This Friday through Sunday, in its 23rd edition, Art Basel Miami Beach will gather works from around the world and debut Zero 10, a major digital art program — a first at any of the Basel fairs.
The location
The Miami Beach edition of Art Basel is unique in that it takes place on a single floor, rather than in a multistory location as the other Basel fairs in Hong Kong, Paris and Basel, Switzerland do.
Here, when visitors walk into the Miami Beach Convention Center, all 283 galleries from 43 countries sit adjacent to one another, a sea of paintings and people.
“You can feel that palpable hum of energy, people, art, light, landscapes — the whole cultural convergence — in that moment,” said Bridget Finn, director of Art Basel’s Miami Beach show. Finn, who took on the role just before the fair in 2023, came to Art Basel from the gallery world, having most recently served as a partner and managing director of the Detroit art gallery Reyes Finn.
“It takes your breath away,” she said. “It’s taken my breath away since 2006, every time I step on that show floor.”
How to orient yourself
The fair is divided into six sectors, each with a curatorial focus and theme.
“The Galleries sector we view as the core sector, the lifeblood of the show,” Finn said. This section includes more than 200 galleries, presenting Modern, postwar and contemporary art.
Within Galleries, Finn said, will be miniature “shows within a show,” in a sector called Kabinett — presentations of either a highly curated concept or a single artist’s projects. With 32 presentations this year (to last year’s 24), more will be on display than ever before.
Highlights in the Kabinett section will include a selection of early paintings by the Black American artist Robert Colescott, presented by the Jenkins Johnson Gallery of San Francisco. The works are ”historic in terms of the artist,” Finn said. “They’re from his time both in France as well as in Egypt, so I’m extremely excited to see those.”
Colescott died in 2009, and this year is the centennial of his birth.
And Gray, a gallery started in Chicago in 1963, will present Roger Brown, an artist of the school of the Chicago Imagists.
“It’s a later series of his work that presents the artist’s own collections within his paintings back to a collecting community,” Finn said, “and I think it’s an incredible dialogue and a very special body of work.”
Fresh takes
The two smaller sectors highlighting newer work, Nova and Positions, will be at East Entrance B on Washington Avenue, “the first time that we’ve really highlighted our youngest exhibitors by bringing them to a main entrance,” Finn said, referring to one of several public entrance points.
Nova presents works created within the last three years by up to three artists, and Positions offers young galleries, usually in business 10 years or fewer, a chance to mount solo presentations by artists who are coming up in the field.
The Survey sector looks further back in time, with galleries highlighting art created before the year 2000. Many selections aim to re-evaluate influential figures who have captured art world attention, emphasize a major moment in art history, or rediscover lesser-known practices that might, at the time, have been left out of the dominant narrative.
In this sector, Voloshyn Gallery, based in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Miami, will debut with a spotlight on Janet Sobel, who passed away in 1968. After emigrating from what is now Ukraine to the United States, Sobel, a mother of five in her 40s, started painting as a self-taught artist, and went on to become an Abstract Expressionist whose drip paintings influenced Jackson Pollock.
At the south end of the exhibition hall, Meridians will display large-scale works, including Ward Shelley’s “The Last Library IV: Written in Water,” a gigantic handmade immersive work that visitors will be invited to walk through, and which features tilted shelves stacked with banned books, stolen documents and state secret plans, emphasizing the precarious state of the written word — and of democracy itself.
A new digital landscape
Near Meridians will be Art Basel’s first-ever curated program for art of the digital era, Zero 10.
“Digital art is artwork created within a digital environment, using software, code or computational systems as its primary medium,” explained Eli Scheinman, Art Basel’s senior adviser for digital art. “Its essential form originates from data — whether bits, code or algorithmic instructions — and the final output of this work can be displayed on a screen, in print, as a sculpture, painting or within a physical installation.”
Digital art has made serious inroads in the collecting world, purchased by more than half of some 3,000 collectors who participated in the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025. It ranks third in total spending after paintings and sculptures.
But displaying it has its challenges.
“Too often, digital works are presented as technology demos or history lessons rather than as artworks,” Scheinman said. “Exhibition formats foreground the tool or the novelty instead of the ideas, preventing the works from being understood as meaningful contributions to contemporary art.”
He said that he aimed for the exhibition and display of the artworks in Zero 10 “to try to address that challenge.”
Scheinman noted that the key was “to express the ways in which wholly digital artworks, at their foundation, can meaningfully be legible and resonant and compelling as contemporary artworks.”
To be included, the works in Zero 10 do not have to be rendered on the spot in pixels. The only necessity for a work to be included is that, somehow, technology was involved in the process of making it. For example, the artist Tyler Hobbs, showing new work at the fair, creates his work using code.
“He writes custom software that produces visual compositions, continually refining the underlying system until it generates forms that meet his artistic intent,” Scheinman said. “For this project, he selected a group of these digitally generated works and translated them into physical artworks.”
Hobbs has created thousands of these compositions, reviewing, fine-tuning the algorithm and cycling through that feedback loop until he curated 12 outputs. He then printed them and applied them to wood panels; four of these 4-feet-by-5-feet panels will be on display at Zero 10.
Curating your own experience
Vincenzo de Bellis, the chief artistic officer and global director of Art Basel fairs, is particularly excited that the Los Angeles gallery Roberts Projects will be bringing Betye Saar’s piece “Lost and Found,” designed for the fair, and that Mazzoleni, a gallery founded in Turin, Italy, will be showing the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, who currently has a retrospective at MoMA that de Bellis called “mind-blowing.”
De Bellis, who oversees all of Art Basel’s fairs worldwide, called the Miami Beach edition “the most outward-facing and probably the most culturally hybrid of all our shows,” adding that, “it’s the place where people have the most sense of openness and discovery.”
He credits new galleries (49 will be first-time participants) working with new artists, leading to plenty of artworks that are premiered at the fair.
“We tend to forget, among the noise that these big events create, that artists are making work specifically for the fairs,” he said. “The fairs have become a place where they often debut new series, new ideas, and many of them come to the fairs.”
De Bellis suggests that visitors check identification labels for the dates when a work was created while walking through, to get a better sense of just how fresh some of the works are. And if attendees are in doubt about anything, he said that they should strike up a conversation.
“If there’s one thing that I would suggest for casual collectors, first-time buyers, it’s always not to be ashamed or shy about asking questions,” he said.
Ticket information
Single-entry tickets cost $88. Students, people aged 13-18, veterans, seniors and Miami Beach residents can get a discounted ticket of $68.
Exit is final, but if you need a rest, the show floor will have cafes and restaurants serving Mexican cuisine, sushi, or oysters and Champagne.
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