During Miami Art Week the deal-making, socializing and celebrity gawking at Art Basel and satellite art fairs can vie for attention with the dizzying floor plans of gallery booths. But there’s a wealth of other options around town that serve up art viewing at a different tempo. Here’s a sample of the offerings.
The Bass Museum of Art
“Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years” is this New York-based artist’s first major exhibition in her hometown. It traces the impact that the city — where glamorous artifice, urban neglect and rampant nature can collide — has exerted on Feinstein’s practice over the last three decades through 19 works in sculpture, painting and video. The magnum opus here is a 30-foot-long landscape that Feinstein painted on mirrored panels and made specifically for the show — a surreal mash-up of significant places from her youth as a homage to old Miami.
Mid-Beach, Miami Beach
As a preview of the new seven-mile underwater sculpture park and snorkel trail called the ReefLine designed by OMA off the coast of Miami Beach — Miami’s answer to New York’s High Line that will be installed in phases beginning spring 2025 — the project’s founder and artistic director Ximena Caminos is unveiling “Miami Reef Star” on the beach from Tuesday to Sunday. Created by the artist Carlos Betancourt, this 60-foot sculptural prototype comprises 46 star-shaped modules of different shapes and sizes rising like a fantastical sand castle complex on the shore. (When the final installation is placed in water 15 to 20 feet deep, it will span 90 feet in diameter and be visible overhead from passing airplanes.)
Caminos has also recruited the herd of 100 life-size Indian elephant sculptures, part of “The Great Elephant Migration” organized by the Art&Newport founder Dodie Kazanjian and recently seen in New York’s meatpacking district, that stretches in several lines down the beach parallel to the future ReefLine.
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
This museum was the first to acquire one of Lucy Bull’s mind-bending abstract paintings, in 2020, and is now the first to give the New York-born, Los Angeles-based artist a solo U.S. museum show. “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths” showcases 16 of her optically rich canvases that draw the eye into vibrant landscapes of shape and color where the micro and macro constantly shift. Here, Bull has pushed the scale of her paintings, with several diptychs stretching 10 feet horizontally and a spectacular triptych commissioned for the museum’s stairwell and running almost 40 feet vertically.
Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County
The latest opera to spring from the prolific imagination of William Kentridge — the Johannesburg-based artist renowned for his recounting of sociopolitical histories through the mediums of charcoal drawing, animation and performance — has its U.S. premiere in Miami from Thursday to Saturday. “The Great Yes, The Great No,” conceived and directed by the artist, is set aboard an ocean liner bound for Martinique from Vichy France and mixes passengers on this historic voyage as characters alongside other famous 20th-century thinkers. Kentridge has cast the ship’s captain as Charon, the mythical ferryman who transported dead souls across the River Styx to the underworld.
El Espacio 23
This 28,000-square-foot gorgeously repurposed warehouse is home to the expansive personal collection of the philanthropist and real estate developer Jorge M. Pérez (for whom the Pérez Art Museum Miami is named). El Espacio 23 celebrates its fifth anniversary in the industrial neighborhood of Allapattah with a fresh rehang of works across media referencing the human body called “Mirror of the Mind: Figuration in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.”
Inspired by recent acquisitions of works by Shirin Neshat, Julio Galán and Anselm Kiefer among others, the themed exhibition includes photographs, paintings, sculptures and videos by more than 120 artists. They are grouped in distinct sections exploring perception (works by Larry Rivers and Nancy Spero), trauma (A. R. Penck, Antonio Tàpies), introspection (Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman), belonging (Deana Lawson, Jared McGriff), healing (Yael Bartana, Carrie Mae Weems) and flesh (Vera Chávez Barcellos, Marta Minujín).
Marquez Art Projects
Just a short walk from El Espacio 23 (and not too far from the Rubell Museum, also celebrating its fifth anniversary in Allapattah), Marquez Art Projects opened last year in the neighborhood — now clearly the go-to for collectors looking for warehouses to convert to public exhibition spaces for their art.
Founded by John Marquez — also a real estate developer, restaurateur and lifelong Miami resident — the 8,000-square-foot nonprofit foundation exhibits rotations from his collection. It now includes works by more than 1,000 artists, mostly emerging and often Miami-based. On Monday, in the center jewel-box gallery, the first U.S. solo show opened of the Slovenia-born, London-based artist Katarina Caserman, who makes abstract paintings projecting a sense of movement and dynamism. The other three galleries will present a new installation of about 25 works from the Marquez Family Collection, organized by themes of landscape (pieces by Hayley Barker and Harold Ancart), abstraction (Daisy Parris, Vaughn Spann) and surrealism (Emily Mae Smith, George Rouy).
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