How Studio Vizcaya turned artmaking into a Miami summer tradition
Written By Miguel Sirgado June 30, 2026 at 4:20 PM
Participants parade sections of a deconstructed dragon lantern across Vizcaya’s East Terrace during the 2019 finale of “Weave.” This year, Studio Vizcaya is inviting the public to help create—and bring to life— “The Fruit We Bear.” (Photo by Ben Thacker, courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
For nearly a decade, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens has invited Miamians to do something unusual each summer: come together to create art.
This year, participants are building giant papier-mâché fruit lanterns as part of “The Fruit We Bear,” the latest edition of Studio Vizcaya. Led by artist Shawna Moulton, the free weekend workshops will culminate Saturday, July 25 with an illuminated twilight procession through Vizcaya’s waterfront gardens, where more than 1,000 participants are expected to carry their creations through the historic estate.
Layers of white, orange and yellow paper begin to take shape as workshop participants learn the techniques behind this summer’s fruit-inspired lanterns. (Photo by Mateo SeZa, courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
The event also marks a return to one of the program’s earliest traditions. After suspending the event in 2020 due to the pandemic, Vizcaya is bringing back its illuminated procession for the first time since 2019.
“The feedback we’ve been getting is that people want to come back to Vizcaya and be part of this immersive experience again,” says Gabriella Roman, Vizcaya’s community programs manager. “So, this year we’re returning to some of the program’s early roots.”
Participation is designed to be as welcoming as possible.
“We’re intentionally trying to create a third space where adults can engage their creative side,” Roman says. “Maybe it’s an experience you normally would have had at summer camp or art camp, but now you get to experience it later in life.”
Participants working on lanterns for a former workshop at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens. This year’s “The Fruit We Bear” marks the return of the museum’s signature illuminated procession for the first time since 2019. (Photo courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
Participants range from families with children to people arriving alone, looking for a chance to unplug and connect with others through artmaking. Nearly half are first-time visitors, while others return every year. One couple even met while participating in a previous edition and now comes back each summer as a tradition.
Keeping the program free is part of that philosophy.
“We want to make the program as accessible as possible and remove any barriers someone might have to participating,” Roman says. “The final artwork is supposed to reflect many different voices, stories and backgrounds, so it was essential to keep it free and not limit participation with a paywall.”
Gabriella Roman, community programs manager at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, works with young participants during a Studio Vizcaya workshop. (Photo by Manuela Delgado/Beyond Creative Productions, courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
Some people commit to multiple weekends, while others stop by for a single afternoon. All materials are provided, and no artistic experience is required.
Roman says the approach shifted after the pandemic, when smaller groups created opportunities for deeper interaction.
“We wanted the experience to be more intentional,” she says. “We built in more time for talking, more time for people to get to know their neighbors and more opportunities to exchange ideas.”
For Moulton, the project began with a walk through Vizcaya.
Born in the Bahamas and raised in Jamaica, Moulton lives in Plantation, in Broward County, and maintains her art practice and studio in Miami. She studied sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. While visiting Vizcaya with a group from the Norton Museum of Art, she was drawn to one of the four herms —sculptural figures—that flank the entrance to The Barge, the estate’s monumental stone breakwater overlooking Biscayne Bay. The figure carries a basket of fruit on its head, immediately transporting her back to childhood memories in Jamaica.
Lead artist Shawna Moulton reviews participants’ work during a Studio Vizcaya workshop at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens. Her project, “The Fruit We Bear,” uses fruit-inspired lanterns to spark conversations about shared values and community. (Photo by Manuela Delgado/Beyond Creative Productions, courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
“Fruit immediately made me think about community,” Moulton says. “In Jamaica, if you came to my house during the summer, you weren’t going to be hungry. My family was going to feed you mangoes, bananas and whatever had grown nearby. We all have a story of somebody giving us a piece of fruit, and that felt like a beautiful place to start.”
Florida’s landscape offered another layer of inspiration.
“One of my favorite things about South Florida is that it reminds me of Jamaica,” she says. “There are mango trees, papayas and all kinds of fruit growing here, so I was also inspired by the land itself and what a fruitful place Florida can be.”
The lanterns are tied to values such as joy, kindness, peace and patience. Throughout the summer, participants are encouraged to talk about those ideas and what they mean in their own lives.
“I didn’t want the sculptures to simply be fruits,” Moulton says. “I wanted them to be connected to something we could have conversations about.”
Gathering around food, Moulton says, has always been one of the simplest ways to bring people together.
Families gather at Vizcaya Village carrying handmade lanterns before the start of the 2018 “Float” procession. (Photo by Ben Thacker, courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
“My philosophy is that you can never be angry when food is being served,” she says.
She has already watched new relationships emerge.
“There were a group of women who had never met before, and by the end of the afternoon they were like best friends,” she says. “They came up with a design together, executed it together and were proud to share it with everybody else.”
Others have described the experience as a form of wellness.
“People have told me this feels like healing,” Moulton says. “They’re grateful for having a space like this.”
Those interactions, Roman says, have become part of the estate’s identity.
“Vizcaya is a museum and a historic estate, but we also think of it as a home for the community,” she says. “Over the past decade, Studio Vizcaya has become one of those places people now associate with the summer art experiences they return to year after year.”
That sense of belonging often spreads quickly.
During a recent gathering, Moulton recalls a retired teacher who was having such a good time that she called her daughter and asked her to come join.
“An hour later, her daughter was there,” Moulton says.
Community members parade illuminated lanterns through Vizcaya’s Upper East Terrace during the finale of “Whirl,” the museum’s first illuminated procession in 2016. This summer’s finale revives one Studio Vizcaya’s lantern building community tradition. (Photo courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens)
On July 25, participants will gather at Vizcaya Village before crossing South Miami Avenue at twilight and entering the gardens, where nine large-scale lanterns will be illuminated. Five will be fruit-shaped sculptures, while four will be collage-inspired lanterns created throughout the summer.
Roman hopes participants leave with something deeper than a finished artwork.
“I hope people feel excitement, wonder and a connection to everyone around them,” she says. “That procession across South Miami Avenue is such an important part of the program, and I hope participants understand the role they play in making the experience possible.”
WHAT: Studio Vizcaya: The Fruit We Bear
WHEN AND WHERE: Free workshops: 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, July 11, Miami Beach Regional Library, 227 22nd St., Miami Beach. 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Sunday, July 12, Vizcaya Village, 3250 S. Miami Ave., Miami. Finale performance: 7 to 9:30 p.m., Saturday, July 25, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, 3251 S. Miami Ave., Miami.
COST: Workshops: Free with online registration. Finale: $15, $10 for children, 6 to 12, free admission for children under 5.
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 atwww.artburstmiami.com.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
A new exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami didn’t begin with the idea of a collector lending paintings to a museum. It began with a realization.
Megan Kincaid, curator of the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, recalled that shortly after joining the team, she was looking at the collection with its owner when she saw more than a remarkable group of paintings. Something stood out.
“You have a Basquiat show on your hands. This is ready to go. This is museum quality.”
That realization became “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” which opened Thursday, June 25, and will be on view for nearly a year through Sunday, June 6, 2027.
The exhibition brings together 10 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection in the first public exhibition drawn from the collection. Spanning works created between 1982 and 1985, Kincaid said the exhibition functions as “a kind of retrospective” of Basquiat’s most significant period.
For both the collector and the curator, there was never any doubt where that exhibition belonged.
Collector Kenneth C. Griffin, right, and Pérez Art Museum Miami Director Franklin Sirmans stand in front of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Untitled” (1982), one of the centerpiece works in “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” the first public exhibition drom the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection now at PAMM. (Photo by World Red Eye)
“Without question, it was always going to happen for Ken at the Pérez,” said Kincaid, who is co-curator of “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols.” “It was the right venue, and Miami was where he wanted to stage an exhibition of this kind. It’s important to remember that this is the first time Ken’s ever presenting a section of his collection as a show with his name on it, and it was decisive and important that the show take place in Miami.”
The Right Place at the Right Time
The decision reflected more than geography. It reflected a relationship that had been taking shape since Griffin moved Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022. The move returned the Florida native—born in Daytona Beach and raised in Boca Raton—to his home state. Two years later, his $10 million gift to PAMM established the Kenneth C. Griffin Gallery, which now hosts the first public exhibition drawn from his collection.
“Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” represents a watershed moment for Miami’s cultural landscape. It is the first public exhibition drawn from one of the world’s premier private Basquiat collections, presented at a museum whose director, Franklin Sirmans, has spent more than three decades studying the artist, and it arrives as Miami continues to establish itself as an international art destination.
For Sirmans, PAMM’s director and co-curator of the exhibition, the moment is about more than one collector or one museum. It’s another chapter in Miami’s cultural evolution.
“We’re incredibly fortunate,” Sirmans said. “This is a really fascinating moment to think about how the landscape is being enriched by new people coming in.”
Franklin Sirmans, director of Pérez Art Museum Miami and co-curator of “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” has spent more than three decades studying Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Photo by Lazaro Llanes, courtesy of Pérez Art Museum Miami)
There was another draw that made PAMM the perfect fit. Sirmans has spent more than three decades studying Basquiat, beginning with his undergraduate thesis while at Wesleyan University and continuing through major exhibitions that have shaped scholarship on the artist, including co-curating the 2005 landmark show “Basquiat” at the Brooklyn Museum, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
“If you could pick a museum director in the country to curate a Basquiat show, it would be Franklin,” Kincaid remarked.
Why Basquiat Endures
Sirmans said there are many reasons why more than three decades after his untimely death from a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of 27, Basquiat remains one of the defining artists of the late 20th century.
“The work at its core is about humanity,” Sirmans said. “It’s about people and times and eras of human beings.”
Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat drew on a wide range of cultural references that shaped both his life and his work. For Sirmans, those influences give the exhibition a particular resonance in Miami.
“We have three different languages in the gallery alone… Creole, Spanish and English… there aren’t that many American cities where you think about language in the same way that you do here.”
While the artist’s work resonates with audiences around the world, Miami’s deep Caribbean and Latin American cultures, central to the city’s identity, may allow many visitors to connect in a deeper way.
“I think it can sound trite sometimes when you say, ‘Yes, he is a Black person, his father was from Haiti, his mother was from Puerto Rico.’ All those aspects are part of it. They’re not the end-all and be-all, but I think they are something that makes the presence of not only the artist, but the work speak to that kind of heritage, that kind of upbringing,” Sirmans explained.
One notable omission among the works is “Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump,” considered one of the crown jewels of Griffin’s collection. Kincaid calls the 1982 work a tour de force of the collection, and of Basquiat’s entire career. “The only reason it is not in the show here is because it is in another exhibition that Ken has supported at the Hirshhorn Museum (in Washington, D.C.).” The private sale made headlines when Griffin acquired the painting for more than $100 million in 2020, making it one of the most valuable Basquiat works in any private collection.
Megan Kincaid, curator of the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection and co-curator of “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols,” while looking at the collection with its owner said, “You have a Basquiat show on your hands.” (Photo courtesy of Megan Kincaid)
But rather than keeping it tucked away, Kincaid said this reinforces Griffin’s philosophy of making the collection accessible.
“I’m very lucky to work for a collector who has the vision to share his collection with the public,” she said. “There was the exhibition in terms of content, and there was this vision to make this work accessible. There’s the vision as a collector and the vision as one of civic responsibility.”
That same philosophy shaped the exhibition itself.
“It was absolutely a decision to present as much as we could, and we want people to feel empowered to make their own personal choice about what they like best,” Kincaid said. “To over-curate the exhibition would have been a bit of a disservice.”
Looking Closely
Along with the nine works, the exhibition includes a sculpture known as “Untitled (Box)” — though Kincaid noted that “crate” is probably a more accurate term. The piece revealed a surprise when it was brought to PAMM.
“This was one work we acquired with this show in mind when we were offered it and it came to our attention, and it’s centered in the gallery,” Kincaid said, noting that it highlights another aspect of Basquiat’s artistic practice through his use of found and assemblage materials. “We were able to open it for the first time here.”
“Untitled (Box),” 1985, is in the center of the gallery, and was acquired with the PAMM exhibition in mind. Shown on the wall behind the crate is “Untitled (“Skull”), painted in 1982 and regarded as Basquait’s breakthrough year. (Photo by Lazaro Llanes, courtesy of Pérez Art Museum Miami)
The work first debuted publicly in 1985 in a highly unusual setting: the legendary Area nightclub in New York City, where a famous photograph captured Basquiat himself sitting atop the crate.
In a previous life, the wooden crate had been used by artist Robert Rauschenberg, widely regarded as the father of assemblage art in the United States, to house and transport his paintings before Basquiat incorporated it into his own work.
“It is an art historical object where Basquiat is commenting on his own lineage and place within the canon of American art,” Kincaid said. “It is a super special object in that it has so many layers of meaning and significance.”
Sirmans said it is that kind of layering that will be eye-opening for visitors when they are face to face with the works.
“It’s the awe of standing in front of great paintings and I think that is what’s going to be revelatory for a lot of people who only know (Basquiat) from reproductions. What it is to be standing in real time and be among others in the space of the gallery who are all contemplating the work for a moment in time. These paintings demand that kind of slow experience.”
WHAT: “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection
WHEN: Opens Thursday, June 25 through Sunday, June 6, 2027. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday.
WHERE: Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami.
COST: $18, $14 for seniors 62 and older, students, and children 7 to 18; children under 6, free admission. Other free admission for military, healthcare, first responders, Florida educators, and disabled visitors and an accompanying caregiver. Admission is free from 5 to 9 p.m. every Thursday.
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 atwww.artburstmiami.com.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
‘Ode to the 305’ On View at Newly Opened University of Miami gallery
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral June 22, 2026 at 10:21 AM
The newly renovated University of Miami Art Gallery @ The Chapel provides the setting for “Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami,” an exhibition curated by Ronald Sánchez that explores the city’s overlooked histories, working-class neighborhoods, and everyday realities beyond the tourist gaze. (Photo by Ronald Sánchez)
For decades, Miami has sold itself through a carefully curated fantasy. Palm trees sway against pastel Art Deco facades. Luxury towers rise beside turquoise water. Nightlife stretches until dawn. The city appears polished, glamorous, and perpetually on vacation.
Yet for those who call Miami home, another city exists beneath the postcards.
It is a city of working-class neighborhoods, crowded highways, corner stores, backyard gatherings, immigrant communities, and fading storefronts. It is a city where memory resides in familiar fences, old apartment blocks, neighborhood landmarks, and family photographs. It is this Miami—raw, imperfect, and deeply human—that curator Ronald Sánchez explores in “Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami,” on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery @ The Chapel through Friday, June 26.
Roscoe B. Thicke III’s photographic portraits draw from personal and family histories rooted in Miami’s Pork ‘n’ Beans community, honoring place, memory, and the generations that shaped the city’s cultural fabric. (Photo by Ronald Sánchez)
Rather than celebrating Miami’s polished exterior, the exhibition embraces its contradictions.
“I feel like it reflects authenticity,” says Sánchez. “The Miami we know. Tourists won’t understand what Flanigan’s is. They won’t understand taking the green cup home. Going to a Hurricanes game. Being stuck on US-1 or I-95 during rush hour. The heat when you get into your car. Those are the things that make Miami what it is.”
Featuring works by Valerie Catalan, Mark Herrera, Katelyn Kopenhaver, Isabella Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez, Roscoe B. Thicke III, and Julia Zurilla, the exhibition presents a collective portrait of a city rarely depicted in tourism campaigns.
Instead, viewers encounter stories rooted in migration, family histories, labor, resilience, and belonging.
A New Home for Miami Stories
The exhibition also arrives during a significant moment for the University of Miami’s art program.
Located inside a historic 1948 chapel, the gallery recently completed an extensive renovation after relocating from Wynwood, where it had spent more than a decade. Gallery Manager and Curator Milly Cardoso describe the move as transformative.
“We really needed something on campus,” Cardoso says. “It makes the gallery accessible to students and the university community in a completely different way.”
Julia Zurilla’s multichannel video installation, “Portrait of a Bather in Three Movements,” uses water as both subject and metaphor, reflecting on adaptation, memory, and survival in a city shaped by the sea. (Photo by Ronald Sánchez)
Rather than erasing the building’s past, the renovation carefully preserved many of its architectural features, including portions of the original stained-glass windows and vaulted wooden ceiling.
“It’s a landmark building,” Cardoso explains. “We were very careful with the renovation. The stained glass couldn’t be altered, and the ceiling couldn’t be disturbed. We wanted to respect the history while creating a space that could serve contemporary art.”
The result is a venue uniquely suited for an exhibition concerned with memory and transformation.
Beyond the Miami Myth
Sánchez originally developed many of the ideas behind “Ode to the 305 “through an earlier exhibition, “Magic City: Contemporary Visions of Miami,” presented at the Doral Contemporary Art Museum. That project even earned recognition at the Telly Awards through an accompanying documentary. But this new iteration feels more focused, more intimate, and more rooted in everyday experience.
“I wanted to steer away from the title ‘Magic City,’” Sánchez says. “This show is a little different.”
The difference is immediately apparent.
In Roscoe B. Thicke III’s photographs, family members from the Pork ‘n’ Beans housing projects become living archives of Miami history. The images honor a neighborhood often omitted from mainstream narratives while emphasizing the role of memory in shaping identity.
“People who don’t know Miami don’t know Pork ‘n’ Beans,” Sánchez notes. “That’s where the love letter comes in.”
Nearby, Valerie Catalan’s photographs capture landscapes that feel simultaneously specific and universal. During the walkthrough, viewers repeatedly tried to identify the locations depicted.
“People kept saying, ‘I know a place exactly like that,'” Sánchez recalls. “It could be Hialeah. It could be Little Havana. It could be Westchester.”
Katelyn Kopenhaver’s text-based work offers a satirical inventory of things Miami does not need more of, blending humor and critique to examine the city’s culture of excess, development, and performance. (Photo by Ronald Sánchez)
The photographs evoke the textures of everyday Miami—the hum of air-conditioning units, chain-link fences, overgrown yards, and the warm light that settles over residential neighborhoods in the late afternoon.
For many Miamians, the images feel less like documentation than recognition.
Migration, Identity, and Resistance
The exhibition’s emotional center emerges through works addressing migration and belonging.
Mark Herrera, himself a Coast Guard officer, transforms firsthand encounters with migrants into haunting drawings that depict journeys across the Florida Straits and beyond. Technical boat schematics become visual frameworks for stories of displacement, survival, and hope.
“He has witnessed these moments firsthand,” Sánchez explains. “People use anything that floats.”
A sculptural life vest fabricated from found materials reinforces the precarious reality behind migration statistics.
Nearby, Richard Rodriguez’s provocative print work confronts immigration enforcement directly. Featuring an altered Department of Homeland Security seal alongside the phrase “Los pendejos de Homeland Security” and the declaration against ICE, the piece refuses neutrality.
Its placement within a university gallery feels especially significant.
“I really appreciate the art department letting me show this piece,” Sánchez says. “Other institutions might not.”
The work’s unapologetic stance reflects broader conversations happening across Miami’s immigrant communities while underscoring the exhibition’s commitment to authenticity over comfort.
Familiar Places, Shared Memories
Other works approach Miami through quieter observations.
Isabella Rodriguez’s paintings transform ordinary architectural details into moments of contemplation. Louvered windows, metal fences, tropical vegetation, and pastel facades become visual markers of collective memory.
“We all know buildings like that,” Sánchez says while pointing to one painting. “I have that exact fence at my house.”
The recognition is immediate.
Likewise, Katelyn Kopenhaver’s humorous text-based work offers a satirical inventory of things Miami does not need more of, poking fun at luxury culture, traffic, and the city’s endless cycles of reinvention.
Together, these works reveal a Miami that is simultaneously frustrating and beloved.
Learning to Stay Afloat
The exhibition concludes with Julia Zurilla’s multichannel video installation, “Portrait of a Bather in Three Movements.”
Presented within the gallery’s dedicated video room, the work examines swimming as both a literal and metaphorical act of survival. Water becomes a recurring symbol throughout the piece—sometimes nurturing, sometimes threatening.
Sánchez describes the installation as “poetic.”
In Valerie Catalan’s photographs, familiar South Florida landscapes become sites of emotional reflection, where beauty, uncertainty, and the quiet rhythms of everyday life coexist. (Photo by Ronald Sánchez)
Projected imagery of swimmers, ocean currents, and shifting rock formations creates an immersive environment that feels deeply connected to Miami’s relationship with the sea.
In a city defined by water, the work becomes a meditation on adaptation itself.
A Love Letter Without Nostalgia
What makes “Ode to the 305” successful is its refusal to romanticize Miami.
The exhibition does not ignore the city’s inequalities, its displacement, its political tensions, or its rapid transformation. Instead, it embraces these realities as essential parts of the story.
“This is my representation of what real Miami is,” Sánchez says.
That representation feels especially urgent as Miami continues to reinvent itself.
In the renovated chapel gallery, surrounded by works that honor neighborhoods, memories, and often-overlooked communities, viewers encounter a version of Miami that cannot be found in travel brochures.
It is a city of contradictions, but it is also a city worth loving precisely because of them.
WHAT: “Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami”
WHERE: University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel, Room 112, 6565 Red Road, Coral Gables
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. Closed Saturday. Through Friday, June 26, 2026. Private tours available by appointment.
COMING UP: The next exhibition at the museum is “Common Ground” by William Osorio, curated by Milly Cardoso, with an opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, July 9 and on view from Wednesday, July 8 through Wednesday, Aug. 5.
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 atwww.artburstmiami.com.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
NSU Art Museum’s ‘Close to Home’ Finds Common Ground Among Miami Artists
Written By Douglas Markowitz June 15, 2026 at 6:12 PM
Piero Penizzotto, “Kings of Comedy (Chris, Imani, Bernard, Calvin, Dre)”, 2024, papier-mâché, foam and acrylic, is one of the works in NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s group exhibition “Close to Home” through Sunday, Oct 4. Collection NSU Art Museum, purchased with funds provided by the Susan S. Miller Acquisition Fund. (Photo by Oriol Tarridas, courtesy NSU Art Museum)
A cross-section of the Miami art scene can be found just north in Fort Lauderdale, where NSU Art Museum’s latest group exhibition, “Close to Home,” brings together nearly two dozen artists with ties to the city.
Community is the central idea of the show, with the three curators – museum director Bonnie Clearwater as well as Ariella Wollens and guest curator Sinaí Rivera – choosing artists that engage with ideas of family, friendship, and togetherness.
Many of the selected works depict the artists’ loved ones or close confidants, with the overall concept of the show arguing that such tight interpersonal bonds are an essential facet of the local art scene.
Roscoè B. Thické III, for example, pays tribute to his deceased grandmother in two works, referencing the diamond-shaped anti-theft shutters that cover the windows of her house in urban Miami. In one photo, an empty chair has been placed between the two shuttered windows.
Roscoè B. Thické III pays tribute to his deceased grandmother referencing the diamond-shaped anti-theft shutters that cover the windows of her house in urban Miami. “Missing Matriarch,” 2020. Archival Fine Art Print Hahnemühle Baryta Satin 300gsm. (Photo courtesy of The Guzman Duran Art Trust)
Another work, “Redeemer,” splits a portrait of Thické’s son in the Everglades, standing in a crucifix pose modeled after the famous statue in Rio de Janeiro. The diamond grid of the shutters serves as the frame, splitting the photo itself into parts, while tiny cymbals have been placed underneath the wood, turning the work into a massive tambourine. Both works in tandem poetically evoke the passing of an older generation’s spirit into their descendants.
“There were so many ways that we could have gone about (the theme of) friends and family, but I think overall it’s just spending time together and just quality time and mundane moments – I think this is what these artists are trying to highlight,” Rivera says. “And then I think there is this diversity that very much represents what Miami feels like to me, just different communities all in one space.”
Susan Kim Alvarez’s Bosch-esque triptych of South Florida chaos, “Mouth of Miami,” 2025. Acrylic, ink, and gouache on canvas. 60 in x 144 in (152.4 cm x 365.76 cm) NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; Purchased with funds provided by Curator Circle. (Photo courtesy of NSU Art Museum)
That diversity is reflected in the various mediums seen throughout the show, from painting and photography to three-dimensional artworks. Josh Aronson’s work “The Cabin Mirror” serves as a visual archive of his “Florida Boys” photo series, featuring preparatory documents and photos hung against a four-pane mirror.
Aronson developed the “Florida Boys” project, which places young South Floridians in pastoral settings, based on the idea that many local urban residents, often first-generation immigrants, are unable to engage in certain rites of passage.
“They don’t have access to that kind of quintessential boyhood experience of climbing trees, swimming in springs, so on and so forth, and so we use photography as a way to kind of write ourselves into that narrative,” Aronson says.
Richard Moreno’s “…and From This Wretched Form I Absolve Thee (Purifying Thy Form for the Continuation of my Spirit”), 2024, created with mummified iguana found in the historic grounds of Vizcaya. The artist’s sculptures feature gothic and esoteric aesthetics. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Meanwhile, Richard Moreno’s work spotlights a very different facet of the wider South Florida community, its punk and metal scene. The artist’s sculptures feature gothic and esoteric aesthetics, with some even incorporating decaying animal parts à la Damien Hirst. One piece uses an iguana carcass the artist scavenged while working as an art handler at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, placing the body in a coffinlike reliquary. Others have participatory aspects: During the show’s opening event on Sunday, June 7, a noise musician played an improvised set with one of the sculptures, which has a built-in amplifier in its base.
In recent years NSU Art Museum has become something of a champion of the local scene. Most notably, in 2023 Clearwater and Wollens curated “Future Past Perfect,” a uniquely-formatted show which gave seven individual local artists their own solo presentation.
Several artists from that exhibition reappear in “Close to Home,” allowing visitors to check their progression: Zoe Schweiger has moved on to painting sweltering nightlife scenes in her fluid style of monochromatic warm-color canvases, while Susan Kim Alvarez has illustrated a Bosch-esque triptych of South Florida chaos in her painting “Mouth of Miami.” Both have benefitted from the exposure; Schweiger will begin a master’s program at the Yale University School of Art later this year, while Alvarez and fellow artist Cici McMonagle, who also had a solo show at NSU, will stage a museum exhibition in their hometown of Lakeland next year.
Zoe Schweiger paints sweltering nightlife scenes in her fluid style of monochromatic warm-color canvases. “Cici at Floyd 1:09 AM,” 2025. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 40 in x 50 in (101.6 cm x 127 cm). (Photo courtesy of the artist and Mindy Solomon Gallery)
“We want to be an institution that doesn’t just debut artists or sort of pick up on people, but has a consistency in supporting them,” Wollens says. “(We want to) continue to have some sort of infrastructure with artists and follow them through these points in their careers, especially the artists who are in our community.”
Bringing on Rivera as co-curator is a part of that vision. A Miami native and a student at NSU studying business, the 26-year-old had worked in the curatorial department at the museum and was approached by Clearwater to help program the show based on her extensive participation in the local scene.
“Bonnie personally reached out to me. She was inspired by how I’m active in the community, and she saw potential in me that I had yet seen for myself,” Rivera says. “When I started going to school, (the idea of) being a curator still wasn’t at the top of my mind. I came to work at the museum for fun because I like museums, and I wanted to gain some kind of insight. But this truly is my passion, and it’s just kind of evolved from that.”
Papou, “Tropical Violence,” 2026, Oil, acrylic, spray paint, sand, latex on unstretched canvas, 72 in x 96 in (182.88 cm x 243.84 cm) (Photo courtesy of Spinello Projects)
The continued investment in these artists reflects a sustained interest in building an arts ecosystem that spans, and even surpasses the entire South Florida region. At the opening, many in attendance remarked that they rarely visited Fort Lauderdale. Time will tell whether artists will feel more comfortable claiming South Florida over Miami as their home base, but “Close to Home” is a good place to start.
WHAT: NSU Art Museum’s “Close to Home”
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., Sunday; closed Monday. Through Sunday, Oct. 4.
WHERE: NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale
COST: Admission is $16 for adults; $10 for seniors; $8 for military; $5 for college students; and free for students age 13-17, U.S. military veterans and dependents, museum members, NSU and Broward College students, faculty, and staff, and children 12 and under.
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.artburst.com.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
South Florida Artists Scale Up for Orlando Museum’s Florida Prize
Written By Michelle F. Solomon June 10, 2026 at 10:23 AM
“Formed Under Pressure: Horizon 2026,” a site-specific installation by Mette Tommerup, is one of the exhibitions in this year’s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art. Eight Miami Dade County artists or duos are featured this year in the survey show through Sunday, Aug. 23. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
A trio of vibrant pyramids, built from almost 100 canvases, tower from floor to ceiling. Photographs explore motherhood and the American landscape. A bed of dried flower petals bears the imprint of a body. Walls are covered in hand-drawn sacred symbols. A pink installation of sculptures made of goat’s milk soap is built around intimacy and well-being.
One gallery after another at the Orlando Museum of Art belongs to a Miami-Dade County artist in this year’s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, making the state’s premier contemporary art exhibition feel unexpectedly close to home for Miami audiences.
Eight of the exhibition’s 12 artists and artist duos have South Florida ties, including Miami artist Francisco Masó, whose “The Coronation of Gladiolus” received the exhibition’s $20,000 top prize.
Miami artist Francisco Masó “The Coronation of Gladiolus” received the $20,000 Florida Prize. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon, senior curator at the Orlando Museum of Art, who organized the exhibition with associate curator Katherine Page, credits what she calls the county’s “ecosystem for artists” as one of the reasons that so many are from Miami.
“Miami has just this incredible pool of artists, but those artists are there because there’s a great support system for them,” she says, pointing to organizations such as Bakehouse Art Complex, Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, Bridge Red, and other spaces that provide exhibition opportunities, studios, and a community that allows practices to develop over time.
“When you think about Miami as this ecosystem for artists, you have incredible spaces for creation,” she says.
Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon, senior curator at the Orlando Museum of Art, (Photo courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art)
Once selected for the Florida Prize, artists are given something many times unavailable to them: room to create, to push their ideas and to mount something that can be seen for an extended period of time by a range of visitors.
“When you give artists the space to create, a lot of them want to scale up,” Claeysen-Gleyzon says.
While Miami may have studio complexes, what the Orlando Museum of Art offers with its Florida Prize is that local artists basically get the chance to exhibit in what amounts to solo shows in a major museum.
Page, who started at the museum six months ago, says she and Claeysen-Gleyzon immediately started working on finalizing the artists that would be selected for this year’s exhibition.
“When we are thinking about the artists to select, we think about what spaces will work best for their work, what will highlight their work. They have room and space to grow and we work with them to figure out what that means. Many of them already have something in mind that they’ve been dreaming about,” she says. “It’s really great to be a part of that dream.”
Miami Beach-based artist Charo Oquet’s installation at the Orlando Museum of Art became an opportunity to unite works dating back to 2014 with sweeping wall ink drawings created specifically for the museum show. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
Artists aren’t selected through an open call. Instead, the Florida Prize is built through years of studio visits, exhibition research and conversations as curators follow artists’ careers before extending an invitation.
“The process to select the artists for the Florida Prize is actually something that takes several years,” says Claeysen-Gleyzon.
Dreaming Bigger
When Mette Tommerup first visited the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, she looked at the soaring gallery walls and hoped one day she would be invited.
This year, the Danish-born, Coconut Grove-based artist got her wish.
Across a 90-foot wall at the Orlando Museum of Art, Tommerup assembled three monumental pyramids built from canvases dragged through the ocean and Biscayne Bay, dried in flowering trees and tossed from rooftops at dusk, surrendering part of the creative process to nature itself.
One of the towering pyramids in site-specific installation as part of the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art by Danish-born Coconut Grove-based artist Mette Tommerup. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
Each pyramid has a color that represents the three elements of ocean, earth and air with newly introduced gold leaf accents. The canvases, carefully arranged in structured compositions, rise in the gallery like geological formations or ancient architectural monuments, according to Claeysen-Gleyzon.
“I try to relinquish authorship, so my work is not all about me,” says Tommerup. “I try to listen to the canvases.”
The opportunity to be selected and work with curators to realize ambitious projects is what makes the Florida Prize such a milestone, Tommerup says.
“The Florida Prize is a significant invitation in an artist’s career to be trusted to take on these large gallery spaces at a substantial museum,” Tommerup says. “This is, for most artists, the highest level of achievement in the state of Florida for an annual contemporary art survey show.”
Maria Theresa Barbist’s series “DER GRUND AUF DEM ICH STEHE” (“The Ground on Which I Stand”) traces psychological transformation through five stages of trauma healing in psychotherapy. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
The exhibition also gives artists the freedom to experiment with new materials and approaches.
Maria Theresa Barbist embraced a new process, replacing traditional canvas with industrial tarps that allowed her to work on a larger scale while embedding transferred Polaroid photographs collected over years in Miami and Austria.
“This is the first time I’m painting on tarp,” Barbist says.
For Charo Oquet, the exhibition became an opportunity to unite works dating back to 2014 with sweeping wall ink drawings created specifically for the museum show. Surrounding sculptures, assemblages and brightly colored forms make the space feel part sanctuary, part dreamscape. The drawings mark the first time the artist has worked directly on gallery walls, she says.
“I’m interested in the language of the sacred,” says Oquet, who has spent nearly four decades researching Afro-Dominican spirituality. “I don’t want to do exactly the religious thing,” she says. “I want to take that idea and bring it to contemporary art.”
Working primarily in black-and-white film, Miami-based photographer Rose Marie Cromwell draws visual and conceptual references to photographers such as Ansel Adams and Robert Frank. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
Rose Marie Cromwell, who makes bodies of work about different geographies having worked in Panama, Cuba and Miami, likewise expanded her practice beyond its usual boundaries. Her gallery combines monumental photographs with the idea of what the American West looks like through a feminist approach to landscape photography. For one large piece, she hand-stitched photographs together.
In another room an installation video shows her mother and her daughter climbing on rocks juxtaposes bodies and how they age. All of the work grew out of documenting her postpartum experience during the pandemic, then turning her attention to motherhood, generations and the American landscape.
“I realized that there was some power in sharing a story about motherhood with the world,” Cromwell says. “I had never turned the camera really onto myself or my own body or my own life. I realized as my daughter was getting older, my mother was in her 70s, and I suddenly felt at the beginning of my 40s, kind of on this hill of life that I have never really been on before, where I could more clearly see the beginning and the end.”
We Are Nice ‘n Easy transformed a gallery into a glowing pink environment built around intimacy, vulnerability and care. Husband-and-wife artists Allison Matherly and Jeffrey Noble cast their own bodies in goat’s milk soap. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
Room To Experiment
We Are Nice ‘n Easy transformed a gallery into a glowing pink environment built around intimacy, vulnerability and care. Husband-and-wife artists Allison Matherly and Jeffrey Noble cast their own bodies in goat’s milk soap, embracing a material that changes over time. In each sculpture, the figure holds its head in its lap.
“A lot of our work in previous years has become more controlled and manufactured looking. We wanted to introduce a medium that had more variables,” says Noble, welcoming the unpredictability of a process that echoed the themes of the installation itself.
Miami-based artist Jessy Nite’s work with durable synthetic materials and intricate knotting techniques explored resilience, preservation and the ties that bind communities together, (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
In Jessy Nite’s exhibition, the gallery became a warm apricot-colored environment where language intersected with sculpture. Bold phrases are stretched across walls, while monumental paracord textiles and a suspended woven vessel invite visitors to linger over words such as “Retreat,” “Endure” and “Siempre.” Working with durable synthetic materials and intricate knotting techniques, the Miami artist explored resilience, preservation and the ties that bind communities together, turning simple text into quiet moments of reflection.
Ema Ri took a more contemplative approach, filling a darkened gallery with intimate paintings that were a meditation on transformation, grief and renewal. Beneath one canvas, a pedestal covered with compressed dried flowers featured an impression of the outline of the artist’s body, extending the paintings into a reflection on mortality and resilience.
Beneath one canvas, Ema Ri presented “Keep Your Promise,” a pedestal covered with compressed dried flowers featuring an impression of the outline of the artist’s body. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative)
St. Petersburg artist Jason Hackenwerth, whose massive, suspended balloon sculpture greets visitors in the museum’s rotunda, and the collaborative duo of Meredith Laura Lynn of Tallahassee and Katie Hargrave of Chattanooga, Tenn., bringing perspectives from riffs on naturalist explorations in a multi-media installation, rounded out the exhibition.
The range of work presented a challenge for guest juror Jade Powers, curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, who spent an afternoon studying the exhibition before selecting the recipient of the Florida Prize’s $20,000 award.
“I appreciated how each artist engaged with relevant contemporary questions,” Powers says. “Whether addressing religion, censorship, aging, the body, historical narratives, or personal and collective trauma, every installation approached these subjects in a distinct and thoughtful way.”
She ultimately selected Masó’s “The Coronation of Gladiolus,” an installation that first appears celebratory. Gold folding panels, hanging banners and historical imagery seem almost ceremonial. A constant drumbeat and the scent of gunpowder are meant to evoke an atmosphere of a public gathering before revealing references to surveillance, repression and resistance in Cuba.
The striped abstract paintings throughout the installation are based on polo shirts worn by Cuban state security agents who blend into crowds during protests, while gladiolus flowers reference the Ladies in White dissident movement. Gold folding panels
For Masó, the work is meant to make hidden systems visible.
“For me, art should be useful,” he says. “I’m giving you the tools for understanding.”
Powers says selecting a single winner is a tall order. “(It) is never easy, particularly when the overall quality is so strong, but spending time with both the artworks and the artists’ ideas helped clarify the strengths of each presentation.”
Katherine Page, associate curator at the Orlando Museum of Art, (Photo by Heerak Shah, courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art)
A Conversation Across Galleries
Page says there’s a deliberateness in giving over most of the museum to the show. It invites visitors who may not be frequent museumgoers into something more accessible. Visitors can also cast a People’s Choice vote for their favorite Florida Prize artist.
“It really invites a deeper kind of thinking about the work and about which artists visitors find they connect with the most. I think that is very special.”
Despite the artists’ varied approaches, Claeysen-Gleyzon says the exhibition’s conversations emerge naturally.
“The works aren’t supposed to talk to each other,” she says. “But somehow they do.”
It is inevitable that intentionally or unintentionally, the exhibition creates a conceptual content conversation and that becomes the most intriguing component of this year’s Florida Prize. To get the true sense of where contemporary art in Florida stands in 2026, the Orlando survey show does just that.
WHAT: 12th Annual Florida Prize in Contemporary Art
WHERE: Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N. Mills Ave., Orlando
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; closed Mondays. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. third Thursday of each month. Through Sunday, Aug. 23.
COST: $20, $12, seniors 60 and older, $10, students with ID, $8, children ages 6 to 17; children 5 and younger and museum members free admission.
INFORMATION: (407) 896-4231 or omart.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.artburst.com.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
Miami Beach’s The Bass Adds New Leadership Role as Museum Expands
Written By Jane Wooldridge June 4, 2026 at 10:01 AM
The Bass Museum of Art is anchored by the original 1930s building. The museum continues to expand, adding more exhibition space and a newly named an artistic director and chief curator who will be working alongside the Miami Beach museum’s executive director. (Photo by Zachary Balber, courtesy of The Bass)
The Bass is reshaping its leadership structure as the Miami Beach museum adds a new position aimed at strengthening its artistic direction and exhibition program.
Philippe Vergne, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Dia Art Foundation in New York, has been named to the newly created position of Artistic Director and Chief Curator and will work alongside Executive Director Silvia Karman Cubiña.
“I’ve been at this museum for 18 years,” said Cubiña. “It’s time to bring in some fresh, breezy, new vision and conversations. That’s really important. It’s a responsible thing to do.”
Philippe Vergne, newly appointed Artistic Director and Chief Curator of The Bass. (Photo by Joaquim Norte de Sousa)
In his new role, Vergne will serve as her “thought partner,” said Cubiña, with responsibility for the museum’s curatorial vision as it adds 2,500 square feet of exhibition spaces to the current 15,519.
After Curator James Voorhies left the museum in December to return to his home in New York, Cubiña reached out to Vergne, a long-time colleague who is currently director of the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum in Porto, Portugal. The conversation was unexpected, he said.
“But when I talked to Silvia, when I met some of the members of her board, I was very impressed by the ambition that her constituency has for the institution. I was impressed by the way the board of the museum has supported the museum… I was very excited by what I was hearing.”
Executive Director Silvia Karman Cubiña has led The Bass since 2008. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, courtesy of The Bass)
And the timing was right. He had been in his current job since 2019. The Bass’s planned expansion was also enticing. “This is a very specific moment, to expand in a city which is itself expanding,” he said.
He will begin his new role Oct. 1.
The museum is working with the city to permit the expansion designed by Los Angeles-based architects Johnston Marklee and supported by a $20.1 million allocation from a 2022 public bond. The addition will solidify The Bass’s vision of a 2.9-acre campus of public art works and sheltered garden space anchored by the museum’s original 1930s façade designed by Miami architect Russell Pancoast. It will be museum’s third expansion since 2000.
Earlier this year, The Bass opened the renovated Rotunda in Collins Park, with an inviting glass entry and almost 2,000 square feet of exhibition space. Since then, attendance has grown by 33.8%, said Cubiña.
The new outdoor space is intended to broaden free access to art and better serve a mixed-income community of time-pressed young professionals and families with free programming that includes the museum’s Third Thursdays activations and access to the Rotunda.
Exhibitions and public programming will be part of Vergne’s portfolio. He will also work with global artists to expand The Bass’s ongoing program of commissions. In past years, those have included installations by marquee artists such as Mickalene Thomas, Rachel Feinstein and Tavaras Strachan.
“I’ve been very privileged to work in different communities in the United States and in Europe, so I have a network of artists,” said Vergne. “But not only artists; I have a network in the art community that will make available to the institution. It’s work that goes beyond pure curating.”
The Bass Museum of Arts’ Rotunda in Collins Park opened in March 2026. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren /Rheo Creative, courtesy of The Bass)
French-born Vergne began his museum leadership career as director of the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille from 1994 to 1997 before moving to the United States. He later served as chief curator and deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2006, he co-curated the Whitney Biennial with Chrissie Iles. He left LA MOCA in 2019 following a tumultuous year marked by internal and external dissent and was named director of Portugal’s Serralves Contemporary Art Museum a few months later.
Vergne’s experience running art institutions make him a strong fit for the role, said Cubiña. “He will be a great thought partner, but also a very practical thought partner, which is very important. He knows what it is to run an institution. He knows what it is to build an institution, and he understands timing.”
Those skills along with Vergne’s art world connections will help free Cubiña to focus on the other aspects of her job, she said. “I need to fundraise. I need to do my job right, and my job is dealing with the future, both the immediate and the long-term future of this museum. I get to do it full time now.”
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.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
Artists Turn Margaritaville Inside Out at Locust Projects
Written By Michelle F. Solomon June 4, 2026 at 2:42 AM
A twelve-foot spilled margarita and a monumental pair of cargo shorts made from real sails in the site-specific installation “Lost Shaker of Salt” at Locust Projects through Saturday, June 20. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of Locust Projects)
At first glance, “Lost Shaker of Salt” at Locust Projects in Little River appears to be a breezy summer diversion.
Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors encounter Kelly Breez and Patty Gone’s brightly colored homage to Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville empire, anchored by a giant margarita knocked onto its side.
Oversized flip-flops are tacked on one wall. Humongous cargo shorts dangle upside down and dominate another area. A tiki-inspired sports bar with tropical-print stools and video screens occupies another corner.
Installation view of Kelly Breez and Patty Gone, “Lost Shaker of Salt,” 2026.at Locust Projects. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of Locust Projects)
Two oversized Adirondack chairs face a campy performance-art film that traces a path from Caribbean sugar plantations and rum production to the modern fantasy of escape marketed by Margaritaville.
But Breez and Gone are selling something entirely different.
“I would say the concept of Margaritaville as a whole is that they’re selling you pure escapism,” says Breez, a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist. “Just vibes and happy hour and drinks and everything is fine. But there really is this absolute underlying dark side to Margaritaville, which was really what we wanted to dig a little deeper into.”
She compares the installation itself to that tension.
Visitors are invited to walk inside the margarita — a dense, found‑object sculptural environment of memorabilia-style elements assembled from collected materials. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of Locust Projects)
“There’s this giant margarita, let’s go stand inside of it, and some Adirondack chairs, let’s have a sit. And giant shorts,” she says. “But inside there is this anti-colonialist memorial library.”
Visitors are invited to walk inside the margarita — a dense, found‑object sculptural environment of memorabilia-style elements.
“I’m a huge maximalist,” Breez says, explaining that her usual instinct is to fill a space with objects and materials. For this project, however, she deliberately pulled back, allowing the giant cargo shorts and margarita to become the focus.
Beneath the humor and nostalgia, the commissioned works are meant to evoke more complicated questions about who gets to be part of this paradise and who gets left out. Margaritaville isn’t just a kitschy theme — it points out a much larger critique of American culture.
Gone, a Los Angeles-based trans artist, poet and educator, approached Margaritaville from a different perspective than Breez. While Breez grew up immersed in South Florida boating culture, Gone became interested in what the lifestyle brand reveals about broader ideas of belonging and the balance of power.
Patty Gone and Kelly Breez inside the installation of the giant margarita surrounded by Breez’s found object art. (Photo by Logan Fazio, courtesy of the artists)
“Margaritaville is kind of like the gateway to thinking about a certain kind of straight white culture in Florida, but then maybe the U.S. more broadly,” Gone says.
She became particularly interested in the sports bar as a cultural symbol.
“I think about the bar itself as a sports bar, especially as a nexus of that kind of social culture,” Gone says. “A kind of patriarchal escapism.”
The centerpiece of the site-specific installation — a monumental pair of cargo shorts measuring 12 feet tall and 17 feet wide — carries a personal connection for Breez.
Many of the sails used to construct the oversized shorts came from the artist’s family sailing trips with her ather, including voyages to Key West.(Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of Locust Projects)
A South Florida native, she grew up sailing with her father and listening to Buffett’s music on the water. Many of the sails used to construct the oversized shorts came from those family sailing trips, including voyages to Key West.
Built entirely from repurposed sailcloth, the sculpture required months of planning, fabrication and hand sewing. Breez worked alongside her father and stepmother, transforming their home into what she describes as “an absolute factory” during the construction process.
The giant shorts also function as the James William Buffett Anticolonialist Memorial Library.
Visitors can enter through the fly, then sit in the library among books selected by Gone examining tourism, colonization, sugar production and the history of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Visitors can enter through the fly of the giant cargo shorts, then take in books in the James William Buffett Anticolonialist Memorial Library. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of Locust Projects)
“There’s a lot of really good stuff in here about the beginning of the sugar trade and how that has to do with the beginning of cocktails,” Breez says.
Those themes reappear in Gone’s multi-channel video installation, which traces the history of the margarita far beyond the frozen cocktails served at chain restaurants and beach bars.
“I was trying to think of how we got here?” Gone says. “How did we get to this sports bar, Margaritaville culture?”
Researching the origins of mixed drinks led her into histories of colonial trade routes, sugar production and empire.
“The first mixed drink is made in India,” Gone says. “Mixed drink culture is so embedded with colonialism.”
The video follows that history from India to Europe and the Caribbean, where sugar production fueled colonial economies and transformed drinking culture.
One discovery particularly surprised her.
Film still of Xochitl Loco, Abhijeet “Moodzi” Mudgerikarin, and Elaina Moreno in Patty Gone’s “Lost Shaker of Salt, 2026.” (Photo courtesy of Patty Gone)
“They’re drinking so much punch at the Declaration of Independence party,” Gone says. “It was wild to me to find that. They’re drinking all these mixed drinks made with ingredients connected to slave labor and that’s their official drink.”
Eventually the story arrives at Buffett himself, whose laid-back image became the foundation of a billion-dollar lifestyle brand that includes restaurants, resorts and retirement communities.
For Gone, that evolution became part of the exhibition’s larger narrative.
“When Jimmy Buffett comes in, he’s this countercultural figure at first,” she says. “Then where does it start to go?”
Neither artist is interested in simply mocking Buffett or his fans but examining the culture. The surroundings are familiar, but they are amplified.
For some visitors, that realization takes time.
Film still of Patty Gone in Patty Gone’s “Beachfront Views.” (Photo courtesy of Patty Gone)
“It takes a bit for satire to sink in sometimes,” Gone says. “It takes you to sit with it for a second.”
About 25 miles north of Locust Projects is the Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort, one of the most visible examples of the lifestyle brand built around Buffett and the promise of tropical escape. Proximity makes the exhibition’s examination of tourism, leisure and paradise feel even more relevant in South Florida.
At the installation’s opening, Breez recalls that many visitors initially responded to the colorful visuals and tropical atmosphere before discovering the exhibition’s deeper themes.
“Some people were ready to just call it cheery and summery,” she says. “But there are indications of the dark underbelly.”
Built entirely from repurposed sailcloth, the sculpture required months of planning, fabrication and hand sewing. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan, courtesy of Locust Projects)
There’s the sports bar, the memorabilia, a stacked cube monitor tower showing Buffet’s early videos, and there are the Big Pharma commercials playing on a loop at the sports bar promising the same feel-good lifestyle for the Boomer generation.
And then slowly the question sinks in — who is this “good life” really meant for?
WHAT: Kelly Breez and Patty Gone: “Lost Shaker of Salt”
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Through Saturday, June 20.
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.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
Installation view of Wade Tullier: “Sky, Sea, Fruit, Hand, Seed.” at Primary (Photo courtesy Erin Parish)
At Primary in Miami’s Little River, the cool gray of the gallery sits in contrast with the midday sun and settles the exhibition into a steady tone that complements the works throughout. As a place without visual busyness, it is currently quietly punctuated by sculptures from the humblest of materials: ceramic. These are 2026 works by Wade Tullier. They establish a presence that feels measured and contained, with a subdued sense of joy.
The exhibition contains a fat totem, two petite wall pieces and a population of tabletop-sized sculptures. The latter sit atop cinderblock pedestals of varying height. This extends and aligns the architecture seamlessly into the installation, a purposeful counterpoint.
From left, Wade Tullier, “Hand with Fruit and Snake,” 2026 ceramic and glaze, 19 x 14 1/2 x 10 in. ; “Snake with Lemon and Boots.” 2026, ceramic and glaze 21 1/2 x 10 x 7 in ; “Boy with Flame,” 2026, ceramic and glaze, 42 x 14 x 15 in (Photo courtesy of Erin Parish)
Tullier titled his show un-evocatively: “Sky, Sea, Fruit, Hand, Seed.” This contrasts with the popular trend toward philosophically or sociologically complex exhibition titles. This probably stems from Damien Hirst’s infamous “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” a.k.a. that shark sculpture. There can be an attempt to assign content through the title when it is absent in the works themselves.
However, Tullier describes: “I make sculptures that depict animals, figures, phenomena, and everyday objects. They are always recognizable but become elusive as I continue to reinterpret each piece. In this way, my sculptures act as characters in oral history: they transform as they are retold. While these objects remain familiar and are easily identifiable, the combinations of works remain ambiguous. They echo the layered, nonlinear structure of memory as it is excavated through storytelling.”
An eight-foot-tall totem of stacked fruit anchors the room: from the floor up, a blue hand holds a lemon, an orange and an oversized blueberry topped with an intense red apple. The leaves and fruit stems protrude to set up a rhythmic counterpoint. The scale brings a sense of familiarity into a different register. The configuration could be seen as a recollection of an odd American roadside attraction seen on a cross-country road trip. Without self-conscious “artistry,” its form echoes self-taught art, often appreciated for its revelations and connection to the spirit world.
“Hand with Lemon, Orange, Blueberry, and Apple,” 2026 ceramic and glaze, 96 x 37 x 27 in. (Photo courtesy of Erin Parish)
Positioned to the left behind the fruit, a single white owl rests on a branch segment. The placement carries a precise sense of balance across the width of the room. It punctuates the spread of cinderblocks while maintaining its own space. Here, less is more and we are nudged not to be too serious. However, within this context, more is revealed and it won’t be all fun and games.
Tullier states, “The imagery in my ceramics traces back to the stories I heard as a child growing up in southern Louisiana. The objects I create pull from this history of natural disasters and human-made catastrophes, chance encounters with wildlife, and occasionally my unsettling experience as a forensic sculptor and researcher. My work responds to the natural world in an effort of balancing pleasure with pain and danger with awe.”
A forensic sculptor is a specialist who reconstructs human faces onto unidentified skulls using clay and anthropological data to assist law enforcement in identifying human remains. A combination of science and art, the work adds another layer to the skill on display.
Snakes, hands, birds and vessels repeat in different configurations. The color blocks are simple and imply a child’s creation, yet they are referentially sophisticated. Hands appear in multiple works: holding a palm tree, cupping a small vessel, supporting a red pot with an emerging snake and sad plants — a Garden of Eden reference. Elsewhere, a cross sits atop a Día de los Muertos-like skull on a tree stump.
The snake reappears in “Snake with Lemon and Boots.” This time it is coiled atop black boots and a lemon. As one stands in front of this sculpture and looks down, there is a moment of amusement when one’s shoes echo the boots in the sculpture. You are looking at it. It is looking at you. Each piece contains a soul and the inherent contradictions within.
The stylization of the imagery is like that of milagros charms of Mexico. These are small devotional metal charms used across Latin America to symbolize prayers, gratitude or hopes. Traditionally, they are pinned to saints’ statues or altars as offerings for answered prayers or to ask for healing. These elements circulate and return with slight variation.
“Snake with Lemon and Boots.” 2026, ceramic and glaze 21 1/2 x 10 x 7 in. (Photo courtesy of Erin Parish)
The glazing seems casual at first. However, it alternates not only in color but also in a specificity of finishes that reiterates each object’s presence in space and in relation to illumination. Surfaces alternate between matte and glossy, catching light. Above the grouping, the gallery lights are arranged like those for a Broadway stage. Color remains restrained, held in blocks with minimal internal variation. The tones stay slightly dulled, allowing each form to maintain its clarity without competing for attention.
Tullier received a BFA from Louisiana State University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions in Miami, Chicago and Detroit.
Across the exhibition, the work builds through a consistency of weight and presence. Forms repeat, relationships remain active. Narrative stays embedded within the material, carried through scale and the placement of symbols. These works use plain speak, and the objects feel as though they could be found on a home altar containing fancy dress dolls, Saint Michael and a series of water-filled glasses.
WHAT: “Wade Tullier: Sky, Sea, Fruit, Hand, Seed”
WHERE: Primary, 7410 NW Miami Court, Miami
WHEN: 11 a.m. Thursday and Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. Through Saturday, May 30
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.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
Between Image and Memory: Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s ‘ECOS’
Written By Carmen F de Terenzio May 8, 2026 at 7:34 PM
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.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, “La Tormenta,:” 2026, Oil on linen, 23 x 29 in. (Photo by Rodrigo Gaya, courtesy of KDR, Miami)
“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.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, “Tres Lindas Cubanas,” 2026, Oil on linen, 82 x 118 in. (Photo by Rodrigo Gaya, courtesy of KDR, Miami)
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.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, “Adios A Cuba,” 2026, Oil on linen, 90 x 90 in. (Photo by Rodrigo Gaya, courtesy of KDR, Miami)
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.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, “El Abrazo Del Mar,” 2025, Oil on linen, 65 x 140 in. (Photo by Rodrigo Gaya, courtesy of KDR, Miami)
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.
Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, “Espirales De Nubes,” 2026, Oil on linen, 24 x 35 in. (Photo by Rodrigo Gaya, courtesy of KDR, Miami)
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
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Through Saturday, May 23
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.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
Dahlia Dreszer Turns Memory Into Bloom at Miami Beach Botanical
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral May 7, 2026 at 11:43 PM
“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.
Artist Dahlia Dreszer stands within her exhibition “All That Remains” at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, where suspended photographic works and preserved organic materials create an immersive meditation on memory and transformation. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
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.
Detail view of Dahlia Dreszer’s photographic work “All That Remains VIII,” where a preserved flower intersects with layered color and light, reflecting themes of impermanence and constructed memory. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
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.
An interactive digital component, “Clone Dahlia,” in Dahlia Dreszer’s “All That Remains” invites viewers to engage directly with the artist’s image. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
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
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 atwww.artburstmiami.com.
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
HistoryMiami becomes Museum of Miami in shift toward county-wide outreach
Written By Michelle F. Solomon May 7, 2026 at 6:00 AM
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.”
A “Wish Wall” will invite Miamians to imagine the future of their city and their country. (Rendering courtesy of Museum of Miami)
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.”
Natalia Crujeiras, Museum of Miami’s CEO and Executive Director. (Photo Museum of 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.
The courtyard of the HistoryMiamiMuseum, now the Museum of Miami. (Courtesy of Museum of Miami)
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.”
A letter from the late 1890s from Henry Flagler to Julia Tuttle, as part of their correspondence for Flagler to extend his railway to Miami is in Museum of Miami (formerly the HistoryMiami Museum’s) archives. (Photo courtesy of Museum of Miami)
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.
As the museum reaches beyond its walls, it’s also rethinking how people experience its stories. (Photo rendering of Wish for America wall courtesy of Museum of Miami)
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
Studio Vizcaya's community art project, "The Fruit We Bear," invites participants to create giant papier-mâché lanterns that will illuminate a twilight procession through Vizcaya.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents the first public exhibition from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, featuring 10 landmark works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Miami's postcard image gives way to a more personal portrait in "Ode to the 305: A Love Letter to Miami," on view at the newly opened University of Miami Art Gallery at The Chapel.
Across Centuries and Cultures: ‘The Light of the World’ Traces Images of Christ in Art
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral May 1, 2026 at 4:38 PM
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.
A Belen Jesuit student views Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s “The Crucifixion, after Thomas Eakins” (2011), collage, in “The Light of the World,” curated by Carol Damian and Adriana Herrera, on view through Wednesday, May 6. (Photo by Suzzane Sardina and Ignacio Font, courtesy of Saladrigas Gallery at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School)
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.
ilvia Dorfsman, local art dealer and appraiser, views Karim Borjas’ “Ecce Homo” (2006), a photographic installation featuring red strings, while Olga Garcia-Mayoral, curator and writer, reflects on Erik Ravelo’s “Señor, Dame Luz” (2009), a C-print in “The Light of the World” at the Olga M. and Carlos A. Saladrigas Gallery at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School. (Photo by Teresa Martinez, courtesy of Ignacio Font)
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.
Installation view of “The Light of the World,” curated by Carol Damian and Adriana Herrera, at the Olga M. and Carlos A. Saladrigas Gallery at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, on view through Wednesday, May 6. (Photo by Phillip Karp, courtesy of Ignacio Font)
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.
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