People come to Art Basel Miami Beach to buy art, attend parties, gawk at social-media-famous socialites, or some mixture of the three. Museums generally don’t offer the public any opportunities for any of that, and so, even though Miami has plenty of institutions, these spaces must play second fiddle to Art Basel and the other fairs that orbit it. But there are good reasons to venture beyond the fairs and into institutional walls this week—not the least because museums offer a temporary reprieve from dealers trying to hawk their wares.
Here is the good news: Miami, unlike the other cities where Art Basel hold its fairs, has no MoMA-scaled museums, which means that the institutional offerings are manageably sized. Here is the bad news: museums here are not immune to the whims of the market (note the mentions of “support” from blue-chip galleries in wall texts), which results in watered-down curation.
This all can make the crop of institutional shows variable in quality at best and downright bad at worst. Which museum exhibitions are actually worth your time? Below, a look at six of the most high-profile shows on view in Miami and the surrounding area this week.
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Andrea Chung at MOCA North Miami: The Best Thing You’ll See This Week
Image Credit: Photo Zachary Balber The AC at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is on full blast right now, and there’s a good reason why—some of the works on view at Andrea Chung’s exhibition there are quickly wasting away. This much is obvious upon entry to the gallery holding her newest installation, The Wailing Room (2024), in which bottles sculpted from sugar are suspended from above. Each bottle contains a message written by Chung, who, drawing inspiration from Toni Morrison and the story of Margaret Garner, takes up the perspective of enslaved mothers who killed their child to avoid the harsh realities of slavery. Some of those letters now lie on the floor amid the remainders of the bottles that have already melted. The brown liquid surrounding them looks a bit like bloodstains.
Not even a frigid room can spare The Wailing Room, but Chung appears to be aware of this. Her powerful survey at MOCA is about the loss of history, something Chung suggests is endemic to the Black diaspora across time. But Chung’s approach is hardly cynical—she often finds a salve in visual opulence. Take one series of collages in which Chung appropriates ethnographic images of Black men and women. To these black-and-white images Chung appends cherry-hued beads and color pictures of flowers, affording the people pictured here forms of beauty denied to them by white photographers.
Another body of work takes up a very different kind of old-school photography: Anna Atkins’s cameraless pictures of flora, made during the 19th century. Atkins’s cyanotypes may seem innocuous, but as Chung points out, she was only able to make her photographs because of travel made possible by her husband, a businessman who owned plantations in Jamaica. Keen to resolve the pain inflicted by Atkins’s family, Chung has pulped Taschen catalogs of Atkins’s cyanotypes and sculpted the destroyed books to form figures reminiscent of West African sculptures. Those gorgeous works, like many others in this terrific show, imply that trauma can in fact be transmuted into beauty.
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Rachel Feinstein at the Bass: A Gaudy Homecoming
Image Credit: Photo Zaire Aranguren Several years ago, when Rachel Feinstein was asked about her upbringing in Coral Gables, a Floridian city not far from Miami, she recalled lizards that ate bugs, homes built atop trash, and ants everywhere—a “rotting jungle,” as she called it. That may explain why this show, a tribute to Miami and the surrounding region, generally isn’t so warm and fuzzy.
Aside from a video featuring footage of the artist’s marriage to the painter John Currin, whom she wedded in Miami on Valentine’s Day in 1997, all the sculptures and paintings included are unsentimental and unsettling—none more so than Little Man (1999), a wooden replica of a van that may have figured in the 1981 murder of Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy, in Hollywood, Florida. Mounted to a black stand, this van is here rendered in muted grey tones quite unlike the Art Deco hues seen throughout the area surrounding the Bass. Imperfect and awkward though it may be, the sculpture is oddly convincing as a refutation of the notion that Miami is a playground for tourists, who come here seeking heavy drinking, warm weather, white sand beaches, and overall good vibes.
Too bad one cannot say the same for much of the other works on hand, which are victims of the very gaudiness Feinstein desires to critique. Many of the more recent works in the show are paintings in which 18th- and 19th-century figures congregate on the grounds of contemporary McMansions. Done in brown tones recalling painting sketches of centuries past, these works draw a straight line between the extravagance of Rococo-era France and the excess of present-day Florida. That connection is hardly surprising as these pieces lean willingly into Miami clichés, doing little to subvert them along the way. Here is something else hardly surprising: Feinstein is now based in New York, a city whose distance from Miami seems to have weakened her engagement with the region she once called home.
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Calida Rawles at the Pérez: Racism of the Past Ripples Out to the Present
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London Art about violence is a tricky proposition: confront carnage too bluntly, and you risk inflicting trauma anew; address it too obliquely, and you risk dancing around the subject. Calida Rawles’s paintings of Black men and women swimming through all-consuming water fall toward the latter end of that spectrum, but they are hardly avoidant of the racism they critique, even when it isn’t represented. Her elegant exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, a small grouping of new works referencing the history of Overtown, a historically Black neighborhood in Miami, shows just how adept this artist is at conversing with painful legacies of systemic violence.
The paintings here return to Rawles’s familiar formula of depicting Black men and women in all-consuming bodies of water, a subject that seems straightforward but reveals itself otherwise. Away with the Tides (2024), the work that lends this show its name, features two feet that splash around as a pool of white water rushes in, threatening to consume this swimmer. Because the rest of this figure’s body is hidden away beneath all that rippling blue, it’s unclear whether Rawles has depicted this swimmer from above or below, or whether she is kicking away the whiteness or falling prey to it. Either way, this compelling painting suggests impending danger.
Unfortunately, other works here are more direct. Take the film installation We Gonna Swim (2024), a collaborative effort with Laura Brownson that intersperses new images of Overtown residents swimming, recent maps showing a highway built through their neighborhood, and archival footage of segregated beaches. Most locals already know all this history—this is where it’s most apparent that Rawles, who lives in Los Angeles, is not from here. Still, Rawles’s paintings are so piercing that she doesn’t even need to depict the past in order to communicate the neighborhood’s troubled collective consciousness.
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Keiichi Tanaami at the ICA: A Japanese Giant Gets a Posthumous Survey
Image Credit: Photo Zachary Balber Even before his passing earlier this year, Keiichi Tanaami had a reputation in his home country of Japan as one of the essential artists of the postwar era—a weirdo who digested the fallout of World War II via an avalanche of surreal imagery. In the US, he is far less well known, though that will hopefully change after this survey, a show that is as overwhelming as it is engrossing.
Upon entry, viewers are bombarded with collage-filled walls and sound bleed from films that play simultaneously, an effect that would seem undesirable were it not for the fact that Tanaami placed a premium on extravagance. The earliest works in the show are collages from the 1960s in which the artist, who saw the Allied Forces’s air raids on Japan firsthand as a kid, voiced antiwar sentiments by way of presenting headless people in suits and big-breasted women, all in the neon colors of psychedelia. The latest works, some made just a few years prior to his passing, are paintings studded with rhinestones and old-school pin-ups clipped from magazines.
Tanaami’s animations from the ’60s, with their rapid-fire editing, are among the most over-the-top works here. They combine images of explosions with shots of chickens and, naturally, naked women, a constant in this artist’s oeuvre, which contains more than a shred of misogyny. Those animations speak well to the Japanese tendency during the postwar era to push traumas out of sight, out of mind—Tanaami’s incessant flow of pictures gives viewers little time to think much at all. It’s not surprising that these works have aged well. What’s more shocking is that his later work, which is stuffed to the gills with kitschy allusions to modernist masterpieces, looks quite nice when placed in context with the works that made him famous. The war machine never died after the ’60s, and neither did Tanaami’s creativity, which led him to accept déclassé styles as a part of his continued quest for aesthetic assault.
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Lucy Bull at the ICA: More Than Just a Market Darling
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery Staring at Lucy Bull’s recent abstract paintings, at the ICA, I found it tough to forget that she was just 34 when one of her canvases sold for $1.81 million earlier this year. This isn’t entirely fair: artists are not their auction records, and monetary valuations rarely align with art-historical worth. Is her latest work, a 39-foot-tall canvas called 13:13 (2024) that rises up three floors in the museum’s stairwell, $1.81 million good? I doubt it, but it’s certainly huge.
Bigger is not always better, and thankfully, there are many modestly scaled works here, many of which suggest that Bull has the talent to match her market-driven fame. This much is evident in a work like 17:31 (2022), in which swoops of black writhe against a pine-green void. Bull made those feathery black forms by scraping away paint, exposing hidden colors beneath. In that way, this work looks a bit like Max Ernst’s paintings made using frottage, for which he rubbed against unconventional materials against wet canvases to create rough, uneven textures.
The Surrealist quality of Bull’s work hints at its psychological dimension—she’s trying to channel altered states. That aspect of her work isn’t always so successful, especially when she shows her hand and paints out hints of fantastical beings. We don’t need to see the edges of those creatures to know that they are there, lurking beneath her beautifully adorned surfaces. Far more convincing is the way that Bull excavates those surfaces, prying away bits here and there to reveal cloudy layers of paint hidden beneath wisps of color.
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Vanessa Raw at the Rubell Museum: Quotidian Queer Figuration
Image Credit: Courtesy Rubell Museum The Rubell Museum’s artist residency program is so closely watched—Artnet News once labeled it the “most coveted” initiative of its kind in the world—that just about anyone who takes part is preordained for stardom. Joining the ranks of alumni such as Oscar Murillo, Amoako Boafo, Sonia Gomes, and Sterling Ruby this year is Vanessa Raw, a British former triathlete who now spends her time painting nude women cavorting in the wilderness.
Many of her works are painted in dreamy hues that seem to intentionally recall Post-Impressionism. One features gnarled trees set against blazing yellow backgrounds that recall the work of Vincent van Gogh, who would never have painted the act of self-pleasure being undertaken by one of the two naked figures shown here. Meanwhile, Storm in the Morning Light (2024) includes a cluster of lakeside women whose composition vaguely alludes to Paul Cézanne’s paintings of bathers. Van Gogh and Cézanne brutishly smeared paint around, approaching nature by effectively smashing it up and reordering it. By contrast, Raw’s approach is gentler and quieter, with her thinned materials allowed to drip beyond the uneven frames she paints around her landscapes.
Raw’s paintings also have something in common with recent works by Ambera Wellmann and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, two younger artists who also depict orgiastic lesbian sex in Edenic settings. But Raw’s work lacks Wellmann’s zesty formalism and Toranzo Jaeger’s anti-capitalist politics, and that leaves Raw’s paintings feeling inert. As it currently stands, Raw’s practice is only half-cooked, but there are reasons to keep watching this artist. One is the way she represents nonhuman creatures—horses, dogs, calves, and more—as witnesses to all this copulation, an off-kilter addition that suggests stranger and more interesting play than initially meets the eye.
