Between Image and Memory: Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s ‘ECOS’

Installation view of “ECOS” by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello at KDR, Miami.  (Photo by Rodrigo Gaya, courtesy of KDR, Miami)

In Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s Little Haiti studio, the horizon is the only straight line.

It cuts across several of the canvases leaning against the walls—sometimes steady, sometimes dissolving into color—but always there, a point of orientation in paintings that otherwise refuse to settle. Around the room, forms emerge and dissolve: spirals, birds, clouds, fleeting figures. The space feels in motion, as if each painting were still in the process of becoming.

He is tall, with a focused, attentive energy; his movements are deliberate. In the studio, that attention informs how he sees. He speaks of clouds not as images to reproduce, but as edges to follow: a contour shifts, stretches, becomes a line. In his work, what begins as observation loosens into gesture, into something less fixed. A cloud becomes a curve; a curve turns into rhythm, and the paintings move between abstraction and figuration without fully belonging to either.

“ECOS,” Piñeiro Bello’s current exhibition at KDR in Miami, on view through Saturday, May 23, presents a body of work from the past year that expands this approach. Rather than building a single narrative, the show develops as a system of echoes: ideas, images, and sensations that return across the canvases, altered. This openness extends to the material. Drawing from watercolor, Piñeiro Bello applies oil in thin, wash-like layers, so the surface holds color without weight: fluid and open. Forms gather and dissolve: an eye might emerge from a field of blue only to fold back into it.

In “La Tormenta (The Storm),” the surface thickens into a dense field of blues and violets, where forms surface and submerge at once. An eye appears near the center, suspended within a shifting mass that could be water or sky. Around it, fragments of bodies—limbs, profiles—emerge only to dissolve again. Nothing holds for long; the painting resists a fixed image, gathering sensations that move between recognition and dissolution.

For Katia Rosenthal, director of KDR, the exhibition unfolds less as a sequence than as a shift in feeling. “There’s a progression through the space from canvas to canvas,” she says, “not linear, but more emotional. As you move through the exhibition, something opens up; by the time you reach the larger paintings, you feel like you’ve traveled somewhere.” That movement is built through repetition. “A color or symbol in one painting reappears in another across the room, shifted in temperature or saturation,” she notes. “That repetition with variation is the architecture of the show—you’re moving through something that rhymes with itself.”

Language sits at the origin of this process. Piñeiro Bello keeps notebooks filled with phrases drawn from literature, music, and conversation that he later returns to. Books remain close to the canvases—spines worn, marked, returned to—so that reading and painting stay intertwined. He speaks of returning to writers such as Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, not as references but as points of departure. These phrases are not captions added after the fact, but starting points. “They are like sketches,” he says. “I collect them, and then I organize a set of ideas.” Music is never far from that process.

Nearby, a turntable sits beside a keyboard on a table, surrounded by small photographs, postcards, and scattered objects. Music moves through the studio.

In “Adiós a Cuba” (Farewell to Cuba), a horizon stretches across the canvas beneath a luminous sky, while color moves restlessly below it, folding and drifting out of form. Birds cross the surface—elongated, almost weightless—their bodies suspended between flight and transformation.

 The title refers to a piano composition by Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905), written in 1875 during his exile from Cuba, a detail Piñeiro Bello kept returning to as he worked. 

The painting does not mourn the island; it holds the difficulty of leaving it—how something can remain vivid, even radiant, while no longer remaining inhabitable. The birds read as figures in passage, carrying both departure and what cannot be fully left behind. Their elongated forms recall the hybrid figures of Wifredo Lam, whom Piñeiro Bello invoked in the studio not as citation, but as a presence that continues to emerge.

If “Adiós a Cuba” moves through departure, “El abrazo del mar” (“The Embrace of the Sea”) holds the opposite tension. A vast horizon divides sea and sky with unusual clarity. Yet beneath it, color refuses to settle. Lines ripple, expand, and collapse into one another, as if the painting were holding together multiple states at once: stillness and movement, surface and depth.

The horizon here is not only spatial, but temporal. It marks a threshold between what lies behind and what lies ahead. For those who have left the island, it is both limit and possibility, a line that separates while also suggesting passage. In the artist’s work, that ambiguity remains unresolved.

If these images feel expansive, even dreamlike, they are not nostalgic. Piñeiro Bello is clear about that. His relationship to Cuba is shaped by distance—eight years now—and by the impossibility of return. “The farther I go from Cuba,” he says, “the more Cuban I become.” Memory, in his work, is not a return to what was, but something constructed in the present: layered, reworked, carried forward.

The horizon remains, but nothing else settles. Across “ECOS,” forms resist becoming fixed—color continues to shift, images return only to dissolve again. The paintings do not fix memory into image; they keep it in motion, shifting, returning, continually reworked.

WHAT: “Ecos”

WHERE: KDR, 790 NW 22nd Street, Miami, FL 33127

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Through Saturday, May 23

INFORMATION: (305) 392.0416 and KDR

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

Dramatic Carnival Parade Photos On View in Little Haiti

Christopher Mitchell’s J’Ouvert photos were shelved for years and now see the light of day in “Daybreak” on view at P71 Gallery in Little Haiti. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

In 2004, Haitian-American photographer Christopher Mitchell went to work on Labor Day. Living in Brooklyn at the time, he decided to take photos during the New York borough’s famous West Indian Day Parade held every first Monday of September. But he didn’t shoot the main parade – instead, he got up before the crack of dawn and joined a procession for J’ouvert, a Carnival celebration celebrated in several Caribbean countries including Haiti. 

“I would always document Carnival in Haiti, and when I was in New York, I would also document American parades and types of festivals (including Carnival),” says the artist, now based in Miami at Bakehouse Studios. “But you have to get up very early to catch the J’ouvert element.” 

J’ouvert originates from colonial-era protests by enslaved Africans: Barred from celebrating Carnival, they would vandalize the costumes of white colonial citizens with tar or oil in the early hours of the morning. Mitchell took a similarly radical approach to his own project. He shot from within the crowd rather than inside it, entirely on film and mostly in predawn darkness, experimenting with film stocks that would allow him to work in very low light. A malfunctioning flash meant that the only source of light came from overhead streetlamps. 

“These images are very much like a time capsule of how things were,” he says. “It was a beautiful challenge for me, to be able to shoot during that time when it was mostly film that was available. And I got to try it out in a way that maybe, if I was hired, I doubt a client would want me to do that. But that’s the beauty of being free – I wasn’t hired for this. This is a passion project, so I got to shoot it the way I wanted to see it done.” 

The photos mostly went shelved for years, existing only as a single, self-printed volume in Mitchell’s studio. It took a visit from Yessica Gispert, an artist, curator and Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Florida International University, for them to see the light of day. A show of the photos, titled “Daybreak” is now on view at P71 Gallery in Little Haiti. 

“This whole project that he put together is in real time. It’s him walking through the crowd, and when it starts, it’s at night, and when it ends, it’s daytime.” Gispert, the show’s curator, says. “And I was really drawn to that perspective of him being within the crowd versus on the outside, him being a Haitian photographer, being among his community, him being shoulder to shoulder with everyone and enjoying and observing, not in this kind of outsider view, but very much an insider view. It made me think of Gordon Parks, it made me think of also a lot of SNCC photographers who documented the Civil Rights Movement.” 

Certainly, the images themselves are striking and dramatic, defined by strong shadows and a dynamic sensibility, with bodies constantly in motion. Light shines off black-painted limbs covered in slick, glossy liquid, a reminder of the celebration’s origins. The graininess of the photos also confers an appropriately gritty quality. 

But there’s more to the photos than their aesthetics. Time has given Mitchell’s work an additional resonance: This is, after all, a time before smartphones and omnipresent cameras, and it shows in the faces and movements of the paradegoers. 

“People don’t think the way they used to, they don’t carry themselves the way they used to,” Mitchell says. “Like as we’re editing, we’re going through 100-plus images and just watching people in the crowd, just being totally lost in the moment, really immersed. Watching people’s eyes being almost in a trance, like being somewhere else.” 

Mitchell points to something that’s commonly expressed in 2026, that people are so hyperaware of smartphones and potentially being posted on social media that they refuse to express themselves in public. His photos show what the world could be like without this state of mass surveillance: More fun, less inhibited, not afraid. 

As the artist says: “This is before people even cared about social media.”   

WHAT: “Christopher Mitchell: Daybreak” 

WHERE: P71 Gallery, 230 NW 71 St., Miami

WHEN: Opening reception, 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday, May 9. Through Thursday, May 28

COST: Free 

INFORMATION: instagram.com/p71.art

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

Dahlia Dreszer Turns Memory Into Bloom at Miami Beach Botanical

“All That Remains” by Dahlia Dreszer is on exhibition at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden through Tuesday, May 26. Dreszer is also hosting workshop events throughout the month. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Dahlia Dreszer’s “All That Remains,” on view at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, is less a conventional exhibition than an immersive environment shaped by suspended photographic panels, preserved flowers rescued from past celebrations, and an AI-generated digital counterpart of the artist herself. The Miami-based, Panama-born artist transforms the garden’s gallery into a meditative space where large-scale photographic still lifes, dried botanicals, and technology coexist in thoughtful dialogue about memory, loss, and preservation. 

Dreszer’s practice has long explored identity, heritage, and the construction of home across diasporic experience. Rooted in her Latin American and Jewish background, her work often uses carefully staged imagery to merge the intimate and the symbolic.

In “All That Remains,” however, those concerns become more personal and more vulnerable. The project was sparked by the death of her grandmother, Lily R. Rose, who named the artist after the dahlia flower and shared with her a lifelong love of gardens and preservation. 

That family connection anchors every aspect of the show. Dreszer explained that after her grandmother passed away, she began what she calls “rescue missions,” collecting discarded floral arrangements after weddings and events. Flowers destined for the trash became the raw material for remembrance. Hung upside down in bathtubs, closets, and corners of her home, they were dried, cataloged, and stored for years until they reemerged here as sculpture and image. What others considered waste became an archive. 

This act of salvaging gives the exhibition its emotional core. Dreszer is not simply preserving petals; she is preserving gestures, rituals, and relationships. She has described the flowers as symbols of family, aging, beauty, and impermanence. Those themes are evident throughout the installation, where the dried blooms carry a haunting elegance. They no longer possess the lush freshness associated with celebration, yet they have gained something deeper: history. 

The photographs themselves are sumptuous and meticulously composed. Dreszer stages each image as a hybrid of still life, portrait, and psychological landscape. Wilted florals mingle with reflective heirlooms, painted surfaces, and found objects, many passed down through generations or carried through previous bodies of work. Vases and mirrored surfaces subtly reveal traces of the artist herself — a silhouette here, the glint of a camera there. She is both maker and participant, visible yet elusive. 

That tension between presence and disappearance is one of the exhibition’s strongest  

qualities. Dreszer’s images feel theatrical, but never artificial in a hollow sense. She embraces staging as a way to tell truths that documentary realism cannot. Her camera, she suggests, is as interpretive as a paintbrush. The resulting works occupy an in-between space where reality is heightened, memory is choreographed, and symbolism blooms from everyday materials. 

Color plays a central role. Saturated reds, golds, and vivid tropical hues pulse through the compositions, recalling both Latin American visual culture and the emotional charge of family memory. Red, in particular, appears as a recurring note of vitality. Dreszer has connected it to her grandmother’s belief in optimism and resilience. Here it becomes a thread linking grief to celebration. 

The Botanical Garden provides an inspired setting. Outside the gallery walls, living plants continue their own cycles of budding, flowering, and decay. Inside, Dreszer presents flowers arrested in time. The contrast sharpens the exhibition’s central question: what does it mean to preserve something that was meant to fade? The scent of dried florals reportedly meets visitors as they enter, blurring boundaries between artwork and environment. Even the custom hanging structures were designed to respond to the gallery’s limited wall space and floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing natural light to participate in the installation. 

Yet “All That Remains” is not nostalgic. One of its most surprising dimensions is technological. A centerpiece of the exhibition is “Clone Dahlia,” an AI-generated digital version of the artist that interacts with visitors in real time. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a gimmick or a threat, Dreszer frames it as a collaborator and a vessel. The clone responds to questions about the work, asks visitors about their own memories, and stores those exchanges as an evolving oral archive. 

This component could have felt trendy or distracting. Instead, it extends the show’s larger themes with intelligence. If flowers can preserve memory materially, perhaps technology can preserve it conversationally. If family stories risk disappearing with each generation, perhaps new tools can help carry them forward. Dreszer does not offer easy answers, but she asks timely questions about authorship, legacy, and simulated presence. 

Importantly, the AI element never overshadows the tactile richness of the physical work. The true power of the exhibition lies in its material intelligence: brittle petals, fragile stems, faded blossoms, and reflective surfaces, arranged with painterly care. Dreszer understands that grief is experienced through objects as much as ideas. We keep the scarf, the vase, the bouquet, and the letter. We assign emotion to matter because matter outlasts the moment. 

There is also generosity in the project. Dreszer has spoken of wanting visitors to discover their own meanings rather than be told what to think. That openness gives the exhibition broad resonance. One need not share her biography to feel the poignancy of trying to hold onto something already passing. 

Miami’s art scene often prizes spectacle, speed, and novelty. “All That Remains” offers something rarer: slowness, reflection, and tenderness. It asks viewers to look carefully at what has withered and to recognize beauty there. It reminds us that endings can be fertile ground for transformation. 

In a city built on reinvention, Dreszer has created a quietly moving show about what survives it. “All That Remains” is less concerned with loss than with continuity — the ways love lingers in color, in gesture, in flowers rescued from the edge of disappearance. 

WHAT: Dahlia Dreszer: All That Remains 

WHERE: Miami Beach Botanical Garden, 2000 Convention Center, Miami Beach 

WHEN: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays. Through Tuesday, May 26. Mother’s Day Floral workshop, 2 to 4 p.m., Sunday, May 10; 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 20, artist talk Dahliah Dreszer in conversation with José Carlos Díaz (chief curator, Pérez Art Museum Miami); 11:30 a.m., Thursday, May 21, Flower Crown workshop 

COST: Free but RSVP requested. 

INFORMATION:  (305) 673-7256 and mbgarden.org 

 ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.  

HistoryMiami becomes Museum of Miami in shift toward county-wide outreach

The new Museum of Miami, formerly the HistoryMiami Museum. (Photo courtesy of Museum of Miami

The institution known for almost two decades as HistoryMiami Museum is changing its name to the Museum of Miami to reflect a countywide “museum without walls” mission.

The name change is only a small part of a deeper transformation for one of the oldest cultural institutions continuously operating in South Florida, and housed inside the Miami-Dade Cultural Center area downtown on West Flagler Street.

“It’s more than a name change. That’s just the visible part,” says Natalia Crujeiras, chief executive officer of Museum of Miami. “It’s really about a deeper shift about how we think a museum can really, truly serve a city like ours.”

The shift follows three years of research and listening sessions in neighborhoods across Miami-Dade — from Homestead to Overtown and Liberty City to Miami Beach, according to Crujeiras. The recurring message was that HistoryMiami Museum “made a lot of people feel like they didn’t belong here, or our content was not for them.”

For some, the word “history” was the stop gap.

“The word history felt sometimes distant or like a school assignment,” she explains. “Or for many people that come from other places, there was a deeper connection for the places of their home countries or the places they relocated from.”

While she maintains that the museum will still serve as a repository of the area’s history, it will broaden its accessibility.

“In many ways it’s kind of we’re expanding our scope, rather than limiting it to one tool or one discipline,” she says. “History is a core component of what the museum does, but we also care about culture and art and community; all of the things that make Miami, Miami.”

The rebrand, says Crujeiras, is rooted in a bigger question: What does it mean to be a Miamian, and how do people feel they belong here?

“Miami is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic cities in the world, and that diversity makes us exciting and dynamic, but it also comes with a cost. Neighborhoods change quickly. Community shifts. New residents arrive, and many are not connected to Miami. For many it’s hard to answer a question like, ‘What is a Miamian? How do I fit in this place?’”

One of the most concrete shifts is how the Museum of Miami will show up for residents. She says that there shouldn’t be an expectation that people will make their way downtown to visit the museum.

“We realized that we can’t continue to wait for people to come to us only,” Crujeiras says. “What we heard is that Miamians want us to come to them as well.”

The museum will keep its West Flagler Street home as “a hub, a place where you can access our collections and see our extraordinary artifacts” — but the new strategy is to get out into the community.

“We want to have programs, experiences, exhibitions across the entire county.”

The “museum without walls” model was well underway before the name change was announced.

“We just had a program in Miami Dade College’s Homestead campus, connected to our current exhibition, but we brought the program to that community, and it’s really leaning into that, in making sure that every place in Miami can be a vehicle to take our stories. We want to be wherever people live, learn and gather.”

Even as it moves forward, the Museum of Miami maintains its deep roots.

Originally formed as the Historical Association of Southern Florida and founded in 1940, it moved through several homes and evolutions before becoming HistoryMiami Museum and, now, Museum of Miami. The original name was the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

“We began with collecting little things in a storage cabinet at the University of Miami,” says Crujeiras. Over time, it became a collecting institution and in the 1980s, Miami-Dade County built the Cultural Plaza to house the main library and what was then the Center for Fine Arts and the then Historical Association of Southern Florida.

Its name was changed to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in 1962 and then HistoryMiamiMuseum in 2010.

The museum holds what Crujeiras calls “the largest leading archive about Miami.”

“We have the first photos, the glass negatives, the first images that were taken of Miami in the late 1800s; letters of exchange between Henry Flagler and Julia Tuttle to convince him to build the railroad. We have over two million photographs and more than 40,000 artifacts.”

There are also emotional tales reflected in installations. “We have rafts used by Cuban refugees and Haitian refugees. That shows really the trauma and the risk and the hope and opportunity for so many of our community members that had to have been forced to relocate seeking freedom.”

And one of the most popular attractions is the electric trolley from the 1920s.

“It was the main vehicle for public transportation in the 1920s, which happened to be segregated. We can have a conversation about that part of our history in an artifact where you can actually get in and sit down. It is very personal and very emotional to try to put yourself in the experience of people that came before us.”

As part of its new chapter, the Museum of Miami will host a rare traveling exhibition from the National Archives.

The Smithsonian affiliate is one of only eight sites in the country that the National Archives has chosen to show “the original documents that forged our nation,” Crujeiras says. “For the Fourth of July, starting on Saturday, June 20 and through Sunday, July 5, we will have the Oath of Allegiance signed by Washington and Hamilton and Burr. We’re going to have the Treaty of Paris. We’re going to have the first annotated version of the Bill of Rights. These are the original documents of our country.”

The exhibit will be paired with an interactive mural inviting Miamians to imagine the future of their city and country.

“We’re inviting Miamians to dream up what is the country and the city they want to build for the future and asking based on what Miami is today, ‘What is it you want to see in the future?”

As the museum reaches beyond its walls, it’s also rethinking how people experience its stories.

“We need to understand that, especially young audiences, consume content in a different way, and they want to have interactivity and digital stuff, and they want to lead what they experience. We’re making efforts to digitize more things from our collection, to make it accessible.

She says she hopes the rebrand will awaken old memories and power forward a new momentum.

“I think this institution holds important memories of our community, and we want to turn that memory into motion and to think, ‘Okay, what is it that Miami wants to become, and how we can use this place as a vehicle to build that understanding?’ ”

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

Across Centuries and Cultures: ‘The Light of the World’ Traces Images of Christ in Art

Olga M. and Carlos A. Saladrigas Gallery at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School presents “The Light of the World,” curated by Carol Damian and Adriana Herrera, on view through Wednesday, May 6. (Photo by Phillip Karp, courtesy of Ignacio Font)

At the Olga M. and Carlos A. Saladrigas Gallery at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, “The Light of the World” bridges historical reverence with contemporary relevance. Curated by Carol Damian, a longtime Miami art historian and former director of FIU’s Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and Adriana Herrera, an independent curator and writer focused on Latin American art, the exhibition traces artistic interpretations of Jesus Christ across centuries, cultures and media.

Rather than presenting devotion as fixed, the exhibition reveals it as something shaped by culture, memory, and lived experience. Moving through the gallery, viewers encounter a dialogue between past and present—one that reflects both continuity and transformation.

A 17th-century Cuzco School painting of “St. Joseph with the Christ Child” introduces this dialogue with quiet intimacy. The composition is tender and grounded: Joseph cradles the child, both figures haloed and framed by delicate floral motifs. The work carries the visual language of colonial Latin American religious painting, yet its emotional accessibility feels immediate. It sets the tone for the exhibition’s central premise—that sacred imagery, while rooted in tradition, is always evolving in its expression.

That evolution becomes strikingly apparent in contemporary works that reinterpret canonical imagery through new materials and perspectives. Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s “The Crucifixion,” after Thomas Eakins (2011), transforms a familiar scene into a densely layered composition constructed from fragments of printed media. From a distance, the crucified figure is clearly legible. Up close, however, it dissolves into a chaotic accumulation of images—faces, textures, and visual debris—suggesting a world overwhelmed by information. In Muniz’s hands, the crucifixion becomes not only a symbol of sacrifice but also a reflection of contemporary visual culture, where meaning is both constructed and obscured.

Material experimentation continues in Stella Bernal de Parra’s “Mi Cristiano” (1973), a suspended textile that evokes the human body through woven wool and elongated strands. The work resists direct representation, instead suggesting presence through form and gravity. Hanging in space, it reads as both garment and relic, its tactile surface emphasizing labor and devotion. The piece invites viewers to consider faith not as an abstract concept, but as something embodied—stitched, woven, and carried over time.

Narrative returns powerfully in Darío Ortiz’s “The Last Supper” (2026), where the biblical scene is relocated to a contemporary environment marked by subtle signs of instability. The figures surrounding Christ wear modern clothing, their gestures subdued and contemplative. Rather than dramatizing the moment, Ortiz renders it as a quiet gathering, emphasizing the story’s human dimension. The work suggests that the sacred does not exist outside of history, but continues to unfold within it.

The exhibition also foregrounds artists who engage sacred imagery through inherited craft traditions. In Jesús Tax’s “Sustained Investigation” (2022), Christ’s face emerges through an intricate network of threads stretched across nails. The technique, rooted in textile, practices passed down through generations, transforms the act of making into a devotional gesture. The tension of the threads creates a dynamic surface, where image and structure are inseparable, reflecting both fragility and resilience.

Elsewhere, Pablo Cano’s “Westinghouse Basilica” (1979) reimagines the icon through found objects. A vintage refrigerator becomes a devotional structure, its doors opening to reveal painted religious imagery. The work carries a subtle humor and a deeper resonance: it collapses the boundary between the sacred and the everyday, suggesting that spirituality can inhabit even the most ordinary spaces.

Drawing plays a quieter yet equally significant role in the exhibition. In works by Fernanda Frangetto, including her “Via Crucis series” and “The Risen Jesus”, the figure of Christ dissolves into fields of color. Rendered in soft charcoal and pastel tones, the images feel ephemeral, as if emerging from light itself. Rather than defining the body, Frangetto allows it to disperse, emphasizing sensation over structure. These works offer a moment of stillness within the exhibition, inviting contemplation through their subtlety.

Throughout the gallery, the curatorial vision becomes increasingly clear: this is not simply an exhibition about representation, but about interpretation. Each artist approaches the figure of Christ from a distinct perspective, shaped by geography, material, and personal experience. Together, the works form a constellation of voices that expand the meaning of sacred art beyond any single tradition.

What makes “The Light of the World” particularly compelling is its ability to bridge historical reverence with contemporary relevance. The exhibition does not attempt to resolve the tension between past and present; instead, it allows that tension to remain visible. In doing so, it reflects the ongoing role of art in shaping our understanding of spirituality, identity, and community.

In a cultural moment often defined by fragmentation, the exhibition offers something quieter yet enduring: a space for reflection. Through painting, textile, drawing, and assemblage, these artists remind us that the sacred is not static. It is something continually reimagined—held, questioned, and brought into the present through acts of creation.

WHAT: The Light of the World

WHERE: Olga M. and Carlos Saladrigas Art Gallery, Ignatian Center for the Arts, Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, 500 SW 127 Ave., Miami

WHEN: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday and Thursday or by appointment. Through Wednesday, May 6. Closing reception from 7 to 9 p.m., Wednesday, May 6.

 COST: Free

INFORMATION: (786) 621-4170 or ifont@belenjesuit.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

 

‘Anchors of Light’ Reframes 30 Years of MOCA North Miami

Luis Gispert, “Untitled (Living Room)” 2003 is part of “Anchors of Light” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and features many artists from the museum’s history. The show is on display through Sunday, Oct. 4. (Photo courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami)

As the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami celebrates its 30th anniversary, a new exhibition is as much about looking back as it is about moving forward.

Focusing on works from the museum’s collection, “Anchors of Light,” which opened on Wednesday, April 15, features many artists from the museum’s history. Nearly 50 artists are represented in a presentation that spans historical artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenberg), past retrospective subjects (Maryan S. Maryan, Edouard Duval-Carrie), and beloved locals (Purvis Young, Pepe Mar).

But it’s also a platform for ambitious new voices. The museum invited Catherine Camargo, a Miami native and founder of the ultracontemporary Queue Gallery, to curate the show. Camargo is known for consciously programming art that runs against the usual perceptions of Miami’s scene, and her predilection towards dark and muted colors and unconventional materials shines through. A perfect example comes in the Will Boone painting that gives the show a bold opening statement. “Widowmaker” features horizontal gray and black stripes underneath a thin, pink circular outline that can be taken for a solar form, an apt visual metaphor for Miami as a place where sunny weather often provides a thin façade for moral shades of gray.

“The guest curator program at MOCA overall has a goal of providing a platform for different voices and perspectives,” says Chana Sheldon, the museum’s executive director, “and bringing in someone like Catherine to have a fresh look at works that our team and some of our visitors know always brings about really exciting results.”

One interesting segment comes in the form of a “video corridor,” in which a group of six flat-screen TVs protrude from the walls, allowing visitors to watch video artworks as they walk through. Camargo says the idea came from space constraints: she wanted to show multiple video works but didn’t want to build multiple separate screening rooms, such as the one reserved for the Ragnar Kjartansson installation “God.”

“I knew I couldn’t have a room for each piece,” she says. “They have a lot of amazing films in the collection, and I was getting to the point where my list of works to be shown felt never ending. And I was worried about space. So I came up with the idea of having a video corridor so that I could arrange these videos in a way where people can still interact with it.”

That ingenuity also came in handy when confronted with another critical issue, the size of the collection and the works that are no longer there. Although MOCA’s collection of some 600 artworks is smaller than other local institutions – the Pérez Art Museum Miami claims almost 3,000 pieces, while the privately-owned Rubell Museum owns over 7,700 – its age reflects the museum’s pioneer status within the local art scene. The collection is as old as the museum building itself, which opened in 1996 as an evolution of the former Center for Contemporary Art under Bonnie Clearwater, now director and chief curator at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.

“The idea was to create a program and a collection that would resonate with the South Florida art audiences, and also…that it would be an international museum located in North Miami,” Clearwater says. “We were a hybrid between a community center and an international museum of contemporary art, and we basically were able to maintain that vision all the way through and bring some of the best works to Miami, as well as bringing attention to the incredible, dynamic artist scene that was developing at that time.”

Under Clearwater’s leadership, MOCA quickly made a name for itself exhibiting major contemporary artists, giving retrospectives to starry names such as Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein as well as platforming locals such as Pablo Cano and Teresita Fernandez. Few other local institutions were seriously collecting at the time, and some hadn’t even been founded yet in the pre-Art Basel period.

After she left in 2013, a bitter dispute ensued between the City of North Miami, which owns the museum, and the board, which included collectors such as Irma Braman and Ray Ellen Yarkin. Both the city and the patrons made ownership claims on the museum’s collection, and a settlement resulted in MOCA retaining the majority but losing a portion of key objects as the board defected to form the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Since then, MOCA has continued to platform major contemporary artists, but in a way that centers North Miami’s diverse population. Recent years have seen shows from Haitian heritage artists like Manuel Mathieu and Didier William as well as art world stars like Cecilia Vicuña and Lonnie Holley, and the museum is one of the few in the United States that provides artwork information in Haitian Creole.

Still, Camargo found she had less to work with than she expected. The ICA ended up taking pieces by big name artists including James Turrell, Ed Ruscha, Dan Flavin and Raymond Pettibon. “The ICA split definitely did alter what was left in the collection and kind of changed a lot of the story I was able to tell,” she says. “It forced me to focus on what remained, and there were still so many gems that I was able to pull out, and that was exciting. But that was definitely something that presented itself as a challenge.”

So, how does a curator tell a comprehensive story when so many of the pieces that form MOCA’s history are unavailable? Certainly, a few big names are still present, including a video installation from Ragnar Kjartansson and works on paper from Pat Steir and Jose Bedia.

Beyond that, it came down to celebrating Miami and its artists. The “Miami School” section focuses on works from artists that made their careers in South Florida, such as Cano, Robert Chambers, and Purvis Young. Connections are made to a show curated by Clearwater, “Defining the ‘90s,” that was one of the first attempts at placing Miami on the same level as New York and Los Angeles as a major contemporary art scene.

Works throughout the show reflect the themes that animate the artistic discourse that takes place in South Florida. Artworks in “The Body” reflect the city’s obsession with the material world, from Tom Wesselman and Alex Katz’s pop-centric odes to skin contact to Luis Gispert’s photo of his own Cuban family’s living room, decorated floor to ceiling with faux-baroque kitsch.

Alfredo Jaar’s “A Logo for America” famously recenters the broader Latin conception of the bi-continental landmass, arguing against U.S. exceptionalism – appropriate for a city that considers itself the capital of Latin America.

Much has changed in Miami in the 30 years since MOCA’s founding, but as many moments in “Anchors of Light” attest to, just as much has remained the same.

 WHAT: “Anchors of Light”

 WHEN: Through Sunday, Oct. 4.

 WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, 770 NE 125 St., North Miami

 COST: $10 for general admission; $5 for seniors, students with ID, youth ages 12 to 17, and visitors identifying as disabled; free for children under 12, North Miami residents, city employees, veterans, and caregivers of disabled visitors.

 INFORMATION: 305-893-6211 or mocanomi.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

‘My Silence Is Made of Explosions’ Reframes Surrealism at VISU Contemporary

Aïda Muluneh, “The Sorrows We Bear,” 2018. Archival pigment print, 31.5 x 31.5 in. Edition of 7, featured at VISU Contemporary gallery as part of “My Silence is Made of Explosions.” (Courtesy of the artist and David Krut Gallery, New York)

At VISU Contemporary, “My Silence Is Made of Explosions” presents Surrealism not as a historical reference, but as a living, evolving language shaped by contemporary women artists. On view through Sunday, May 31, the exhibition brings together a group of photographers whose works challenge perception, destabilize meaning, and reframe the image as a psychological space rather than a fixed document.

The premise is ambitious: to position Surrealism as urgently relevant today. But what ultimately gives the exhibition its strength is not the concept alone — it is how that idea materializes through specific works that linger in the viewer’s mind.

Photography, traditionally associated with truth, becomes something far more unstable here. Across the exhibition, images feel constructed yet emotionally precise, suspended somewhere between documentation and imagination. As noted in the exhibition materials, the works reject fixed narratives in favor of ambiguity and psychological depth. But it is in the individual works that this tension becomes fully realized.

Aïda Muluneh’s photograph immediately commands attention through its bold, graphic composition. A figure stands against a saturated yellow background patterned with repeated eyes, the face partially obscured yet sharply defined. The image feels both controlled and disorienting — its symmetry suggests order, while the repetition introduces unease. The gaze becomes fragmented, multiplied, turning the act of looking into something unstable. It is an image that does not resolve, instead holding the viewer in a state of heightened awareness.

Nearby, Tania Franco Klein’s work shifts the tone toward something quieter, yet equally charged. In her staged photographic scene, a figure appears suspended within a dim, cinematic environment, caught between presence and disappearance. Light moves across the body in a way that feels almost theatrical, suggesting a moment unfolding rather than a moment captured. There is a sense of internal tension — as if the image exists at the edge of a dream or memory, never fully settling into clarity.

The exhibition also carries a strong local connection through Jen DeNike, whose work bridges photography, performance, and movement. Her collaboration with Barbara von Portatius introduces a layered, almost painterly approach to the image. In one of DeNike’s photographic works, the body is not static but activated — wrapped in reflective material and surrounded by shifting light. The result is an image that feels sculptural, as though the figure is being constructed in real time. Light becomes both medium and subject, dissolving the boundary between photography and performance.

Movement is central to DeNike’s practice, and that sense of motion is palpable even within stillness. The image captures a fleeting gesture, yet it resists being fixed. Instead, it suggests continuation — a moment before or after something has occurred. This temporal ambiguity aligns closely with the exhibition’s broader engagement with Surrealism, where time and meaning are never fully anchored.

Zanele Muholi’s self-portraiture introduces a different kind of intensity. In contrast to the constructed environments seen elsewhere, Muholi’s work is direct, confrontational and deeply present. The artist’s gaze meets the viewer head-on, unflinching and deliberate. The photograph is striking in its tonal depth — the richness of black against light creates a powerful visual contrast that emphasizes both presence and form.

There is no ambiguity in the act of looking here, yet the image still resists simplification. Muholi’s self-portraits operate on multiple levels simultaneously: as a portrait, as a performance, and as an assertion. The work holds a quiet authority, transforming the photographic surface into a space of visibility and control.

Throughout the exhibition, the body emerges as a central site of transformation. It is fragmented, obscured, multiplied, or intensified, but never passive. In some works, the body merges with its surroundings; in others, it becomes a surface onto which meaning is projected. This fluidity reinforces the exhibition’s exploration of Surrealism as a method rather than a style — a way of accessing internal states that cannot be fully articulated.

The curatorial approach, shaped in part by conversations with the gallery’s leadership, emphasizes Surrealism as a framework for confronting rather than escaping reality. This perspective is evident in how the works engage with perception itself. Images do not offer resolution; they create friction. They ask the viewer to remain in a space of uncertainty, where meaning is continuously shifting.

Pacing of the show supports this experience. Each work is given room to breathe, allowing viewers to move between images without being overwhelmed. The rhythm encourages a slower, more deliberate engagement — one that mirrors the psychological depth of the works themselves.

What distinguishes “My Silence Is Made of Explosions” is its ability to balance concept with material presence. The Surrealist framework is not imposed — it emerges organically through the works. Each image becomes a point of entry into a larger conversation about perception, identity, and the instability of meaning.

By grounding its ideas in specific, visually compelling works, the exhibition succeeds in reactivating Surrealism for a contemporary audience. It is not a return to the past, but a continuation — one that reflects the complexities of the present moment.

At VISU Contemporary, the result is an exhibition that does not simply illustrate Surrealism, but inhabits it — creating a space where images linger, shift, and quietly unfold over time.

WHAT: “My Silence Is Made Of Explosions” a group exhibition of contemporary Surrealist photographers

WHERE: VISU Contemporary  Gallery, 2160 Park Ave., Miami Beach

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Saturday or by appointment. Closed Sunday through Wednesday. Through Sunday, May 31, 2026.

COST: Free

INFORMATION: (513) 659-4690 or https://visugallery.com.

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

 

Mahara+Co Show Explores Women, Nature and Interconnection

Cecilia Porras, “The Garden Door,” 2026. Acrylic on canvas. (Photo courtesy of Mahara+Co.)

Three Latin American female artists challenge the expectation that women’s art should center on gendered themes such as fertility, the body, or domesticity.

“Ser tierra, mujer, planta, animal y planeta (Being Soil, Woman, Plant, Animal, and Planet)” at Mahara+Co features the work of Paula Nicho, Cecilia Porras, and Gabriela Novoa,  who take a broader perspective — that humans are one part of an interconnected web of life.

According to Marivi Véliz, the curator of the exhibition, the artists’ work breaks down the idea that humans are above nature, reflecting current critiques of the Anthropocene, the era in which human activity has fundamentally altered the Earth’s climate, ecosystems, and geology, and imagining a more connected, less human-centered way of living.

At the same time, the curatorial work speaks directly to the present moment. As the climate crisis intensifies and digital technologies reshape how people experience reality, new ways of understanding connection, belonging, and coexistence are emerging. Véliz notes that what may once have been dismissed as “magical” or “naïve” in art before,  now reads as visionary. The exhibition suggests that art is not just reflecting a changing worldview that recognizes the interdependence of all living systems,  but is actively helping to lead this perspective.  

This perspective is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous and ancestral ways of seeing the world, especially in Mesoamerica, where life has always been understood as interconnected. These perspectives were often ignored in the past, but they’re now coming back into focus. The exhibition reflects this shift, showing how these ideas are not just surviving, but helping shape how we think today.

Veliz curated “Being Soil, Woman, Plant, Animal, and Planet” within a broader and rapidly evolving shift in Latin American women’s art, particularly in Central America. Drawing from her recent research with Mujeres en las Artes in Honduras, she identifies a departure from earlier artistic tendencies: women artists are increasingly engaging themes of pleasure with a level of openness and autonomy that was not as visible in previous decades. As she notes, “the finding that struck me the most was how many women are now addressing topics such as pleasure and the body.”

This shift reflects the growing influence of communitarian feminism across the region, which is reshaping both the products of art as well as the frameworks through which art is understood. Compared to her earlier experience working in Guatemala, from 2003 to 2011, Veliz sees a significant expansion in creative freedom that allows women artists to move fluidly between the personal, the collective, and the ecological.

While this exhibition extends beyond one country or community,  it shares what Veliz describes as a collective reimagining of identity, embodiment, and relationality that is gaining momentum across Latin America. 

Hailing from different parts of Latin America, the work of the artists exemplifies this sentiment.

Paula Nicho (San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, 1955) is an artist whose work draws from textile and painting traditions to create dreamlike scenes where the body and nature merge. Her paintings often feature floating female figures in symbolic landscapes. Recognized internationally since the 1980s, her work is held in major collections, and in 2024 she participated in the Venice Biennale.

Gabriela Novoa (San Salvador, El Salvador, 1991) works across painting, textiles, and video to explore desire, sexuality, and the body. She creates hybrid, shifting figures that move between vulnerability and protection, often inspired by sewing and embroidery as ways of telling stories. Her work connects contemporary, post-human ideas with the history of women’s experiences in El Salvador. 

Cecilia Porras Sáenz (Guatemala–Mexico, 1979) has a background in performance, theater, and dance, and approaches painting as an expanded, performative field.  She creates large, immersive works that focus on the power and independence of nature, often minimizing the presence of humans.

By presenting these artists in Miami, the exhibition expands the cultural narrative around Central America, highlighting the region’s richness in knowledge, imagination, and artistic production. It frames Latin American women artists as vital contributors to a wider reimagining of relational life, offering visions of connection in a world searching for new ways to relate to the planet and to each other.

WHAT: “Ser tierra, mujer, planta, animal y planeta (Being Soil, Woman, Plant, Animal, and Planet)” group exhibition

WHERE: Mahara+Co Gallery, 1294 NW 29th St., Miami

WHEN: noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday, Tuesday by appointment. Through May 18.

COST: Free 

INFORMATION: (786) 498-8706 and mahara-co.com/

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

 

‘Get in the Game’ at PAMM Puts Sports and Art on a level playing field

Hank Willis Thomas’ 2016 work “Guernica,” a mixed-media work that recreates Pablo Picasso’s famous antiwar image with NBA jerseys instead of human figures is featured in “Get in the Games: Sports, Art, Culture,” at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) through Sunday, Aug. 23. (Photo courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York) 

Pick a side: the clamor of the stadium or the calm of the museum. Are you Team Sports or Team Arts? At the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture” challenges the age-old divide to bridge the cultural gap between the two.

The exhibition aims to reconcile the athlete’s arena and the artist’s studio and serves as a reminder that whether someone wears a jersey or a museum wristband, the quest for excellence remains the same.

On display through Sunday, Aug. 23, “Get in the Game” features more than 100 works by artists from around the world and showcases sports memorabilia, including vintage sneakers, racing equipment, and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Men’s and Women’s World Cup soccer balls from 1930 to 2023.

Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and presented in Miami with locally focused additions, the exhibition arrives in the wake of events like the Miami Open and as the Magic City continues to host global spectacles such as Formula 1 in May while preparing for the FIFA World Cup 2026 at Hard Rock Stadium in July.

Franklin Sirmans, PAMM’s director and organizer of the museum’s presentation, believes the timing adds to its significance. “I think sports and arts deserve deeper exploration in museum exhibitions,” he says. “This show is at PAMM in a year of unprecedented presentations of sport on the national and world stage.”

He sees the exhibition not just in terms of what spectators witness on the field, court, or track, but also in how those events resonate in memory and imagination. “The exhibition pauses and creates space for conversations and reflections on how these events impact us,” Sirmans explains.

Fabiana A. Sotillo, a curatorial assistant and co-curator of PAMM’s show, says her outsider perspective on sports shaped how the exhibition was recontextualized for local audiences. “When I started working on the presentation of ‘Get in the Game’ at PAMM with Franklin, I was aware that this show would be a challenge for me due to the fact that I am not as knowledgeable about sports as Franklin is,” she shares. “However, what I thought would be a disadvantage for us ended up being a very valuable aspect of our presentation in Miami.”

As the curator and writer of the exhibition’s materials, Sotillo explains that her unfamiliarity allowed her to consider visitors who might feel intimidated by sports, as well as those who might feel they would be out of place in a contemporary art museum. “My lack of sports knowledge ended up being an advantage, since I really catered the exhibition materials to those who may be intimidated by the idea of sports, but also considered the other side of the coin: those who might be intimidated by art,” she says. “We were able to build a presentation that truly caters to every type of visitor: sports fans, art admirers, young visitors, etc.”

As a result, the exhibition is divided into six thematic sections: Fandom, Winning and Losing, Breaking Records and Rules, Count Me In, Field of Play, and Mind and Body. Sotillo emphasizes the goal is not to dictate a story but to create a space where viewers can connect with both fields without needing any prior expertise.

“Sports, arts, culture—these are all community builders,” Sotillo says. “Both athletes and fans experience such intense emotions during competitions, and art is all about capturing emotions and expressing ideas.”

This focus on emotion appears in works like Ernie Barnes’s “Fumble in the Line” (1990), which depicts football players in exaggerated, almost sculptural forms. Their bodies collide in a chaotic struggle that reflects both the brutality and beauty of the game. Barnes, a former professional football player, is known for translating his personal experiences into art that highlights movement, tension, and rhythm.

Emma Amos’s “Hurdlers I” (1983) blends painting with textiles, showing women athletes mid-leap while incorporating handwoven elements that reference African kente cloth. The piece links physical endurance with cultural identity, considering the show’s broader themes of how sports intersect with race, gender, and history.

One of the most striking pieces is Hank Willis Thomas’ 2016 work “Guernica,” a mixed-media work that recreates Pablo Picasso’s famous antiwar image with NBA jerseys instead of human figures. According to art curator Jason Jenn, this piece prompts the viewer to reflect on how themes of war and sacrifice in the original piece relate to the struggles faced by professional athletes and the challenges they overcome to entertain fans.

Nearby, Holly Bass’ “NWBA (Jordan)” (2012) captures the artist mid-air, her silhouette transformed with basketballs in a photo that is playful, athletic, glamorous, and critical.

Bass says the image was inspired by Michael Jordan’s iconic “Jump Man” logo, which itself has roots in dance. “It was originally inspired by a photo of Jordan imitating a ballet dancer doing a grand jeté,” she says. “So it’s kind of like art imitating sports imitating art.” She emphasizes that the work’s athleticism is real, not simulated. “This isn’t Photoshop or some kind of wire suspending me in the air. I’m a trained dancer.”

The exhibition frequently revisits the theme of bodies under pressure, whether in triumph, strain, spectacle, or change. Jake Troyli, a professional artist who lives in Brooklyn and whose work is included in “Get in the Game,” played Division I basketball at Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C. He says his background in sports has shaped his views on performance and spectatorship. “As I started to gain some distance between myself and my time playing in the NCAA, I began to turn a critical eye toward the dynamic of the spectator/spectacle relationship,” he says. “What does it mean to perform? What does it mean to perform for a hungry audience? What does it mean for so much of a person’s self or self-worth to be tied up in the results of the performance?”

These questions extend beyond sports; they also relate to the conditions many artists face, particularly in public forums where creation and judgment feel immediate. This parallel resonates with artist Cheryl Pope, who is both a visual artist and a boxer. Pope, who won the Chicago Golden Gloves in 2014, considers boxing fundamental to her understanding of art. “My experience of boxing has been critical to my understanding of being an artist,” she says. Training and competition taught her discipline, positive thinking, and how to manage risk, which later informed her studio practice.

The exhibition’s educational programming is also designed to show how sports can connect visitors to museums. Marie Vickles, PAMM’s senior director of education, says the show offers “a really exciting and accessible entry point for visitors of all ages and backgrounds to engage with art via an avenue that everyone is familiar with—sports.” Her team has organized tours, workshops, public talks, screenings, and hands-on activities aimed at youth, educators, adults, and families.

“The universal themes of teamwork, discipline, resilience and perseverance across sports and arts have provided us with ways to craft experiences that make folks feel welcome in a museum,” Vickles says. During the opening week, PAMM hosted the first session of “GAME TIME,” a two-day conference bringing together artists, athletes, poets, curators, journalists, and performers. Sirmans described the gathering as an added layer of interpretation, with a second session planned for Friday, June 26.

Lee Moriarty, a professional wrestler and visual artist who took part in “GAME TIME,” sees a connection that already exists in his own life. “I think both wrestling and art have always been connected and have influenced each other so it’s great to see it being explored deeper,” he says. For Moriarty, wrestling naturally combines sport and art, blending athletic skill with theater, imagery, storytelling, and performance.

The exhibition also ensures its global perspective reflects Miami. Sirmans noted that the museum included works and references that resonate locally, such as sketches by LeRoy Neiman of Muhammad Ali in Miami Beach and a podcast made with the young girls of Little Haiti Football Club.

These additions help tie the show’s broader themes to local experiences.

By the time visitors leave PAMM, Sirmans hopes they will no longer view sports and art as separate worlds. “Sports and arts are metaphors for our lives and there’s room for all and inspiration to be found in a consideration of games in our lives.”

WHAT: “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture”

WHERE: Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Friday and Saturday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; 1 to 6 p.m. Sunday.

COST: $18 adults; $14 seniors 62 and older, students with ID, and ages 7 to 18; free for members, children 6 and under, and free admission for all on Thursdays after 5 p.m.; Other free admissions with ID: active U.S. military and veterans, health care professionals and first responders, Florida educators, and visitors identifying as disabled and their accompanying caregiver.

INFORMATION: (305) 375-3000 or pamm.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.

 

Trashroom Gallery, Cargo Space: Rethinking Alternative Art Spaces

Trashroom Gallery: Juan Pablo Garza and Christian Vinck (Romero Henriquez) “Icacos Patafisicos” from December 2025. (Photo courtesy of Trashroom Gallery)

Exhibitions are a core function of any professional visual artist’s work; they are the primary medium by which art lives in a public space and connects to the world. Highbrow, conventional exhibitions in today’s landscape feed into a kind of art world machine. For those at the top of the food chain, work goes to galleries, where it must be sellable for the gallery to survive. It is then sold to collectors, who in turn feed into the museums where they serve on boards of, or into private (but public-facing) collections.

This entire process requires access, connections, and, most importantly, money. But what happens to those who live outside that inner circle? And what happens when you factor in rising rents, limited real estate, and the fact that local organizations making exhibitions outside this system—such as Tunnel Studios, Laundromat, Edge Zones, and Rice Hotels—can only accommodate a certain number of artists each year?

Now more than ever, members of the local art community have developed a strong undercurrent of conceptually forward-thinking and varied artists—more than the current ecosystem of exhibition spaces can accommodate. As in other decades and parts of the world, this climate has prompted artists to think outside the white cube, expanding where and how exhibitions can take place.

Trashroom Gallery and Cargo Art Space are two examples of this reimagining of space. Both further democratize exhibition participation while breaking with conventions of what is necessary to put art into the world.

Trashroom Gallery was started by local conceptual assemblagist Alfredo Travieso in 2025, when he realized the trash chute room in his building had enough space to accommodate a small exhibition of his own work. Travieso describes it as a “clandestine project,” not only because neither his landlords nor the building are aware the space has been turned into a gallery, but also because its location is hidden from the public.

With a few exceptions, most artists drop off their work and Travieso installs the shows himself. Only his neighbors see these exhibitions in person; they live publicly through Instagram.

“I usually don’t let the artists into the space. They drop off the works, I put up the show, I document, and then I give them the works. There’s a practice of community… a kind of relational aesthetic. It’s become a very symbiotic relationship with the artist.”

In creating Trashroom, Travieso works through layers of irony and opposition. The project plays with elevation and debasement at once. It gives new life to artworks by exhibiting them, yet that life takes place in the same location where people discard their garbage.

Trashroom also flips several tenets of traditional exhibition-making. There is no budget, no sales incentive (to date, only one piece has sold, with proceeds going to the artist), and no opening receptions or programming. Some may argue these are not “real” exhibitions. Yet in their focus on simply giving artists space to bring work into a public sphere, they do so in a purer, more idealistic way than the traditional white cube.

Cargo Art Space, founded by Ana Vergara through Florida International University’s Ratcliffe Art + Design Incubator, takes a different approach. It hosts exhibitions inside a cargo van—typically a U-Haul—retrofitted with walls and lighting for installations.

The idea itself is not entirely new. Cargo cites inspiration from the Miami-Dade Public Library’s Artmobile program from the 1970s to the 1990s, and it recalls more recent projects like the U-Haul Gallery. But novelty is not the goal—access, community, and mobility are.

“It’s so expensive to rent a conventional space, and a U-Haul is $29.95 a day flat rate. That price becomes unbeatable if you want to put on exhibitions wherever and whenever you want,” Vergara explains.

Cargo exhibitions exist in a similarly ephemeral way to Trashroom. Sometimes all within the same day, Vergara rents the van, installs the walls and lighting, hangs the show, exhibits it, and takes it down. Viewers find the location online and attend what is effectively both the opening and closing. After that, the exhibition lives on primarily through documentation.

For both Trashroom and Cargo, social media and online platforms act as critical repositories for visibility and permanence. While all exhibitions rely on online sharing, here these platforms function as a primary viewing space rather than just promotion.

This shift raises questions. Are exhibitions meant to be experienced in person, or online? And if part of the intrigue of these spaces is their transience and opacity, is that diminished by digital visibility?

Part of the answer may lie in who shows up. Vergara recalls an older woman from a nearby church and a local business owner stopping by—people she would not typically encounter in a conventional art space.

“That’s the beauty of Cargo,” she says. “There’s no hierarchy. I treat everyone equally.”

WHAT: Trashroom Gallery
WHERE: Location not disclosed
COST: Free
INFORMATION: @trashroom_gallery on Instagram, or contact Alfredo Travieso at televisor@gmail.com

WHAT: Cargo Space
WHERE: Space is  announced within a month of opening, flexible based on location of van.
WHEN: Last exhibition was 4:30 p.m. Saturday, March 14, next opening will be announced online.
COST: Free
INFORMATION: www.cargo-space.net or @cargo__space on Instagram

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

‘Re.Imagination at Fundación Pablo Atchugarry’ Finds Meaning In What Returns

Fernanda Froes, “Lapis Lazuli: Rotas,” 2026. Tempera of ultramarine pigment on paper, with gold threads and threads dyed with ultramarine pigment. 23 x 16 in each, in “Re.Imagination” at Miami’s Fundación Pablo Atchugarry. (Photo by Zachary Balber)

Works face one another across the room, not quite aligned, but held in proximity. A landscape dissolves into pigment. Nearby, a field of blue becomes a map. The connections are not immediate, but they begin to register, slowly, across materials, surfaces, and forms. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “La Trama” (“The Plot”), curator Ross Karlan builds the exhibition “Re.Imagination” around the suggestion that history does not move in a straight line. It returns, each time slightly altered.

Presented by The55Project Art Foundation and on view at Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, “Re.Imagination” brings Brazilian, American, and Dominican voices into proximity, not to resolve their differences but to remain in dialogue.

The show unfolds through a series of correspondences instead of a fixed narrative. Materials, images, and gestures begin to echo across works, allowing connections to form gradually across time and place.

The exhibition begins with the material weight of the earth. In Heloísa Maia’s “Sertão Landscapes Series,” the land emerges through layers of saturated color—yellows, reds, and greens that feel almost unstable, as if the landscape were in the process of forming or dissolving. 

Trees stretch and bend, their outlines shifting, held together by pigment that carries the trace of the land itself. Nearby, Fernanda Froes’s “Lapis Lazuli: Céu e Terra” moves in a different register. Its deep blue surface initially reads as a night sky, but the scattered points are not stars. They mark the locations of lapis lazuli mines across the world. In other works, blue fragments are traced by delicate lines that map their routes across continents.

The exhibition’s logic depends on these proximities, though they do not always carry the same weight. In some moments, connections emerge directly through material and form. In others, they rely more on the curatorial narrative, asking the viewer to bridge the gap. This tension becomes part of the experience, revealing how repetition is not only seen, but constructed.

In Pedro Delgado’s self-portraits, personal history is inseparable from spiritual practice. A figure dressed in white stands against a tiled, rhythmic ground, holding a single flower. His body is both present and absorbed into the surface. The white clothing suggests a ritual dimension. Delgado’s engagement with Candomblé brings another layer into the space, where land, body, and belief are intertwined. Nearby, John Brendan Guinan’s ornate masks approach belief from a different angle, drawing from a self-constructed system that blends Catholicism, technology, and speculative forms.

Maria Lira Marques, now 81, brings this connection closer to the surface, working with pigments drawn from the soil of the Jequitinhonha Valley in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her paintings carry a knowledge of the land that is both tactile and lived, built through decades of working with its materials rather than representing it.

In Cássio Markowski’s series “I Hear in the Sea the Stories of the Rivers,” archival images drawn from Portuguese collections surface histories of colonization and displacement. The sea becomes both passage and witness, holding fragments of lives otherwise obscured. Across from this, Yelaine Rodriguez’s “Children of the Water” approaches water through spirituality and the body. Her photographs, taken in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, gesture toward syncretic traditions where water is not only element but presence—linked to feminine figures and to rituals that persist across geographies.

The final section turns toward memory, where the exhibition becomes quieter. Liene Bosquê’s photographic series begins with an act of loss. After her grandmother’s death, she traced the outline of every object in the apartment, on the floor and on the walls, marking the exact space they once occupied before they were removed. The photographs that remain are already one step removed from the original gesture. They are records of absence, but also of care, holding space for what can no longer be seen.

Nearby, Nino Cais’s “Opera of the Wind” presents a series of stands arranged like a dispersed score, suggesting sound without producing it. A shared memory remains just out of reach.

The exhibition closes by turning outward again. In Rafael RG’s triptych, three stars are named after enslaved men who escaped in 1853. Drawing from a historical newspaper report, the artist reconstructs the sky from that night, mapping memory onto the cosmos. Each panel holds a different register—document, field, and mark—but together they trace a line between history and imagination.

Across the exhibition, connections surface gradually, returning in different forms.

WHAT: “Re-Imagination”

WHERE: Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, 5520 NE 4th Ave., Miami

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Through Saturday, May 2

INFORMATION: (305) 639-8247 and Fundación Pablo Atchugarry Miami

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