Review: At MoCA North Miami, a Promising Debut Raises Questions About AI

Diana Eusebio, Natural Black No.1, 2025. Photograph digitally printed on cotton fabric naturally dyed purple with logwood, quilted by hand, 27 x 37 in., is part of the Miami born artist’s solo museum debut at MoCA North Miami. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Diana Eusebio’s “Field of Dreams” at MoCA North Miami is a perfect example of how one or two artworks in a show can totally transform how it’s received as a whole.

“Field of Dreams” marks the Miami-born artist’s solo museum debut. The story it tells is one born and raised Miamians will be familiar with, one of cultural and technological mixture. Using a combination of textiles, found materials, and digital photography, from family photos to contemporary shots of the Everglades, Eusebio weaves a narrative fabric that manifests her identity as both a child of immigrants and a native Floridian.

Diana Eusebio, Adapting Across Borders (Red), 2025. 69 X 49 inches. Photograph digitally printed on cotton fabric naturally dyed red with cochinilla beetle, quilted by hand. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Central to this is the artist’s use of natural pigments as a storytelling device. The walls at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami are daubed with rosy-red pigment from the Cochineal, a cactus-dwelling insect her mother would harvest and sell in her hometown of Ayacucho, Peru. Eusebio uses the same pigment to dye a pair of textile works showing herself and family in Florida Marlins T-shirts, referencing her Dominican father’s love of baseball. The vibrant teal clashes with the bright red, a visual metaphor for the disparate parts of her heritage coming together. Nearby, a vitrine holds examples of the various pigments used and the plants they derive from.

Foliage also functions as a material, especially in works that reference the local ecosystem and contemporary struggles to determine its fate. A large work titled “Home Safe” features a photograph of a tree canopy transferred to an indigo-dyed cotton fabric, surrounded by actual tree branches covered in Spanish moss.

Diana Eusebio, Alligator Alcatraz, 2025. Photograph digitally printed on cotton fabric naturally dyed yellow with Spanish moss and sapote, quilted by hand. 27 x 37 in. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Elsewhere, a serene shot of an alligator lounging amid sawgrass is framed by barbed wire; its title “Alligator Alcatraz” references the immigrant detention camp being built by the Trump administration.

Yet amid all this emphasis on ancestry and nature is a shocking and unexpected digital disruption: AI-generated art. Several pieces, in fact, feature AI-generated images printed on Eusebio’s dyed fabric. The use of generative AI had not been mentioned in any materials promoting the show nor were they mentioned in the works that contained them.

The most disquieting is an image of three women of the Tequesta tribe, which inhabited South Florida prior to its settlement in the 19th century. Rendered photorealistically, the AI-generated image appears as if it were an actual archival photo of a people who more or less vanished long before the invention of photography, a medium that is considered to be a means of conveying reality.

Diana Eusebio, Tequesta Women, 2024. Photograph digitally printed on cotton fabric naturally dyed and stuffed with Spanish moss plant, branch, feathers. (Photo by Douglas Markowitz)

I asked Eusebio to explain her use of AI after having seen the show, which she and curator Kemari Jackson were kind enough to walk me through. At that time, we did not discuss the AI artwork and I would not have even noticed if I didn’t examine the entire show in detail afterwards.

“Indigenous and Afro-Latinx histories have not always been recorded photographically,” she wrote to me via email. “Some artists have used AI to imagine these undocumented histories into photos, in the spirit of Afro-futurism. I’ve always been interested in converting my family’s stories into photos and exploring collective memory through a mix of photo and color. But in general, I don’t consider AI a key part of my current artistic process, instead natural dyeing and photography are the key ways.”

Just the same, Eusebio’s work is undermined by her use of AI generated imagery, not only because she ceded her authorship to the machine, but also because the use of the tech runs in complete contrast to the ecologically motivated themes of her art and the exhibition as a whole. It is well known that the use of AI demands enormous amounts of electrical energy, much of it generated by fossil fuels, exacerbating the already terminal climate crisis.

Diana Eusebio in her Miami studio, Bakehouse Art Complex, 2025. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of the artist)

Eusebio doesn’t need to use AI to get a leg up. Her work is fine as-is, especially in the ways it incorporates digital technology sans-AI. There is much to admire in the fuzzy distortion of the photographic image in “Home Safe,” an aesthetic choice that both renders the image and colors uniquely and ties in with Eusebio’s generational narrative, having grown up at the advent of digital technology in the early 2000s. Likewise, her use of family portraits is endearingly personal. These are works that display the artist at her best. The ones that utilize AI undermine what should be a fine debut.

WHAT: “Diana Eusebio: Field of Dreams”

WHEN: Noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Through March 16, 2026. Closed Monday and Tuesday. (Note holiday hours: Closed Wednesday, Dec. 24 and Dec. 31 and Thursday, Dec. 25, Jan. 1; early closure 4 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 31.

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

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

INFORMATION: 305-893-6211 or mocanomi.org. 

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