If visitors to Art Basel Miami Beach, which runs Friday through Sunday, venture beyond the fair tents, they will find a city with a wealth of culture and history — and an area that could be described as an exclave of Cuba. Here is a selection of sights and shows.
Little Havana
The year 1959 was revolutionary for Cuba: Fidel Castro toppled the Cuban government early that year and went on to hold power for nearly five decades.
That was also a transformative year for Miami. Around 250,000 Cubans fled to the United States in the first few years after the revolution, with over half settling in Miami, and hundreds of thousands coming over the next decade. Today, there are about 900,000 residents of Cuban descent in Miami-Dade County (Miami and its surrounding areas) — out of around 1.6 million in the state of Florida.
The first generation of Cuban exiles settled in a lower-middle-class area that was then home to a large Jewish population. From there, and from other parts of Florida, a group of them plotted to overthrow Castro.
In April 1961, some 1,400 Cuban exiles — trained, financed and directed by the United States — attempted a military invasion of Cuba by landing in the Bay of Pigs on the island’s southern coast. Within 72 hours, the invading force, known as Brigade 2506, had been outnumbered and defeated by Castro’s forces, leaving more than 110 people dead and about 1,200 captured and imprisoned.
From then on, the Miami neighborhood, now known as Little Havana, became a hotbed of anti-Castro activity. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, a monument was installed in the neighborhood, which is now a central gathering place for the Cuban American community.
The memorial is a 12-foot hexagonal column made of marble that is etched with the names of those who died in the invasion; a perpetual flame burns in an urn on top. Nearby is a statue of Nestor Izquierdo, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who continued to fight the Castro regime afterward. Also in the area, the Bay of Pigs Museum and Library chronicles the history of Brigade 2506.
The memorial and the museum are situated on Calle Ocho, Little Havana’s cultural heart — recognizable by its colorful rooster sculptures. Other neighborhood gems include Domino Park — where locals play dominoes — and the recently reopened Tower Theater Miami, an Art Deco building from 1926 that mainly shows independent films, but also programs performances and exhibitions.
Wynwood Walls
To see vibrant examples of outdoor contemporary art, head to Wynwood Walls, an outdoor museum of street art that opened in 2009. Its 35,000 square feet of walls serve as canvases for a rotating series of murals and works of contemporary and graffiti art.
Open through the week of Art Basel Miami Beach is an exhibition titled “Only Human,” a tribute to humanity in the age of technology, with work by street artists including Seth, Miss Birdy, Cryptik, Joe Iurato and Persue.
Joyce Pensato
The painter Joyce Pensato dedicated her life to representing classic animation and cartoon characters. Pensato died in 2019 at 78, and she is posthumously receiving her biggest museum survey ever at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. The show features about 65 works she created over five decades, including some that have seldom been seen in public.
What took so long? “During most of Pensato’s lifetime, her paintings were deeply misunderstood and underrepresented in museums,” said Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s artistic director, in an email. “For much of her life, Joyce’s work was not shown, and when it was, it was at smaller and offbeat galleries,” where there was little documentation or scholarship, and not much of a market for her work. The subject of her paintings — “mass media and its cartoon forms” — did “not always conform to the conventions of the art world” at the time, unlike today, he said.
Richard Hunt
The ICA Miami is also presenting the first posthumous U.S. museum retrospective of the work of the American sculptor Richard Hunt, who died in 2023 at 88. He was the most prominent African American abstract sculptor and creator of public art, and this exhibition, covering more than five decades, showcases Hunt’s mastery of his discipline.
Born in Chicago, Hunt studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then set up a studio in his parents’ basement. In 1971, when he was only in his mid-30s, Hunt became the first African American artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
By 2022, he was being commissioned to create a sculpture for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. “To have one of the greatest artists Chicago ever produced” create a site-specific sculpture, said former President Barack Obama in 2022, “feels like a pretty good fit for me.” The sculpture depicts a bird taking flight from an open book — a homage to reading and learning that is positioned outside the library at the center.
Still, Gartenfeld, of ICA Miami, defined Hunt as “a foundational figure in American sculpture whose achievement has not been recognized at the scale it merits,” recalling that it had been more than 50 years since his last comprehensive institutional survey.
“Hunt redefined abstraction as a language capable of carrying the weight of history, particularly the legacy of the Civil Rights movement and the shaping of public memory in the United States,” he said. Gartenfeld noted that there were 160 public sculptures by Hunt installed in civic spaces in 24 states.
The ICA show “offers a long overdue opportunity to consider the breadth of his innovation,” said Gartenfeld, “and his extraordinary impact on the public landscape of America.”
The post Beyond Art Basel Miami Beach, a Lesson in Cuban American History Awaits appeared first on New York Times.
