain, the longtime keyboardist with "Don't Stop Believin'" hitmakers Journey. 

“It means a lot,” says Sergio, one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at next month’s Aqua Art Miami. “I'm not making this up, but I remember walking into the school, seeing the wall of fame and thinking ‘I don't know how I’m gonna do it, but I'm gonna make it to that wall someday.’ And I did it.”

West Leyden High School, located roughly 15 miles west of downtown Chicago in suburban Northlake, Ill., played a transformative role in Sergio’s life and career. When long-simmering mental health issues dramatically intensified during his freshman year, West Leyden officials steered Sergio towards art therapy, which utilizes creative expression as a means to address negative thoughts, emotions and behaviors. The impact was seismic.

“I always had anxiety, but I never really had depression before my freshman year,” Sergio recalls. “Art was how I learned to cope. It gave me confidence, and eventually, it took over. I dropped everything else to dedicate my life to art.”

Sergio’s talents flourished under the tutelage of West Leyden art teachers Steve Lappe and Carolne Felix, and in his junior year he claimed first-place honors in the 2013 Congressional Art Competition, traveling to Washington, D.C. to view his work on display inside the Capitol Building. 

“Mr. Lappe and Ms. Felix are the ones that really pushed me to become an artist,” Sergio says. “I remember Mr. Lappe once purposely splashed paint on something I was painting, and said ‘Work with it.’ He wanted me to be creative, you know? As long as I did my assignments, they never forced me to follow the rules. They always let me do my own thing.” 

Eleven years after graduating from West Leyden, Sergio continues to do his own thing. In addition to solo exhibitions in Chicago, Miami, Tampa and New York City, he’s collaborated with brands including Delta Airlines, Four Loko and the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. The latter partnership caught the attention of West Leyden English teacher and basketball junkie Victor Giordano, who along with Lappe and Felix led the charge to immortalize Sergio via the school’s wall of fame, which recognizes outstanding graduates and offers role models for the next generation. 

West Leyden and its Franklin Park, Ill.-based counterpart East Leyden High School feted Sergio and his fellow Alumni Wall of Fame inductees with a ceremony and reception commemorating their achievements. All four honorees also spoke to students at both schools.   

“The most important thing I told them — and I tell this to a lot of people — is to be patient. Stick in your own lane, and don’t focus on others. Because when you compare yourself to other people, it drives you down,” Sergio says. “When I was in high school, people were always comparing me to other artists that were quote-unquote better than me, and I never paid attention to that. I only ever cared about what I truly want to do, and I feel like that's what got me to where I am today.” 

Vertical Gallery will feature 12 new paintings from Sergio Farfán (@farfanart) at Aqua Art Miami, which runs December 3-7. Email sales@verticalgallery.com for the collector preview. 

Shop artwork from Blake Jones here.

Blake Jones’ whimsical, wide-eyed characters are woven into the fabric of Chicago life, multiplying like rabbits in galleries and public spaces across the city and beyond. 

The Texas-born painter and designer is a Vertical Gallery mainstay, headlining showcases including ‘Doublespeak,’ ‘Life Sketchbook,’ ‘Love Notes’ and, most recently, 2024’s ‘B-Sides,’ an interactive celebration of his lifelong passion for music. Now Blake’s one of 13 artists exhibiting with us at Aqua Art Miami 2025, running December 3-7. The latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series has all the scoop.

Vertical Gallery: Aqua Art Miami is coming up fast. How are you feeling?

Blake Jones: I’m excited. I've been to [Miami Art Week] a few times, and I know the work people present there is bright, fun and poppy. A lot of my work is done in pastel blues and pinks, but for this show, I tried to avoid that as much as possible, and focused on brighter, pop-aesthetic colors. 

I’m showing 12 pieces [at Aqua]. Originally I was going to do all these life and leisure scenarios, like groups of characters going to the zoo or visiting museums. I sat down and drew a few of them, but they were just fragments of ideas. I realized “This isn't gonna work for Miami. I need to do something bolder to stand out.” 

Nothing held strong enough until I sat down and did these 12 pieces. Conceptually, they are the same — I’m still going off the whole idea of life and leisure. Only now the compositions are uniform, and they’re all directly inspired by my own experiences, like this bar in Amsterdam that we went to, or sitting on the beach in Mexico. They're all over the place, but everything feels cohesive. 

Does your bunny character feature in all 12 pieces?

No, there are six dogs and six bunnies. You know it's not just one bunny character, right?

No, I did not know that.

A lot of people think there's just a pink bunny and a blue one, but in my head, every single one of them is completely different. That's how I've always approached it. The bunny in the library in this new series is not the same one at the movies. Those are two different memories — two different stories. 

Is each individual character’s story semi-autobiographical?

Not always. I have a piece that I sent to Australia a few years ago, with a little dog character who’s in detention. He's wearing a shirt that I had when I was in middle school, when I was getting detention. The piece is specifically based on that memory. The dog’s a stand-in for me. 

But one of the pieces I’m doing for Miami is inspired by a movie I saw a few weeks ago, [writer/director Shih-Ching Tsou’s] ‘Left-Handed Girl.’ There's a character that rides a moped around, and I'm drawing one of my bunnies riding that moped, in the same helmet and everything. It’s not a parody — it’s an homage to that character. So it's not really me specifically the way the other [piece] is, but it still is an inspiration to me, because that movie was amazing. I loved it so much.

Where did the bunny come from, anyway?

When I first started, my work was very stream-of-conscious. There'd be, like, 100 characters on a page. People might like one character, but not the others, and it was really hard to please anybody, including myself. Eventually, people started telling me “The bunny’s cool.” At first it was just a blob with two ears — no body, or anything like that. But I kept drawing it, and it just naturally evolved. 

The bunny looks a lot different now than it did two or three years ago. I might draw it one way 50 times, and then with number 51, I might make the eyes bigger or the little tuft of fur smaller. When I get tired of drawing the bunny, I start drawing other characters, which is how the dog snuck up on me. I’ve tried doing a cat, but it hasn't come to fruition yet. I've drawn maybe 100 different versions of a cat, and none of them have resonated with me.

What do you hope the Miami audience takes away from this work?

I just hope it catches their eye, because it’s really bright and bold. A lot of it's very warm. I hope people see that it's different from what they've seen from me before. It’s a little more vibrant… there's more detail in it than what I had in the ‘B-Sides’ stuff, and more texture. But it's not so far away from that work, either. It still connects with people.

Shop artwork from Blake Jones here.

Vertical Gallery, a recognized leader in the world of urban-contemporary art, makes its return to sunny South Florida for the 19th annual installment of Aqua Art Miami, running December 3-7 in conjunction with the citywide Miami Art Week contemporary and modern art fair.

Vertical will feature 13 artists at Aqua Art Miami 2025 — an all-star lineup spotlighting talents from around the globe, some exhibiting on U.S. shores for the first time. Miami Art Week attendees can view all work presented by Vertical inside Room 124 of the Aqua Hotel, located in the heart of Miami Beach.

Vertical is no stranger to Aqua Art Miami, one of more than 20 art fairs under the Miami Art Week 2025 banner. The gallery first showed at Aqua in 2015, returning the following year and again in 2024. This year’s Aqua event, which brings together more than 30 galleries from across six countries, marks Vertical’s 11th overall Miami Art Week showcase since opening for business in April 2013.  

“We are thrilled to return to Miami Beach, and looking forward to seeing some familiar faces as well as meeting first-time Aqua Art Miami attendees,” says Vertical Gallery owner Patrick Hull. “This time around, we’re focusing exclusively on works priced between $350 and $4,800, making collecting accessible to all audiences.”

Vertical’s Aqua Art Miami 2025 roster, in alphabetical order:

• Adam Augustyn conjures candy-colored dreamscapes inspired by animation, mythology, music, horror movies and the obsessions of his three daughters. 

• Andria Beighton reinterprets midcentury design aesthetics for a new millennium, fusing archetypal atomic-age shapes and motifs with bold, flattened perspectives and ultra-contemporary color palettes.

• Blake Jones’ whimsical, wide-eyed characters are woven into the fabric of Chicago life, multiplying like rabbits in galleries and public spaces across the city and beyond. 

• CABNOV’s sublimely surreal paintings transport viewers to a playfully stylized realm somewhere beyond the scope of human experience.

• Collin van der Sluijs’ searchingly personal, slyly political paintings and illustrations emerge from the deepest reaches of the subconscious, resisting both interpretation and categorization. 

• Flog sees people for who they really are, exposing the emotions swirling below the surface to visualize the true essence of our beings.

• Jamie Jones tears off the mask of adulthood to depict the child within, portraying preteens costumed as pop culture icons — imagined identities that conceal the true self.  

• Jennifer Cronin makes the mundane magical, capturing the intrinsic otherness of everyday life and foregrounding the phenomena we so often take for granted.  

• Jerome Tiunayan synthesizes personal storytelling, comics-inspired illustration and gallows humor to recast the Hero’s Journey for our postmodern age. 

• Joseph Renda Jr. juxtaposes painstakingly realistic images against audacious surrealistic flourishes to illuminate the interconnectedness of all living things.

• Laura Catherwood’s mysterious, often mournful paintings and pencil illustrations map the landscape of her inner world, where fauna, flora and the fantastic coalesce.

• Sergio Farfán’s dizzyingly colorful, reality-warping paintings and sculptures hold up a mirror to reflect the angel and devil at war inside each one of us.

• Troy Lee’s soul-baring paintings aggressively interrogate the perceptions and realities of Black life in contemporary America.

Vertical also will launch “The Usual Suspects,” an exclusive stencil edition from Mau Mau based on sold-out canvases from the UK street art legend’s July 2025 solo exhibition ‘#wishyouwerehere..’ There are two versions of “The Usual Suspects,” both limited to 15 copies.  

“Aqua Art Miami is the anti-art fair,” says Hull, who will be joined in Miami by Adam Augustyn, Jerome Tiunayan, Laura Catherwood, Sergio Farfán and Troy Lee. “A traditional art fair is just rows and rows of dealer booths. Everything looks the same — you don't even remember which galleries you’re visiting. Aqua is different. All the rooms in a historic Art Deco hotel become galleries, and each gallery customizes their space exactly the way they want it. It’s the art fair for people who always say they hate art fairs. All art enthusiasts in and around Miami owe it to themselves to attend.”

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Shop artwork from Jennifer Cronin here.

Jennifer Cronin makes the mundane magical. The Chicago-based painter — one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami — captures the intrinsic otherness of everyday life, foregrounding the phenomena we so often take for granted.  

Jennifer made her Vertical debut as part of our 2022 group show ‘Atomic Number 13 Part 2,’ and we’re excited to present her newest collection to the Miami audience. The latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series reveals all. 

Vertical Gallery: Tell us about the work you’re exhibiting at Aqua Art Miami. 

Jennifer Cronin: It’s in line with the work that I've been making for the past several years: everyday landscapes infused with magic and mystery, reminding viewers there is beauty all around us. The pieces I’m showing in Miami bring in more experimentation and abstraction. I’m letting the paint be paint — letting a brushstroke just be a brushstroke, and not necessarily representing or trying to capture something else. 

There's a section in one painting that’s, like, this green scribble. I didn't know exactly what that was going to be, but after working on the painting and spending a lot of time with it, I knew I wanted it to be there. I don't think about it too much, because it's kind of automatic, but introducing these elements that are a little bit less predictable and a little bit stylistically different has been really, really fun for me.

An eerie green light recurs throughout your earlier work. Is the green scribble an extension of that motif? 

I definitely find myself returning to themes and colors, and yes, there are certain things that have shown up in my figurative work that are now showing up in these landscapes. I enjoy ambiguity, so [green light] is not necessarily something very specific. It’s more a symbol for something unexplained or something mysterious.   

Where does this emphasis on landscapes come from?

I did a show in 2019 called ‘Seen and Unseen’ that was inspired by my research into climate refugees — Alaska Native villages forced to move because the land literally can't support them anymore, and their houses are being swallowed by the sea. That work was really heavy, and it led to some art burnout. I spent about nine months not making anything.

When the pandemic came around, I got the itch to start working again. I did a couple of small drawings, and then I rethought my practice. I wanted to focus on creating work that came from a place of joy — work that was hopeful. So I brought together all of the aspects of my practice that I enjoy most, like landscapes and playing around with paint. 

I think a lot of people can relate to landscapes, because they’re kind of general. A landscape can represent a lot of different places. It's not something too specific.

What do you hope the Miami audience takes away from experiencing your work?

I just hope they're drawn to it. I love the connections that people bring when they're looking at a painting: it's always fun to hear stories about how it makes them think of when they were young, a place that they know, or something like that. I always like seeing people spend time with my work, and getting lost a little. I like that a lot.

Shop artwork from Jennifer Cronin here.

Troy Lee’s expressive and intimate paintings interrogate the Black American experience. The Chicago native — one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami — was known as Troy Scat prior to March 2025’s powerful ‘We From the Heavens,’ a solo showcase inspired by subtle but significant moments nestled deep within his favorite movies, television series, music videos and viral clips. The latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series reveals how Troy’s return to the Windy City shaped his newest work, and identifies what being an artist really means. 

Vertical Gallery: What can we expect from the pieces you’re showing at Aqua?

Troy Lee: This new body of work mashes different things that I like to do within my artistic practice. For a long time, I've been trying to hone in on a style, and right now, I'm in a place where I'm starting to accept that it's best for me to not focus on style, but concentrate on the message and trust in my taste. Because everything that I do, no matter the style, has my hand and voice in it. 

I love illustration, and I love sketches — I love doing them, and I love when other artists do them. The work I’m bringing to Miami is mostly acrylic on canvas, but I'm also sketching on the canvas with pencil and graphite. For a long time, I considered that to be against the rules, so to speak. But I'm in a space where I'm gonna just do what I want, and make it work. 

It's a lot different from the ‘We From the Heavens’ show, where I pretty much knew what each piece was gonna look like at the beginning of the process. There was an overall idea, a scene that I liked, and a [reference photo] right there. With this new work, I’m starting with only about 30 percent of the idea. I might throw in a collage — I’ve also been finding ways to get a watercolor effect without using watercolor paints. That other 70 percent of the idea comes from what I'm feeling in the moment. I’m creating in a more intuitive way.

What themes and motifs are you exploring this time around?

This new work is mostly white backgrounds, but they're heavily layered, and you can see that. There's a red base to each painting, and I layer the background with different colors and abstract marks and stuff like that. Then I paint white over everything, but I purposefully leave some of those marks to bleed through. It symbolizes mistakes — you make a mistake, you fix it and you move on from it. Making mistakes and correcting them or attempting to correct them is a theme in most of my new work. 

In a few of the new works I’m using childhood anime and cartoon characters to express vulnerable ideas and cultivate a certain tone. A cartoon like ‘Family Guy’ uses the dog or the baby to say the craziest stuff, because when an adult says those things, you receive it a different way. It’s digestible if it's a baby saying that stuff. There's also arrows in this new work. I’ve been using that as a way to address some ideas on love, or connection.

Another motif in my newer paintings is the tallies [i.e., tally marks or hash marks for keeping count]. This is the “undefeated” symbol, you know? Every day that I wake up is a reminder that I'm undefeated — that as long as you're still breathing, you can keep going. I'm just tallying up everything… tallying up life. 

You were born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. Seven years ago, you relocated to Los Angeles, and then a few months ago, you moved back. How is returning to Chicago impacting the work you’re creating?

It’s playing a big part. I’ve been doing a lot of reflection. In L.A., I rarely made space or time to sit back and reflect, but being here at home… life hits a lot different. 

It’s why I’ve been creating more intuitively — just doing whatever comes to mind and figuring it out. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I felt I could really do that, and I'm finding that this process of baring my soul is the way that I want to move forward with any painting that I do from now on. 

You bared your soul with ‘We From the Heavens,’ too. That kind of raw honesty must take its toll. How — and more importantly, why — are you doing it this way?

Well, as an artist, that's just what you have to do, you know what I mean? I wouldn't be an artist if I couldn't do that.

The print version of your piece “A Flower Undimmed” was featured in a recent episode of FX Networks’ ‘The Bear.’ How did that come about?

My friend Bianca Pastel recommended me. Someone from ‘The Bear’ came and saw my work, and they reached out to me after. The people that work for the show couldn't tell me if it was gonna be aired, or when it was gonna be aired. Friends saw it before I did, and sent me [messages] like “I didn't know you were on ‘The Bear!’” 

It was really dope, but at first, I didn't celebrate it like I wanted to celebrate it — like I should have celebrated it. I have some peers and some mentors who’ve had their work featured in movies or on TV shows multiple times, so naturally, I'm comparing myself to them, and you know what they say: comparison is the thief of joy. Once I started to think “So-and-so has done that three times already, I need to catch up,” I didn't have as much appreciation for it. I don't know what made me snap out of it, but eventually, I did. 

What do you hope the Miami audience takes away from experiencing your work?

This is my first show in Miami, so I'm really excited. I don't really have any intentions on what the audience takes away from it. There is a concept, but it's mostly about feeling. That’s what I care about. 

I think all of my art is open to interpretation, but with this new stuff, there's a lot more abstract mark-making, and someone who looks at it might see something totally different than what I was feeling when I was creating it. A lot of people, including me, love to know the artist's thoughts behind their paintings, and I'm happy to provide some commentary. But I just hope that the audience feels something — something familiar. Something they can relate to, in their own way.

Vertical Gallery will feature six new paintings from Troy Lee (@_troy.lee_) at Aqua Art Miami, running December 3-7. Email sales@verticalgallery.com for the collector preview.