Echo of Acclaimed Miami Artist’s Work in Venice Reverberates at Betsy Hotel
Written By Elisa Turner October 9, 2026 at 1:51 PM
“Ode to the Everglades” is one of 30 works in various media representing the past ten years of Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrie’s career at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach in the exhibition “From Venice With Love.” (Photo by Carl Philipe Juste)
Artist Edouard Duval-Carrié has long sought to reveal and help rectify centuries-old wounds in his native Haiti, a country forever shaped by the African diaspora. First, he applies pressure, doubling down on history and politics. Then he applies beauty, both seductive and incensed.
Since Saturday, May 9, work by the Miami-based artist has been on view in the Central Pavilion at Venice’s Giardini as part of “In Minor Keys,” the 61st Venice Biennale’s international art exhibition, which continues through Sunday, Nov. 22.
In the wake of his selection for the Biennale, Duval-Carrié has sent a lavish postcard of sorts home to Miami. It is “From Venice with Love,” an exhibit in the Betsy Hotel gallery and in other spaces at the Miami Beach hotel. It is curated by his longtime friend and collaborator Carl-Philippe Juste, a Haitian-born, Miami Herald photographer.
Caribbean scholar, curator and author Erica Moiah James devoted a chapter to Duval-Carrié in her 2025 book “After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary,” published by Duke University Press. In a phone interview, she praises him for art “that has always centered the Caribbean. That centers Haiti. That values Haitian creativity. That understands the complexity of Haitian religious practices and worldviews.”
She sees his art as offering an affirming cultural “anchor” despite the country’s severe difficulties. “Edouard really demonstrates that in terms of the African diaspora, there is no past. The past is definitely a part of our present. It’ll be a part of the future.”
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié’s work is included in the 61st Venice Biennale, which continues through Sunday, Nov. 22. A local companion to that exhibition, “From Venice with Love,” is in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel. (Photo by Carl Philipe Juste)
At The Betsy are some 30 works in various media representing the past ten years of Duval-Carrié’s career. It is meant to “echo,” rather than duplicate, the works in Venice, the artist and curator agree. Most were created exclusively for the hotel. They include paintings, engravings, video, and lightboxes.
There’s a luminous series of royal blue engravings presented with ornate flourishes, recalling styles favored by the French aristocracy. Some portray figures integral to the early history of the Haitian republic. And yet these engravings are informed by the artist’s signature subversive irony, incorporating French aristocratic styles to elevate Haitians bent on destroying French colonial power.
In the darkened BBar, 26 light boxes line the walls. They glow with striking images inspired by Haitian culture and history. Their abundant color is amplified by the presence of the BBar’s mirrored ceiling, and, as a result, at first it may seem that 52 lightboxes dominate the bar, creating an astonishing, immersive experience.
Edouard Duval-Carrié, “Damballah,” mixed media sculpture, 2026. “Damballa” is a 3-D printed version of his bronze sculpture on view in Venice. It represents the Vodou spirit of wisdom and peace, symbolized by serpents. (Photo by Carl Philipe Juste)
The tone throughout is both celebratory and defiant.
It’s defiant, says the artist, because “I’m always trying to redress the history of Haiti, to present the history of Haiti the way I see it.”
The country remains shaped by its historic slave uprising against French colonizers, becoming the world’s first free Black republic in 1804. For gaining independence, it was harshly punished financially.
What insights did Duval-Carrié bring home from Venice? He says the experience underscored that “It was time for the world to realize that Africa did have something to say. I mean, the influence of Africa in the modern world is evident everywhere, especially in the Americas.”
At The Betsy Hotel are some 30 works in various media representing the past ten years of Eduoard Duval-Carrié’s career including “Diamond Sirene,” portraying a mermaid. She’s the lwa, or spirit, of the sea, thought to control whether oceans are tranquil or stormy. (Photo by Carl Philipe Juste)
The exhibit at the Betsy, says Juste, is “very defiant because the dialogue we have in this country currently is the denial of that history or the burying of that history.”
For the artist to be among those chosen to be part of this Venice Biennale was a “radical decision,” placing “African culture in the European setting,” Juste says. In the Renaissance, Venice was “the center of the Western world.” Showing art in Venice imbued with ties to Haiti and Africa, he continues, is “like equating Africa with the same sense of importance globally.”
As curator, he aimed to celebrate Duval-Carrié’s “pathway to Venice, his commitment to his craft, to his art.” The goal was to create a “palette” of glorious colors and textures reflecting the artist’s expansive practice. In that practice, the sacred arts of Haitian Vodou function as both lens and language, resonant with symbolism and multiple deities.
At The Betsy, several works directly evoke Vodou. “The Diamond Sirene” portrays a mermaid, floating in intensely blue water, her excessively large tail hovering like a weapon or anchor. She’s the lwa, or spirit, of the sea, thought to control whether oceans are tranquil or stormy. “Damballa” is a 3-D printed version of his bronze sculpture on view in Venice. It represents the Vodou spirit of wisdom and peace, symbolized by serpents.
Other works move forward to the present by alluding to a despoiled environment. In “Soucouyant Blue,” Duval-Carrié reinvents a blood-sucking creature prevalent in Caribbean folklore with flamboyant lesions recalling toxic bacteria. The bleak shop drawing “Ode to the Everglades” is more dirge than ode.
In “Soucouyant Blue,” Edouard Duval-Carrié reinvents a blood-sucking creature prevalent in Caribbean folklore with flamboyant lesions recalling toxic bacteria. (Photo by Carl Philipe Juste)
The Betsy Orb supercharges his art with South Beach audacity and AI animation. During the day the colorless Orb suggests an egg on steroids, incongruously suspended behind the Betsy over the alleyway at 14th Street. It is actually an ingenious passageway linking the hotel to the neighboring Betsy-owned Carlton Hotel. But at night the Orb is designed to radiate a video projection pulsing with Technicolor luster.
To produce the video projection, Juste says he used clips of Duval-Carrié’s art animated with AI, enhancing the video with AI generated music “so his work literally comes alive,” he says.
The exhibit has been accompanied by free programs, coordinated by the Betsy’s Writer’s Room led by Deborah Putzik Briggs and FIU Public Humanities Lab director Rebecca Friedman. At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22 is a cocktail reception at the Carlton Hotel followed by an 8 p.m. panel discussion “The Power & Realities of Collecting Haitian Art” at the Betsy gallery. Panelists are Duval-Carrié, New York University professor Edward J. Sullivan, and Pérez Art Museum Miami director Franklin Sirmans. Moderator is Rebecca Friedman.
Curator Carl Juste , says he used clips of Duval-Carrié’s art animated with AI, enhancing the video with AI generated music for the projections on The Betsy’s outdoor Orb. (Photo by Carl Philipe Juste)
After “From Venice with Love” closes at the Betsy, a new version of the exhibit moves to Little Haiti Cultural Center. Opening Friday, Dec. 4, this version will be significantly different from the Betsy’s exhibit, says Juste, who wants to bring Duval-Carrié’s accomplishments back home to the Haitian community. The artist’s studio will be recreated inside the center’s gallery, sharing company with works by artists Duval-Carrié admires as well as examples of his own art.
More versions of “From Venice with Love,” Juste adds, are in the planning stage for other Miami-Dade County communities.
“It’s not going to be the same experience at all locations,” he explains. “The attempt to connect with a community will come not only from Edouard’s work but the way he has engaged with that community through his art.
If we don’t engage with each other and try to see where we share common ground, we’re more apt to be engaged in erasure of each other’s culture. That common ground is so important.”
WHAT: “From Venice with Love,” an exhibition by Edouard Duval-Carrié
WHERE: The Betsy Hotel, 1440 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach
WHEN: Open 24 hours daily. Through Thursday, Nov. 15, 2026.
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.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
In “The Magic of Miami Beach,” artist and curator emerita Lea Nickless uses historical photographs, paintings and coral to look beneath the city’s familiar image at the Miami Beach Regional Library.
Written By Miguel Sirgado October 7, 2026 at 10:34 PM
Deering Estate presents “High Tide Low Tide,” an exhibition and series of immersive experiences by Miami artist Mette Tommerup, opening Saturday, Oct 10 through Sunday, Nov. 8. (Photo by Pedro Wazzan)
At Deering Estate, blue canvases stretch across a waterfront lawn, others extend among mango trees, while still more create a canvas shelter large enough for visitors to step inside.
And that is only the beginning.
Over the course of a month, Miami-based artist Mette Tommerup’s “High Tide Low Tide” will continually take on new forms.
Opening Saturday, Oct. 10, and running through Sunday, Nov. 8, the project unfolds across Deering Estate in “waves,” moving among installation, painting, sculpture, performance art and theater before ending with an open mic event that turns the final evening over to the public.
Performance, Mette Tommerup, “High Tide Low Tide,” 2026. (Photo by the artist)
She sees the work, including the different “waves,” as something that changes over time, much like the water that surrounds the historic property on Biscayne Bay.
“The tide is not an abstraction here,” Tommerup says. “It’s physically present and continually changing at the edge of the site.”
Liliam Dominguez, head curator at Deering Estate who has lived in Miami for more than 30 years, had the relationship between art and location in mind when she invited Tommerup to develop a site-specific installation.
Dominguez has followed Tommerup’s work for more than 20 years, particularly her large-scale installations, and the curator saw the property as a setting where that practice could engage directly with the natural environment.
“I thought Deering Estate would be a fantastic backdrop,” Dominguez says.
Public interventions are at the center of “High Tide Low Tide” inspired by the rhythms of the sea. (Photo by the artist)
Tommerup chose water as the starting point, Dominguez says, building on her earlier work while developing something new for the site.
For the artist, who says she is drawn to creating on a large scale, the tide works on two levels. At high tide, the surface can appear calm and ordered. As the water recedes, it exposes what lies underneath. She sees a parallel in the creative process and in the ways people present themselves to the world.
“It is absolutely a metaphor for the creative process,” she says.
It also continues a question Tommerup has explored for years: what happens when a painting leaves the wall?
In earlier projects, she has submerged paintings in the ocean, buried canvases in the earth and exposed them to the elements, allowing water, soil, air and chance to alter them.
Jessica Freites, performance artist, will perform as “The Tide” at the opening “Sphere” on Saturday, Oct. 10. (Photo courtesy of Jessica Freites)
With “High Tide Low Tide,” the canvas takes on new roles. It becomes landscape, sculpture, shelter and, eventually, theatrical set, character and chorus.
“I’m increasingly interested in painting as something with a life rather than an object with an ending,” Tommerup says.
For the first time, Tommerup is also exhibiting an installation outdoors. She has made work outside before, surrendering canvases to water, weather and other natural forces, but displaying an installation in the landscape brings a new degree of unpredictability.
Inside a museum, she says, an artwork inevitably acquires a certain preciousness. Outdoors, the artist has less control over it. That unpredictability takes on particular meaning at Deering Estate, where land and water are part of the work rather than simply its backdrop.
THE WAVES
The first two waves unfold outdoors on Saturday, Oct. 10. In “Sphere,” movement artists Jessica Freites and Kathinka Chambers activate a large blue sculptural form and surrounding canvas elements on the waterfront lawn. In “Between Tides,” blue paintings transform the pathways into temporary channels visitors can walk through.
Kathinka Chambers will perform as “The Tender” and interact with the canvases at the opening Saturday, Oct. 10 at Deering Estate. (Photo by the artist)
“Shelter” carries the work into the mango grove, where a 14-foot-long blue canvas structure extends among the trees, where visitors will be able to enter it. “Shelter” and other various pieces will remain in place through Sunday, Nov. 8.
“I really wanted that duration,” Tommerup says. “I didn’t want the project to exist only as an event that happens and then it’s gone.”
She describes the result as “an evolving installation throughout the space,” one that visitors may encounter even when no performance is taking place.
Water also connects two places central to Tommerup’s life. She grew up in Denmark, a country of islands and coastlines where the sea has long shaped daily life, and has spent decades in Coconut Grove, another place defined by its relationship to the water.
“The waterways, the sea — they tie everyone together,” she says.
In South Florida, an event called “King Tide” inevitably carries environmental associations. Tommerup acknowledges this but says they are not the focus of the project.
“It is not the core of my work, but it is intentionally open to that understanding,” she says.
FROM CANVAS TO STAGE
The third wave, on Saturday, Oct. 24, takes Tommerup into uncharted territory and is something she’s wanted to explore for years: theater.
She had long imagined using her large canvases in a theatrical production but had never found the right circumstances. Then, while exploring Deering Estate, she discovered its Visitor Center Theater.
The discovery led to a conceptual theatrical piece written by Tommerup and guest-directed by South Florida theater artist Brandon Urrutia, artistic director and co-founder of Miami Lakes-based experimental theater company LakeHouseRanchDotPNG.
Brandon Urrutia, artistic director of LakehouseRanchDotPNG, is guest directing the play, “High Tide Low Tide,” a collaboration between the artist and LakehouseRanchDotPNG, at the Visitor Center Theater, from 6 to 8 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 24. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Urrutia)
Urrutia was drawn to the physical possibilities of Tommerup’s script.
“I love movement,” Urrutia says. “I think in movement. I speak in movement.”
For the director, the challenge is making sure the canvases do not simply become scenery.
“How are the canvases responding to the space as characters?” Urrutia says. “If they’re responding, they’re moving. If they’re moving, how are they moving? Why are they moving?”
The goal, Urrutia says, is to “activate the piece with the text and the performance” rather than stage a play surrounded by art.
The collaboration adds another level to Tommerup’s desire to give up control. Nature is unpredictable. Actors can rehearse. Theater gives Tommerup and Urrutia a structure while still leaving room for movement and change.
“There has to be trust,” Urrutia says.
THE FINAL ACT
For the final wave, Tommerup opens the project to the public.
“King Tide,” on Sunday, Nov. 8, begins with a sunset gathering on the lawn before moving into the Visitor Center Theater for an open mic. Emceed by Amaranta Mattie —the Miami-born and raised Deering Contemporary curator— participants can contribute poetry, music, storytelling or dance, with each given up to five minutes.
Sphere, 2026, “High Tide Low Tide,” steel and canvas, 60 in. diameter. (Photo by the artist)
The progression is deliberate. The project begins with Tommerup’s canvases in the landscape, passes through the bodies of performers and actors and ends with the audience contributing something of its own.
“Now it’s your turn,” Mattie says.
The open mic, she says, “gives them permission to be creative in a realm where, most of the time, artwork is served to you and that is the end of the process.”
For the final event, Tommerup plans to do something deceptively simple.
Listen.
“Instead of ending with a statement,” she says, “I’d rather end with listening.”
WHAT: “High Tide Low Tide,” an exhibition and series of performances by Mette Tommerup
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.
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
In “The Magic of Miami Beach,” artist and curator emerita Lea Nickless uses historical photographs, paintings and coral to look beneath the city’s familiar image at the Miami Beach Regional Library.
Written By Megan Fitzgerald October 5, 2026 at 12:28 PM
Visitors explore the modeling and rigging sections of “The Science Behind Pixar,” a traveling exhibition coming to the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, opening Saturday, Oct. 10. (Photo by Michael Malyszko)
Buzz Lightyear may have doubts about humans and space travel, but when it comes to bringing Pixar characters to life, filmmakers take technology to infinity and beyond.
“The Science Behind Pixar” exhibit, opening Saturday, Oct. 10 at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, shows visitors that creating a Pixar film takes not only creativity, but also some pretty sophisticated technology.
Sulley and Mike from “Monsters, Inc.” are among the familiar Pixar characters featured throughout “The Science Behind Pixar,” which explores the technology and artistry behind the studio’s films. (Photo by Michael Malyszko)
Through the exhibition, visitors explore the filmmaking techniques behind Pixar favorites including “Toy Story,” “Finding Nemo,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “The Incredibles” and “Brave.”
Analisa Duran, Knight vice president of science education at Frost Science, says that the exhibit offers a behind-the-scenes look at how creativity, engineering, art and math bring these movies to life.
“And that really was the perfect fit for us. We are a science museum and it’s part of our mission to bring experiences that get people excited about STEM to the museum and this exhibit is definitely going to do that,” Duran says.
More than 50 interactive experiences introduce visitors to parts of the filmmaking process through familiar Pixar characters including Buzz Lightyear, Dory, Mike and Sulley, Edna Mode and WALL-E.
Michael Horvath, vice president of exhibits at the Museum of Science in Boston, helped develop “The Science Behind Pixar” in collaboration with Pixar Animation Studios. He says activities such as rigging help visitors understand the complexity behind creating an animated character. Rigging determines how a digital model can move.
One gallery experience lets visitors manipulate a rigged version of Jessie’s face from “Toy Story.”
“They can move her eyes in every direction and change her eyelids and just see how much articulation can be done in one character, which is a toy, by the way,” says Horvath. “It’s not even a real face, but it makes you appreciate the level of detail that Pixar puts into a character, and you get to play and sometimes break those models.”
Taking a complicated filmmaking technique like rigging and turning it into something that museum visitors can understand and try for themselves was a challenge facing the team that created “The Science Behind Pixar” in 2015. The idea for the exhibit followed another collaboration between the Museum of Science in Boston and a Hollywood film studio.
In 2005, Horvath says they launched “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination,” which was an exhibit developed with Lucasfilm that later led to the “The Science Behind Pixar” exhibit.
An exhibit display featuring characters from “The Incredibles” helps explain rigging, the process that allows animators to control how digital characters move and pose. (Photo by Michael Malyszko)
That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibit “Pixar: 20 Years of Animation,” focusing on the art of Pixar. But Horvath says that exhibit left the science and technology side of the studio’s work untold.
This gap brought Pixar and the Museum of Science in Boston together to figure out how to turn the studio’s highly technical, largely digital filmmaking process into a museum experience.
“On our end, we were like what could we do? What would visitors do? Is this experience that we’re making better than a TV documentary,” Horvath says. “So, the idea of making things physical and real and also making them experiential and interactive is really important to us.”
Horvath says that there were many iterations of designs and prototypes developed to get ready for the exhibit.
“We’d have meetings and say, ‘Hey, tell me more about this thing,’ and then we’d sort of go back and forth and we would develop things,” he says.
Horvath says that Pixar even had to go back into older “Brave” files and change parameters so that visitors would be able to see what happens when simulations are altered, allowing people to turn off the simulation controlling the characters’ clothing and hair.
“It’s just so fun to see clothing not drape the way it should drape, and just turn, basically, into paper doll clothes,” he says. “So, to get the scenes where the clothing was wrong or the hair wasn’t right was just doing crazy anti-gravity things.”
Horvath explains that Pixar can also create an entire field of grass by changing parameters on a parabola, which is a U-shaped mathematical curve. This concept turned into an exhibit element where visitors could manipulate the parameters themselves and create different fields of grass.
He shares that during prototyping, he watched a young girl view the video about the blades of grass in “Brave.” Afterward, he noticed that she had written something on her hand.
Dory from “Finding Nemo” is featured in “The Science Behind Pixar,” where visitors can experiment with lighting effects and learn how Pixar creates believable underwater scenes. (Photo by Michael Malyszko)
“And, then we asked her, ‘What did you write on your hand?’” Horvath says. “And she said, ‘I wrote the word ‘parabola’ because I wanted to go home and Google it and find out more about it.’”
This encounter led the team to include more information explaining what a parabola is and how it relates to computational thinking, he says.
Now, 11 years after the exhibition debuted in Boston, one of two versions of the traveling exhibit comes to Frost Science. The exhibit has toured internationally and nationally since 2015.
Horvath says Frost’s large gallery allows the exhibition to be seen much as it was originally designed, rather than divided among smaller spaces.
“I think the visitors will really love to see it there. I’m excited to see it there.”
Sulley and Mike from “Monsters, Inc.” are featured in the rigging section of “The Science Behind Pixar,” where visitors learn how animators create movement in digital characters. (Photo by Michael Malyszko)
The exhibit is designed for all ages, with some experiences created specifically to engage younger visitors. Horvath recalls watching two adults play with one of those activities, using magnetic 3D parts to assemble a robot in the modeling section.
“I was like, yep, we did it. We made it for little kids and big kids,” he says.
Frost will also put its own touch on the traveling exhibit. A live clownfish aquarium will greet visitors in the foyer before they enter the exhibition, bringing “Finding Nemo” into the experience.
The museum is also creating a Pixar Pass that will connect concepts from the exhibit to other parts of Frost, including the planetarium and aquarium.
Duran hopes the experience continues for families after they leave the museum, whether they talk about what they learned on the drive home or rewatch a favorite Pixar film with a better understanding of what went into creating it.
“They didn’t just create fire by pressing a button, right? They created a simulation based on code,” Duran says.
WHAT: “The Science Behind Pixar”
WHERE: Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, 1101 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday through Sunday. Opens Saturday, Oct. 10 through Sunday, April 11, 2027.
COST: Included with museum admission, $29.95 for adults, $24.95 for children ages 4-11 and free for children ages 3 and under, museum members and active military/veterans with identification.
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.
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
In “The Magic of Miami Beach,” artist and curator emerita Lea Nickless uses historical photographs, paintings and coral to look beneath the city’s familiar image at the Miami Beach Regional Library.
Lea Nickless Reveals the History Beneath ‘The Magic of Miami Beach’
Written By Erin Parish September 27, 2026 at 10:52 PM
Installation view of Lea Nickless’s “The Magic of Miami Beach” at the Miami Beach Regional Library, where photographs, works on paper and archival materials explore the area’s natural and developed landscape. (Photo by Erin Parish)
Seeing Miami Beach as a paradise means overlooking some of the work that made it look that way. Before the hotels and beaches became their defining images, it was an inhospitable mangrove and a mosquito-filled swamp. The population consisted of workers transforming the strip of land to be habitable, even desirable, reforming the cluster into a model of hospitality.
Lea Nickless’s exhibition, “The Magic of Miami Beach,” looks at that history through photographs, paintings, source materials and a fragment of brain coral. On view at the Miami Beach Regional Library, the show takes its title from a 1938 book by Charles Edgar Nash. It asks visitors to look beyond the finished landscape and consider both the people who changed it and the natural world that was already there.
Archival materials, including “A Pictorial History of the Development of Miami Beach, Florida,” are displayed alongside works by Lea Nickless in “The Magic of Miami Beach.” (Photo by Erin Parish)
The photographs are presented to be factual, while the paintings open onto everything that photography does not contain: geological time, microscopic life, and the invisible structures beneath the surface.
The result is a multimedia exhibition which exists between the recorded and the imagined.
Nickless, an artist and curator emerita at the Wolfsonian–FIU, has spent decades working with historical objects and researching their stories
She retains the physical evidence of the landscape that preceded the city. In one image, a forlorn man appears as if swallowed by a tangle of trunks and roots. In another, a solitary figure stands in uneasy contrast to heavy machinery.
The entrance to Lea Nickless’s “The Magic of Miami Beach,” on view at the Miami Beach Regional Library through Nov. 5. (Photo by Erin Parish)
The artist complicates the photographs further by painting over them with ink and watercolor. The division between photographic image and abstraction produces a tension between evidence and the imagination. The large works seem to be on the verge of becoming ghostly, bleached by the same relentless Florida sunlight that makes Miami Beach so visually seductive.
That tension becomes increasingly important as Nickless moves beneath the visible landscape. A sample of Brain (brain) coral sits within a vitrine. With its millipede-like textures and fossil associations, it recalls another Miami hidden beneath the vegetation. Coral is simultaneously biological material, geological record, and evidence of the physical foundation upon which the city was constructed.
The coral, presented as an object of knowledge, also introduces another aspect of Nickless’s project: the impulse to extract nature from its surroundings, classify it, preserve it, and display it. The brain coral becomes an artifact of the very landscape that development has transformed.
“Drift” pushes the exhibition downward. In the series of small works measuring 11 by 15 inches, Nickless imagines microscopic forms resembling cells and bacteria. The scale shifts from landscape to microcosm. Disparate shapes occupy the same field as though they belong to a larger system of coexistence.
Coral specimens, historic photographs and Lea Nickless’s “Bleaching Brain Coral” are brought together in a display examining Miami Beach’s natural history and development. (Photo by Erin Parish)
Hands are prominent in “Inversion 2” and “Inversion 3,” bringing the exhibition’s concern with labor back into focus. Nickless moves between recognizable images and abstraction throughout the show. The smaller black-and-white photographs share imagery with larger works, encouraging viewers to look again at details they may have passed over.
There are moments when the work recalls Charles Burchfield in its sensitivity to the psychological possibilities of landscape, although Nickless is less interested in nature as an expression of individual emotion than in the systems operating beneath it.
“Night Bloom,” with its African baobab, brings a contemporary image into the exhibition. The city is presented instead as one point within a much larger system of movement, migration, geology, ecology, and human intervention.
Historical materials gathered in “A Pictorial History of the Development of Miami Beach, Florida,” presented in books and glass cases include a QR code, offering visitors another way to explore the people and places behind the work.
Lea Nickless’s “Night Bloom, African Baobab,” a pigment-ink work, is included in “The Magic of Miami Beach.” (Photo by Erin Parish)
For someone who has never lived here, Miami Beach can appear almost absurdly beautiful. To someone who knows Miami-Dade, the mangroves, coral and photographs of workers and machinery reveal more of what shaped that view. Nickless brings the labor behind the familiar landscape into focus while asking visitors to look more closely at the natural world beneath it.
Nickless’s achievement is to make that concealed labor visible, an exhibition that is educational as well as aesthetically beautiful.
On Saturday, Oct. 10, from 10 a.m. to noon, a panel discussion presented by the Miami-Dade Public Library System, “Building Paradise: Bahamian Labor and the Making of Miami,” will feature Nicklees, along with Sharony Andrews Green, historian and author, and Gabriella Roman, community programs manager, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Oscar Fuentes will moderate the discussion. The program will begin with a tour of the exhibition, followed by opening remarks by The Honorable Tyson C. McKenzie, Consul General of The Bahamas in Miami.
WHAT: “The Magic of Miami Beach,” an exhibition by Lea Nickless WHERE: Miami Beach Regional Library, 227 22nd St., Miami Beach WHEN: Library hours are 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Through Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. COST: Free INFORMATION: (305) 535-4219 or mdpls.org
ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
Five Artists Explore Excess and Care at The CAMP Gallery
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral September 22, 2026 at 8:04 PM
Installation view of “In Need of Temperance” at The CAMP Gallery, where works by Amanda Kate Walker, Katie Davis and Monica Czukerberg consider contemporary appetites, excess and the question of restraint through distinctly different visual languages. (Photo courtesy of The CAMP Gallery.)
There is something wonderfully chaotic about Amanda Kate Walker’s “Family Dinner.”
Bodies, faces, plates, patterns and fragments jostle for attention across a raw canvas that Walker has painted, cut, collaged and stitched together. The scene is recognizable—a family gathered around food—but order has given way to abundance. Faces overlap with dishes and domestic objects, while the visible seams interrupt the painted surface. There is almost too much to take in at once.
That visual excess provides a fitting entrance into “In Need of Temperance,” one of two exhibitions currently occupying The CAMP Gallery in North Miami.
Amanda Kate Walker’s densely populated, stitched-and-collaged canvases command one side of “In Need of Temperance,” while works by Mabelin Castellanos introduce a quieter vocabulary of thread and cloth nearby. (Photo courtesy of The CAMP Gallery.)
Across the gallery, “Social Proof of Care” changes the pace. Here, Amy Putman and Miami artist Mabelin Castellanos use textiles to explore relationships through materials that have been touched, stitched, exchanged and preserved.
The two exhibitions, on view through Saturday, Oct. 3, are distinct, but experiencing them together creates an intriguing conversation. “In Need of Temperance” brings together Walker, Katie Davis and Miami-based Monica Czukerberg, whose approaches range from densely populated stitched paintings to small, carefully arranged works and embroidered organic forms.
Walker approaches the idea of excess through humor and accumulation.
Her four large works—“Family Dinner,” “Mermaid,” “Might Makes Right” and “Sunday Drive”—are made from acrylic-painted pieces stitched and collaged onto raw canvas. Their visible seams give the works a handmade physicality, while their crowded compositions resemble theatrical scenes populated by unruly characters.
“Family Dinner” makes the exhibition’s concern with excess especially tangible. The canvas is crowded almost to its edges. People, animals, plates of food and domestic details overlap, with one element competing with another for attention. A subject usually associated with comfort and togetherness becomes visually overwhelming. Rather than illustrating temperance directly, Walker makes abundance difficult to ignore.
Davis approaches desire from a very different direction.
Katie Davis’ “The Algorithm Knows” series turns digitally cultivated desires into tactile objects, using textiles, paint and colored pencil to explore the increasingly intimate relationship between algorithms and what we want. (Photo courtesy of The CAMP Gallery)
Eight modestly scaled works from Davis’ ‘The Algorithm Knows’ series hang together in a precise arrangement. Made with textiles, paint and colored pencil, the works depict familiar objects and desires—a swimming pool, flowers, horses, a patio umbrella and even Wiener dogs.
Their titles change the way those otherwise ordinary images register. “The Algorithm Knows You Want A Pool,” “The Algorithm Knows You Still Think About Horses” and “The Algorithm Knows You Love Wiener Dogs” recall the oddly specific advertisements and recommendations that can appear after an online search or moment of curiosity.
The humor comes from recognition. Davis takes the familiar experience of having a preference returned as a digital recommendation and gives it a physical presence. In an exhibition concerned with restraint, the works introduce a contemporary complication: desire can now be continually observed and placed back in front of the consumer.
Czukerberg provides a quieter visual counterpoint.
Her “Dentro De Mi” and “Vida” combine acrylic and oil painting with embroidery, with the canvases hand-stitched onto wood panels. Flowers and organic forms dominate the works, while irregular contours and stitched surfaces give them an object-like presence that distinguishes them from the paintings nearby.
Moving into “Social Proof of Care,” the atmosphere shifts again.
Amy Putman and Mabelin Castellanos both work with textiles, but their approaches are strikingly different.
An installation view of “Social Proof of Care” shows Amy Putman’s tactile portraits alongside works by Mabelin Castellanos. The exhibition considers care through materials and gestures associated with connection, memory and the handmade. (Photo courtesy of The CAMP Gallery)
Putman’s portraits are tactile accumulations. Fabric, yarn, buttons and safety pins gather around human figures; some works also incorporate bullet shell casings. In “Phoebe,” wool, silk and linen handwoven by Putman’s mother, Eileen Goldman, become part of the work.
The materials reward close looking. Buttons and pins are not hidden within the construction but remain visible across the surfaces. The safety pin, an ordinary object designed to fasten separate pieces together, takes on particular visual weight when repeated across a human figure. Rather than painting a portrait solely through likeness, Putman builds one through layers of material.
Castellanos works with cotton and rayon thread on muslin, creating scenes that possess the immediacy of drawings despite being sewn.
Her subjects are deliberately ordinary.
There is a doctor’s appointment. Three people knit. A mother embraces a child. Elsewhere, a small bird appears on the opposite side of a barrier. The spareness of Castellanos’ compositions stands in sharp contrast to Walker’s crowded canvases in the neighboring exhibition.
In “Doctor’s Appointment,” two figures sit beside one another on a sofa. There is no dramatic action. The significance of the scene comes instead from proximity: one person has accompanied another and remains seated alongside them.
Mabelin Castellanos transforms cotton and rayon thread on muslin into intimate scenes of everyday life, where companionship, family and small acts of presence become subjects worthy of attention. (Photo courtesy of The CAMP Gallery)
The use of thread slows that ordinary moment down. A contour that could be made quickly with pencil instead has to be constructed through cloth, giving physical weight to a scene that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
The contrast between the two exhibitions is clearest when moving physically between the gallery spaces. Walker fills the canvas with competing figures and objects. Davis isolates recognizable desires into eight small works. Czukerberg turns toward embroidered natural forms. Putman builds portraits from accumulated materials, while Castellanos pares human interaction down to stitched figures and simple gestures.
“Doctor’s Appointment” is among the quietest works in either exhibition. Two people remain seated together, surrounded by little else. After the crowded table of “Family Dinner” and Davis’ orderly inventory of algorithmic wants, Castellanos’ modest scene changes the rhythm of the visit.
Nothing monumental is happening.
One person is simply there with another.
And Castellanos gives that ordinary act enough space—and enough time in thread—to be noticed.
WHAT: “In Need of Temperance,” featuring Amanda Kate Walker, Katie Davis and Monica Czukerberg, and “Social Proof of Care,” featuring Amy Putman and Mabelin Castellanos.
WHERE: The CAMP Gallery, 791–793 NE 125th St., North Miami
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. Through Oct. 3, 2026..
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.
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
Frost Art Museum Revisits Landmark Exhibition of Modern Cuban Painters
Written By Dennys Matos September 12, 2026 at 6:04 PM
Tené Portocarrero. “Figure for an Imaginary Mythology,” 1945. Gouache on paper mounted on cardboard. 36 x 27 inches. Courtesy of Latin Art Core. (Photograph by Rogelio López Marín “Gory”)
Revisiting an art exhibition means reconsidering its original concept and the works of the artists it featured from a new perspective.
“Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited,” on view through Sunday, Oct. 18 at Miami’s Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, is a must-see in a city with a sizable Cuban population.
Originally titled “Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York,” the exhibition was first presented at Bonhams’ New York headquarters for a month beginning in February.
The word “Revisited” was added specifically for the Miami edition to distinguish this new version from the one previously shown in New York.
Both, however, draw inspiration from the landmark 1944 exhibition Modern Cuban Painters at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s founding director, and Cuban art critic and curator José Gómez Sicre.
By the time MoMA presented the exhibition, Cuba was experiencing a period of renewed cultural confidence and artistic innovation. The country had been operating under the 1940 Constitution for four years, following the 1934 repeal of the Platt Amendment, whose inclusion in the 1901 Constitution had long undermined Cuban independence and sovereignty in its relationship with the United States.
“Modern Cuban Painters” (MoMA, New York, 1944) brought together 13 Cuban painters, including figures from two generations of the country’s modern art movement, including artists from the first avant-garde (1920–1930) and the second (1940–1950). Barr distinguished between the two groups, referring to them as “the older generation” and “the young artists.”
Comparing the artist rosters, “Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited,” curated by Elizabeth T. Goizueta and Cristina Figueroa Vives, features Carlos Enríquez, Amelia Peláez and Fidelio Ponce de León from the first avant-garde, along with Mariano Rodríguez, Mario Carreño, Cundo Bermúdez, René Portocarrero and Roberto Diago from the second.
One notable addition is Wifredo Lam, who was not included in the 1944 MoMA exhibition.
This edition at the Frost Art Museum is far more expansive and in-depth than Bonhams.
“With larger galleries, we have the wonderful opportunity to add more works—whether from the original MoMA exhibition or from the leading New York galleries of the 1940s—as well as photographs and letters,” Goizueta said.
The expanded scope also was what prompted the addition in the exhibition’s title.
“With so many new gems,” Goizueta added, “we realized that the character of this second exhibition had changed—for the better, I dare say—and that change is reflected in the new title.”
The exhibition also incorporates previously unseen materials from the José Gómez Sicre Visual Archive.
“Moreover, it allows us to bring together, eight decades later, a significant group of works, while incorporating previously unseen materials from the José Gómez Sicre Visual Archive—photographs, correspondence, and scrapbooks—that enrich our understanding of the context in which these works were produced and circulated,” Vives said.
The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see in Miami works such as Amelia Peláez’s “Marpacífico” (1936) and “The Balcony” (1942); Cundo Bermúdez’s “Portrait of María Luisa Gómez Mena” (1943); and Antonio Gattorno’s “Self-Portrait” (1944) and “Portrait of Concha” (1941).
Also on view are important works by Mario Carreño (“Goddess of the Sea,” 1943), Wifredo Lam (“Le Sorcier de l’océan (Alafi Incam / Ogun Ferraille),” 1947), Mariano Rodríguez (“The Breakfast,” 1943, and “Gladioli,” 1942), and René Portocarrero (“Spring,” 1940), as well as signature works by Carlos Enríquez (“Nude,” 1940) and Fidelio Ponce de León (“Saint Ignatius of Loyola,” 1940).
Taken together, these elements broaden the interpretive horizon of “Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited” and shed new light on the Cuban avant-garde movement.
In this sense, the first avant-garde constructed a modern vision of Cuba, one whose The first Cuban avant-garde helped shape a modern vision of the country’s national identity, viewing it as a cultural and social achievement. Two influential movements, “Revista de Avance” (1927) and the Grupo Minorista (1923), played central roles in developing that vision.
“Revista de Avance” challenged the prevailing academic artistic traditions rooted in colonialism, while the Grupo Minorista embraced the idea that art and politics were inseparable. The group opposed Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship and U.S. imperialist interventionism and, in many respects, aligned itself with 20th-century Cuban political and revolutionary thought.
Although the first and second avant-gardes differed in style and artistic approach, both explored themes including mestizaje, landscape, rural and domestic life, popular culture, the relationship between the individual and society, desire, solitude and Afro-Cuban identity. Together, these subjects helped define and express a modern sense of Cuban national identity.
Those themes were shaped in part by international artistic influences, but Cuban artists transformed them through their own experiences, subjects and visual language.
Barr emphasized that modern Cuban painting succeeded in blending influences from Paris, Mexico, the Renaissance and the Baroque with what he described as “native Cuban elements.”
Goizueta said the exhibition “takes a broader view: recognizing and bringing to light the importance of that exhibition, along with others, during the 1940s, the difficult years of the world war and its aftermath.”
Rather than simply recreating the 1944 MoMA exhibition, the Frost presentation expands the story through additional artworks, photographs, correspondence and archival material.
Seen together, the paintings and archival materials offer a broader view of how Cuban artists of different generations developed a modern visual language while exploring questions of national identity, everyday life, landscape, race and culture.
The political climate that culminated in the 1940 Constitution was embraced by much of Cuba’s artistic and intellectual community as part of a broader quest for democracy and modernization. More than 80 years later, “Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited” offers a chance to reconsider that cultural moment and the artists who helped define it.
ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING
A series of special lectures are planned surrounding the exhibition. On Tuesday, Sept. 15, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., “Revisiting Modern Cuban Painters: From Archive to Exhibition, features a panel discussion with Elizabeth T. Goizueta, Cristina Figueroa Vives, and María Martínez-Cañas about the roles of archives and primary sources in researching, writing, and exhibiting the history of Cuban modernism.
Mario Carreño. “Goddess of the Sea,” 1943. Duco, seashells, sea fan, and textile collage on panel. 37¼ x 46½ inches. Courtesy of Latin Art Core. (Photograph by Rogelio López Marín “Gory”)
The panelists will discuss the research and writing processes behind the project and the ways archival materials helped reconstruct the artistic exchanges between Havana and New York during the 1940s. The conversation will consider the José Gómez Sicre Visual Archive and its integration into the exhibition. The event is free, but an RSVP is required.
On Thursday, Sept. 24 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., “Curator’s Cut,” a series of daytime conversations, features curator Cristina Figueroa Vives, co-curator of “Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited,” and Miami-based artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello discuss the role of identity and memory in his paintings and the Caribbean influences that have shaped his practice. RSVP required.
WHAT: “Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisited.”
WHERE: The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum,10975 SW 17th St., Miami
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Through Oct. 18.
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
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
Written By Douglas Markowitz August 25, 2026 at 3:27 PM
“Count it All Joy!” brings together work from 15 Miami-area artists, all intended to evoke joyful feelings or express what the artist takes joy from at MiMi’s Green Space gallery through Thursday, Sept. 27. (Photo by Zachary Balber, courtesy of Green Space)
At MiMo’s Green Space gallery, a new exhibition places joy at its center, bringing together works that explore pleasure, optimism and delight.
Organized by curators Donnamarie Baptiste and Arsimmer McCoy, “Count it All Joy!” brings together work from 15 Miami-area artists, all intended to evoke joyful feelings or express what the artist takes joy from.
The show includes work in a variety of mediums, all giving distinct perspectives on the show’s theme and occasionally doubling as insights into the diverse backgrounds that cohabit in Miami.
Photographs taken in the Everglades by Maggie Steber and Lisette Morales show subjects cohabiting with nature. (Photo by Zachary Balber, courtesy of Green Space)
Photographs taken by Maggie Steber and Lisette Morales show people cohabiting with nature – women float and swim in still waters, a man looks out at the expanse of the Everglades – while Sophie Wong depicts scenes of Caribbean life in her paintings. An installation by Chinese-Panamanian artist MaiYap features sculpted mooncakes arranged in a traditional batea, or wooden tray, from Panama’s Bayano region, reflecting the artist’s heritage. And a quilted work by Genesis Moreno features a screenshotted TikTok video demonstrating the “butterfly hug,” a self-soothing technique; the video itself plays nearby on a monitor.
MaiYap’s installation features sculpted mooncakes served in an indigenous batea tray reflecting the artist’s Chinese Panamanian heritage. (Photo by Zachary Balber, courtesy of Green Space)
Baptiste and McCoy were both separately selected by Green Space to curate the show. Both were enticed by the theme, which they saw as providing an antidote to a zeitgeist dominated by politics.
“They wanted to activate the gallery space with works that were centered around joy and create this joyful space,” McCoy says. “Everybody feels a little uneasy, and they wanted to bring into the space a place of ease, a place that brings joy to folks.”
The two found their contrasting, yet compatible curatorial styles worked well together. McCoy treated selection more intuitively, selecting work that “moved her immediately.” Baptiste, meanwhile, took a more measured, research-based approach by visiting studios and having conversations with artists.
One of the largest artworks in the show comes curator Arsimmer McCoy, an “archive install” of furniture and other heirlooms from her grandmother’s living room. (Photo by Zachary Balber, courtesy of Green Space)
“I wanted it to be something where whoever walked in the room could take a look at something and either immediately connect with it or dig into the context a little deeper and find a bit of themselves in there,” she says. “And I think Arsimmer came from a point of, immediately as an artist, seeing something and feeling joy.”
One of the largest artworks in the show comes from McCoy herself, an “archive install” of furniture and other heirlooms from her grandmother’s living room. Decorated with items such as an ornate couch, a reclaimed-wood coffee table, and a CRT television stand complete with Disney films on VHS, the space is meant to evoke nostalgic memories of time spent in similar spaces, for the artist herself and for others. The installation is part of the Carol City Museum, a long-gestating project in which McCoy plans to transform her home in Miami Gardens into an arts and community institution.
“That installation is an homage to the joy that I find in iconography, the joy that I find in the archives,” McCoy says. “You can see those moments of rest, of connectivity, of love, of culture. And it’s also a little disruption of the white-walled gallery space as well, because I know people will gather in that space, and they will find themselves.”
Sophie Wong depicts scenes of Caribbean life in her paintings. (Photo by Zachary Balber, courtesy of Green Space)
McCoy says visitors have offered a variety of comments on the artwork and the comforting feelings it generated. “I had an elder hit me up and say ‘I just wanted to watch ‘Touched By An Angel’ with Della Reese in that room,’ it reminded me of my grandmother’s room,” she says. “And then we see younger folks who are like ‘Man, I remember that, the color of that carpet,’ or ‘I remember those photos, the obituaries.’”
Whether through McCoy’s nostalgic archive, Steber’s photos, or the self-soothing depicted in Moreno’s quilts, the works in “Count it All Joy!” prove that happiness can come from a variety of places, some more unexpected than others.
WHAT: “Count It All Joy!”
WHERE: Green Space, 7200 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
WHEN: noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday through Thursday, Sept. 27.
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
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
Milton Mizell’s Blackquetry, Black identity through the craft of marquetry
Written By Jonel Juste August 23, 2026 at 12:50 PM
“I Said I Love You” by Milton Mizell is one of the works featured in “Blackquetry” at CLAUG Creative Studio, Miami Shores. (Photo by Leesa Richards)
A clean slate awaiting inspiration and creativity to become something beautiful and meaningful. This is how marquetry artist Milton Mizell describes “Blackquetry,” his work that will be on view from Saturday, Aug. 22, to Wednesday, Sept. 30 at CLAUG Creative Studio in Miami Shores.
Marquetry is defined as the covering of the surface of a board or piece of furniture, either entirely or in part, with wooden veneers in the form of a skillfully applied design or picture. In the hands of Mizell, it becomes Blackquetry, Black identity expressed through the craft of marquetry.
“It is a visual language shaped from wood, memory, and cultural truth. The name reflects that union,” says Mizell. “It honors resilience, beauty, and ancestral storytelling while expanding the tradition into a space where Blackness is centered and celebrated.”
Miami-based artist Milton Mizell brings together marquetry, graphic design, and woodworking in his art. (Photo by Leesa Richards)
Mizell, who was born and raised in Miami, didn’t start his artistic career in woodworking. He studied fine art and graphic design and has been working as a graphic artist for many years. However, as a child, he used to watch his father — a jack of all trades — working on wood, fixing and building all kinds of things.
“That planted the seed. I returned to woodworking as an adult when burnout pushed me back toward making physical objects. Wood has been a constant thread, even before marquetry,” he says.
The artist’s journey has not been without challenges. In the past few years, aphasia has taken a toll on his communication skills, limiting his ability to speak, read and write. “However,” he said, “I continue to communicate powerfully through my art, demonstrating that creativity often speaks louder than words and that my intelligence, artistic vision, and passion for storytelling remain as strong as ever.”
The artist describes marquetry as moderately difficult, requiring patience, precision, and a steady hand.
“The Man in the Fedora Hat” by Milton Mizell (Photo by Gregory Reed)
“I admired marquetry for years, ” he says, “but only discovered my path into it when I bought a diode laser in 2023 and joined a weekly Zoom group. After a lifetime of drawing, I finally found a way to merge drawing with wood — everything clicked.”
Among Mizell’s woodworks are handcrafted boxes, keepsake boxes, jewelry boxes but most of all portraits whose subjects come from his community, his culture, and the stories that move him.
“Some portraits depict specific individuals whose presence or emotion I want to preserve; others represent broader aspects of Black identity, resilience, and humanity.”
The process begins with simplifying an image, almost like creating a painter’s palette. Mizell prints a full‑size poster, cuts every shape with the diode laser, a computer-controlled machine that cuts or engraves material with a concentrated beam of light, and assembles hundreds or thousands of pieces with tape.
“Then I create a three‑layer sandwich: veneer, MDF, veneer backer, pressed in a vacuum bag,” he explains. “Sanding is delicate because veneers vary in thickness, and dark dust can stain lighter woods. I dye my own veneers, so color penetrates deeply enough to survive sanding. Step by step, the face comes into view,” he adds.
“Ebony Portrait” by Milton Mizell (Photo by Leesa Richards)
Donnamarie Baptiste, a Miami-based arts producer and cultural strategist who consulted on “Blackquetry” and wrote its curatorial statement, sees the works as both painting and sculpture.
“When you see it, it’s so masterfully done. It’s almost hard to tell whether you’re looking at a painting or something else. Once you understand the process and see how it’s put together, you realize it’s quite sculpture in its essence. It’s sort of like a painting made of wood.”
Since Mizell is a graphic artist by trade, technology plays a central role in his marquetry. In fact, it is foundational, as Mizell puts it. “Adobe Illustrator has been part of my life for over 30 years, and CNC and laser tools allow me to translate digital design into cuttable sections. Technology maps the structure; craft gives it soul.”
For this exhibition, Mizell will show a total of 21 new original pieces and prints. His declared goal is to celebrate resilience, beauty, identity, and humanity — the aspects of Black life that often go unseen. “Blackquetry gives voice to the unspoken,” says the artist.
CLAUG’s resident artist and studio owner Carlos Andrade recalls that Mizell, after receiving a grant from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs was looking for a space for a solo exhibition. “He was having a hard time finding one. One day, he was walking by, and we connected right away,” he says.
About Mizell’s work, Andrade says, “I think it’s very powerful. When you’re standing in front of one of the portraits, you see the amount of details, and I think that makes an impression on people. You begin to understand the process, how tedious it is, and also the talent that Milton has as an artist.”
But beyond showcasing Mizell’s craftsmanship, the exhibition also tells the story of his personal journey.
“Dream Big” by Milton Mizell (Photo by Gregory Reed)
“Obviously,” Andrade says, “we want to showcase his work, but we also want to showcase his journey. Because of his condition, one of the best ways for him to communicate and connect with people is through his art,” he adds.
The artist is also the curator of Blackquetry. Curating his own work, Mizell says that means shaping how viewers encounter the pieces — guiding the rhythm, the scale, and the emotional arc. “It’s an opportunity to frame the craft, the stories, and the cultural context with intention. It’s both vulnerable and empowering: I’m presenting not just the art, but the journey behind it,” he says.
As a curator, he selected works that show the evolution of his voice, pieces that merge tradition with technology, and craft with culture. Each portrait was chosen for its grain, tone, and emotional resonance. “The arrangement highlights the layered construction, the narrative depth, and the diversity of identities represented. The goal was to create an experience that feels both intimate and monumental,” he says.
“Break of Dawn” by Milton Mizell. (Photo by Leesa Richards)
When people walk out of Blackquetry, especially Black viewers, Mizell hopes they feel seen.
“I want them to carry a sense of pride and connection, knowing these portraits honor the beauty and humanity within our community. I hope they leave feeling uplifted, affirmed, and part of the narrative.”
WHAT: “Blackquetry: My Fusion of Marquetry and the Black Experience”
WHERE: CLAUG Creative Studio, 9703 NE 2nd Ave, Miami Shores
WHEN: Opening receptions: 6 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 22 and 4 p.m., Sunday, Aug.23. Regular hours noon to 6 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday. Through Wednesday, Sept. 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.
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
One of the most important, yet underrated American modern artists of all time is getting the retrospective treatment at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU – and it’s not who you might expect.
Louise Nevelson may not be among the first names that come to mind in the pantheon of important artists of the modernist movement. In the mid-20th century, she was a household name, representing the U.S. at the Venice Biennale and appearing on the cover of Life magazine. Today the public is more likely to know Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, even Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler.
But the Russian-born Jewish-American might just dwarf them all in terms of influence. Her large-scale, abstract sculptures made way for a bold new typology: installation art, going beyond sculpture and considering the way an artwork is staged.
“She is, in many ways, the founder of what we understand as installation art,” said Jaime DeSimone, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Nevelson’s hometown of Rockland, Maine. “In one of her first shows, she creates an environment where she’s inviting the visitor to engage with these sculptures. She’s thinking about the way the floor is, the way the walls are covered, using blue lights. This is so much more than just a sculpture that she’s created from discarded wood and fragments and unified by paint.”
“Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk,” opening at the Frost Museum on Thursday, Aug. 20, features a number of Nevelson’s installation works. The artist executed most of her sculptures monochromatically, usually in solid black but also occasionally working with white or gold. These colors correlate to specific themes in Nevelson’s life. Black often represents her interest in space and celestial bodies amid the technological progress of the 20th century, as do the futuristic, abstract forms they take influenced by cubism, Art Deco, and the rising skyscrapers of her adoptive home of New York.
White works such as “Dawn Column I,” meanwhile, indicate matrimonial themes, sometimes reflecting on the artist’s own failed marriage. The piece comes from the larger 1959 installation “Dawn’s Wedding Feast,” created for the Museum of Modern Art’s group exhibition “Sixteen Americans” in New York. The installation marked a major turning point for Nevelson’s career and progression as an artist – it was the first time she had used white on such a scale – and earned her the Venice commission, for which she appropriated parts of the installation into a new work, “Voyage.” The individual components have been split up and are now held by various museums.
“Because of what we understand of Nevelson’s work, she’s constantly creating, and as pieces evolved, she would disassemble them and make them into new works,” DeSimone said. “So people can see how a single column has kind of lived on into a unique work of art.”
But there’s more to her career than the large-scale, sculptural pieces she’s best known for. “Dawn to Dusk,” which travels to the Frost from Rockland, features a number of objects from the Frost’s own collection that offer a broader view of Nevelson as an artist. These include jewelry and a unique set of works on paper: a series of collages made from photographs of Nevelson’s own work.
“What’s nice about this exhibition is that it shows these early paintings, it shows sculpture, it shows collage, it shows other forms of assemblages,” said Natalia Zuluaga, chief curator at the Frost Museum. “And I think when you’re able to see the full breadth of her practice. You see the way in which she developed that language.”
And beyond her art, there are ways in which Nevelson’s life story is likely to appeal to Miamians. The artist was a first-generation American, joining a wave of Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire – specifically what is now Ukraine – to the United States. Her family spoke Yiddish at home and struggled to assimilate into the small town, which led Louise to marry early in order to escape to New York in the early 1920s. There, she rebelled against the stifling confines of her husband’s conservative values and expectations of submissive domesticity, eventually divorcing him and taking up art full-time.
“I think Louise was an intellectually curious person, and it’s worth looking at the kinds of questions that she asked about the moment in time that she was living in, right? Like for me, maybe this is like a story that kind of touches upon the way in which we learn and read and think about the world,” Zuluaga said. “But yeah, she was an immigrant. She was a first-generation immigrant who was growing up in a port town, trying to find her way into New York City in order to pursue a career in art. I think from that perspective, also, there’s a lot of compatibility or parallels to many stories in our community.”
Though she may not be as famous as Picasso or Pollock, Louise Nevelson’s place in the modern art canon is as solid and firm as her sculptures are pitch black. Now, Miami will get the chance to come into deeper contact with this vital artistic voice.
WHAT: “Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk”
WHERE: Patricia and Philip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University Modesto A. Maidique Campus, 10975 SW 17th St., Miami
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Thursday, Aug. 20 through Sunday, Jan. 17, 2027
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
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John Baldessari was one of the great iconoclasts of 20th century art. Coming of age as abstract expressionism ruled the art world, he rejected the dominant style and looked towards conceptualism, art focused on ideas rather than aesthetics. He embraced text and photography, creating work that interrogated what art can be and how it can be made, forming a bridge between conceptual and pop art. He also influenced countless artists both as a teacher at institutions such as UCLA and CalArts – some of his students include David Salle, Jack Goldstein, and Analia Saban – and as an inspiration to artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Krueger, and Anastasia Samoylova.
John Baldessari, “Intersection Series: Embrace (Hand and Ear)/Seascape,” 2001, Five digital photographic prints (one with acrylic paint) mounted on foam PVC board. (Courtesy Estate of John Baldessari; Spruth Magers)
“I think someone like Baldessari is super impactful,” says José Diaz, senior director of curatorial affairs and chief curator at PAMM. “He was someone who broke the rules. I think he helped define that art can be reinterpreted in new ways, and I think he’s done that with visuals, but also with text. And because he was also a professor, I think he’s also been able to contribute to the way artists think today.”
Now, six years after his death in 2020, Pérez Art Museum Miami is celebrating Baldessari’s legacy with a new retrospective of the boundary-pushing artist. “John Baldessari: The End of the Line” is the first major survey of Baldessari’s work in South Florida. It features nearly 40 works from across the artist’s career, mostly drawn from the collection of Craig Robins, the Miami-based property developer best known for developing the Miami Design District. The show comes to PAMM in its largest format yet after successful runs in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Maldonado, Uruguay.
Miamians are already likely to be familiar with the artist, even if they don’t realize it. Thanks to the artist’s friendship with Robins, Baldessari’s art has become an integral part of the built environment of Miami. In the early 2010s the developer invited the artist to design two murals for the Design District, both titled “Fun,” which incorporate vintage photos of beachgoers that wryly comment on the city’s tourism industry.
“I think Craig likes art that is smart and punchy, and that sort of has an impact through either sense of humor or wit,” says Karen Grimson, curator of the Craig Robins Collection. “That’s always something that attracts him, and that’s why he has a significant roster of conceptualists in the collection.”
Indeed, while Baldessari’s work might seem bland and intellectual at first glance, plenty of pieces in the show put his sense of humor on full display. These include a series of photographs with the self-explanatory title “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)” and his “Repository” series, ironically responding to Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-turned-artwork “Fountain” by inscribing a succession of colorful bedpans with the slogan “The artist is a fountain.”
Other works in the show are more provocative, such as an archival, nine-minute film documenting the one-time performance of his infamous “Cremation Project.” A major turning point in the artist’s career, the piece saw Baldessari famously burning nearly all of his early paintings in 1970, repurposing a destructive act as a creative one.
“It’s sort of a rebirth,” says Diaz. “It’s really inspirational because he starts to think about photography as he transitions away from painting, thinking about cameras and how they can function as an artistic medium. That’s how he accumulates this abundant inventory of film stills and images that you see throughout his later work, and I think that use of images to tell stories is something you see in a lot of artists.”
The Baldessari show might also be seen as something of a rebirth for PAMM itself. It’s the first presentation at the museum under Diaz’s stewardship as chief curator after joining PAMM last year from the Seattle Art Museum. It’s also part of an intentional pivot in programming towards what Diaz calls “landmark artists,” household names from the 20th-century onward. Baldessari, with his outsize influence on contemporary art, is one example, as are a concurrently running show of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and an upcoming presentation featuring work by three masters of modern art: Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse.
For Diaz, a born-and-raised local who witnessed Miami’s transformation into an art city in the post-Art Basel era, the shift reflects a belief that PAMM should serve the community by allowing them to engage with important, canonical art, not just the ultra-contemporary work that the city has become famous for.
“The fact that somebody can come here and see close to a dozen works by Basquiat from the particular period ‘82 to ‘85, it’s like a really fantastic opportunity,” Diaz says. “But it’s also like being very thoughtful of people who actually live here that get a chance to see these types of arts without having to go to New York or having to have to go to other places.”
Throughout his life, Baldessari made reference to his outsider status in the art world, particularly his birthplace of National City, Calif., near the Mexican border – “the end of the line,” as he called it, the phrase that gives the show its name. As another city on the margins of America, a place caught between commercialism and conceptualism, there are perhaps few artists better suited to Miami than Baldessari.
WHAT: “John Baldessari: The End of the Line”
WHERE: Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Friday and Saturday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; 1 to 6 p.m. Sunday. Opening Thursday, Aug. 20 through Sunday, May 9, 2027.
COST: $18 adults; $14 seniors 62 and older, students with ID, and ages 7 to 18; free for members, children 6 and under, and free admission for all on Thursdays after 5 p.m.; Other free admissions with ID: active U.S. military and veterans, health care professionals and first responders, Florida educators, and visitors identifying as disabled and their accompanying caregiver.
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.
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Kit Pancoast Nagamura returns with her family legacy at The Kampong
Written By Miguel Sirgado July 27, 2026 at 6:32 PM
“Backbone,” acrylic on canvas, is featured in Kit Pancoast Nagamura’s “When We Come to Paint,” an exhibition of works by the great-granddaughter of botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild, and selected works of her parents. On view through Saturday, Aug. 15 at The Kampong in Coconut Grove. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Whenever Kit Pancoast Nagamura returns to The Kampong, she’s greeted by a scent that has stayed with her since childhood.
“When I go back to The Kampong, the first thing I notice is the smell of the mangoes,” says the native Miamian visual artist. “I think our first memories as human beings are olfactory.”
That memory inspired “When We Come to Paint,” on view through Saturday, Aug. 15 at the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s nine-acre garden in Miami. The exhibition features 26 large- and medium-scale paintings by Nagamura, approximately 40 mixed-media works she calls “Afterworks,” selected works by her parents and original haiku accompanying many of the pieces.
Kit Pancoast Nagamura works on “Where We Connect” (2026) at The Kampong. It is one of the paintings created for “When We Come to Paint.” (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Nagamura, who spent the first four years of her life at the garden, sees the exhibition as both a homecoming and a reflection on the people and places that shaped her artistic voice.
Her connection to the property runs deep. Nagamura is the great-granddaughter of botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild, whose Coconut Grove estate became The Kampong, now part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Her father, Lester Collins Pancoast, was an architect and watercolorist; her mother, Hélène Muller Pancoast, was a Japanese-style woodblock print artist and co-founder of Miami’s Bakehouse Art Complex.
Yet growing up surrounded by accomplished artists came with unexpected advice.
“My parents always said, ‘Don’t talk about your family,'” Nagamura recalls. “What they meant was, ‘Don’t boast about it. You have to make your own life.'”
A family legacy returns home
Only now does Nagamura feel she is ready to bring those generations into the same conversation.
“My family legacy is pretty heavy duty,” she says with a laugh. “I’m old enough now. I can bring them to the table.”
Visitors first encounter works by Lester and Hélène Pancoast before arriving at galleries devoted to Nagamura’s paintings, allowing connections and departures to emerge organically.
“In Stillness Fruit,” acrylic on wood panel, reflects the childhood memory that inspired “When We Come to Paint.” For Kit Pancoast Nagamura, the scent of mangoes is the first thing she notices whenever she returns to The Kampong. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
“I wanted people to see where some things came from and where I diverged,” she says. “When you spend enough time with the work, you begin to see the echoes, the similarities, the reverberations that we share.”
Brian Sidoti, director of The Kampong, says that connection made the exhibition feel almost inevitable.
“When we finally sat down together,” he says, “it was one of those conversations where you think, ‘Well, of course you’re going to have an exhibition here.'”
Sidoti believes Nagamura’s work belongs at the garden not simply because of her family history, but because of the way she understands the landscape itself.
“She has such a deep understanding of the collections here,” he says. “She could highlight that through her work.”
Sidoti looks for artists whose work grows naturally from the garden’s landscape, history and collections.
“We’re a small garden,” he says. “That allows us to create exhibitions that feel intimate and connected to our mission.”
Artmaking as Life
Rather than presenting a traditional solo exhibition, Sidoti embraced the idea of pairing Nagamura’s paintings with selected works by her parents, creating what he describes as a “living lineage of creativity.”
“We wanted to give Kit a strong platform for her own voice while also celebrating her parents’ remarkable work,” Sidoti says. “The conversations around how much of their artwork to include were a delicate balancing act. We wanted every voice to resonate.”
The exhibition also marks a return to the place where making art first became part of everyday life.
Her mother often worked on Japanese-style woodblock prints while the children created artwork nearby.
Part of Kit Pancoast Nagamura’s “Afterworks” series, this mixed-media work is created on recycled Sarasota Herald-Tribune newsprint using acrylic, handmade Japanese washi paper, ink and natural and collage elements. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
“For me, that meant freedom time and quiet focus time,” Nagamura recalls. “I loved the smell of the inks. Even today, if I open a box of crayons, everything comes back.”
Art, she learned early, was inseparable from observation, patience and daily practice.
“People think you just sit down with a paintbrush and become free,” she says with a laugh. “Not at all.”
A fellowship after college took Nagamura to a country that would shape both her artistic practice and the way she observes the natural world.
After graduating from Brown University with an independent concentration in studio art and literature—while also studying at the Rhode Island School of Design—Nagamura received an IBM-funded fellowship in Japan.
Initially, she imagined herself pursuing journalism rather than painting.
For more than 25 years, she wrote “The Backstreet Stories,” a monthly column for The Japan Times that took her through Tokyo’s neighborhoods in search of the histories hidden behind everyday streets.
“I was basically a flâneur,” she says. “A professional stroller.”
Living in Japan influenced Kit Pancoast Nagamura’s artistic language. The techniques and materials she embraced there—including handmade washi paper, mineral pigments and calligraphy—continue to shape the work featured in “When We Come to Paint.” (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Walking through historic neighborhoods, she often navigated the terrain as much by trees as by streets. Old maps revealed layers of history beneath ordinary places.
Without realizing it, those same ideas gradually found their way into her paintings.
“I realized the maps in my artwork come from this searching for meaning and development and history,” she says.
Throughout “When We Come to Paint,” maps reappear layered with handmade Japanese washi paper, mineral pigments and fragments of calligraphy. Many works are accompanied by original haiku.
“I’ve always resisted the idea that you’re either a writer or a painter,” Nagamura says. “To me, it’s all part of the same artistic practice.”
Nature became the thread connecting those disciplines.
Painting the Natural World
Rather than treating plants simply as botanical subjects, Nagamura paints them as living presences.
“I think plants communicate,” she says. “Science is finally beginning to recognize that, but in Japan that idea has existed for centuries.”
Mangrove roots, banyan trees, coconut palms and shifting light appear throughout the exhibition—not simply as botanical studies, but as reminders of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
One recurring idea comes from the Japanese word komorebi, the shifting sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees.
“Mangrove Inlet,” acrylic on canvas, reflects the landscape that surrounded the artist during her earliest years at The Kampong. (Photo courtesy of the artist)
“Those things are worthy of worship to me,” Nagamura says. “I hope people feel connected to plants in a new way. I hope they fall in love with them—love-affair level.”
That relationship with nature extends beyond the paintings themselves.
Among the exhibition’s most distinctive works are Nagamura’s “Afterworks,” intimate mixed-media pieces created from recycled studio materials. For Sidoti, the series reflects the same spirit of stewardship that defines the garden’s approach to conservation.
One of the larger paintings, “Aubade,” holds particular significance for the artist. The luminous five-foot-square canvas celebrating the first light of dawn represents a turning point in her creative process.
“It spoke to me about translucency,” she says. “Every time I thought I should add another layer, the painting itself seemed to say, ‘I’m perfect the way I am.’ So I listened.”
Another painting, “Road Home,” was inspired by the entrance to The Kampong and Nagamura’s reflections on what the idea of home had come to mean after decades abroad.
“If I had not been obsessing about the meaning of home,” she says, “that painting would not have appeared.”
WHAT: “When We Come to Paint,” an exhibition by Kit Pancoast Nagamura
WHERE: The Kampong, National Tropical Botanical Garden, 4013 S. Douglas Rd., Miami
WHEN: 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Last admission at 3 p.m. Through Saturday, Aug. 15.
COST: $17 for self-guided admission. $2 discount for visitors arriving by foot, bicycle, Uber or Lyft; EASY Perks Transit Card holders; guests of members (unless a greater discount applies); PreK-12 teachers; and residents of zip code 33133 with ID. Admission includes gardens and exhibition.
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
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MOAD at Freedom Tower Explores How America Shaped Abstract Art
Written By Michelle F. Solomon July 22, 2026 at 8:12 PM
At left, Joan Mitchell, “Untitled” (1960), oil on canvas. At right, Willem de Kooning, “Figures in a Landscape #2” (1976), oil on paper laid on canvas, are among the highlights in “Abstraction as Legacy,” MOAD at the Freedom Tower, Miami, through Sunday, Oct. 18. (Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Inside the Freedom Tower, where exhibitions focus on immigration, the Cuban exile experience and, for now, a journey through the world of soccer, abstract art isn’t necessarily what people expect to find. On a recent afternoon, a father and son visiting Miami for the FIFA World Cup discovered the Museum of Art and Design galleries on the landmark’s second floor where “Abstraction as Legacy” is hung.
They stuck around and examined each work. For Amy Galpin, that’s exactly the kind of unexpected encounter she had hoped for. The executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College conceived the exhibition as part of the nationwide America250 initiative.
George Morrison’s “Traversal” (1958), is one of the first works visitors encounter in “Abstraction as Legacy,” reflecting on the exhibition’s expanded view of American abstraction. (Courtesy of Art Bridges and the Estate of George Morrison. Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
“We wanted to do something that would be unique and distinctive,” Galpin said. “Quickly we came to the idea of abstraction and thinking about the role of abstraction in postwar U.S. visual culture and history.”
The exhibition explores how American abstraction became one of the nation’s most influential contributions to art history.
“It is really the first time following World War II that we see the international art world looking to the U.S. as innovators, particularly what’s happening with the New York School of painters and that’s represented in the show by William de Kooning, Hans Hofmann as well as Joan Mitchell.”
Bringing together many of those artists required borrowing extensively from private collections. Nearly every work in the exhibition is on loan from collectors, artists, and institutions, giving visitors a chance to experience paintings that are seldom exhibited together. Only the salon-style installation at the end of the exhibition is drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
“For me, it was an incredible opportunity to present work that are not often seen in public spaces in Miami,” said Galpin.
Vaughn Spann’s “Mercy after Rage” (2025), made with polymer paint and mixed media on wood, is featured in “Abstraction as Legacy” at MOAD at the Freedom Tower. (Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo. Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Broadening American Abstraction
There are works by artists who deal with the environment, who are influenced by architecture, and some who focus on the body. “In terms of putting this together, I was looking for all the different story points to bring together. I wanted to make sure that I told certain stories, that there was a lot of different types of abstraction and to show the breadth of abstraction in the United States. And how it would all work.”
The first work visitors encounter is George Morrison’s “Traversal” with its vibrant blues, turquoise and fiery reds welcoming with an explosion of color.
George Morrison’s “Traversal” (1958), opens “Abstraction as Legacy.” (Courtesy of Art Bridges and the Estate of George Morrison. Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
The painting broadens the idea of who belongs in the story of American abstraction, according to Galpin. “For an America250 show I think it was important to have American Indigenous artists – he’s a member of the Chippewa Tribe, spent much of his life in Minnesota, lived in New York and showed alongside de Kooning.”
It was also a way, she said, to start the show in the moment.
“The year of the piece is 1958, and while there were abstract artists active in the U.S. in the early 20th century, this is when the post-war conversation was really beginning. I wanted a painting that was of that spirit. And this is one of the works, too, in the show that speaks also to the international.”
Born in Havana, Zilia Sánchez fled to New York after the Cuban Revolution and later settled in Puerto Rico. Her “Untitled” (1960) is featured in “Abstraction as Legacy” at MOAD at the Freedom Tower. (Courtesy of Cota Cohen. Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Nearby is Zilia Sánchez’s “Untitled,” (1960). Born in Havana, she fled to New York to escape the Castro regime. “She became part of a Cuban exile group in New York of poets, of painters, and then spent much of her adult life in San Juan, Puerto Rico,” said Galpin.
Like Morrison, Sánchez challenges a traditional understanding of who shaped American abstraction.
“One of the things that was important in presenting this exhibit is to show that American abstraction is many things… just as our country is not one thing… it’s a multitude of voices.”
Amy Galpin, executive director and chief curator of MOAD at the Freedom Tower, with Barbara Young and Dan Gelfman at the opening of “Abstraction as Legacy” in front of Noemí Ruiz’s “Vibración en rojo y azul” (1981). (Painting courtesy of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Gift of Dr. Gamaliel R. Herrera. Photo by Barbara Perales)
And it is fitting at the Freedom Tower, she emphasized. “It speaks to the role of migration. In our country, artists first as immigrants, but also artists moving to different artistic centers and being influenced by different artistic centers. There are also two Cuban artists represented in the exhibit, Sánchez and Carmen Herrera,” said Galpin, pointing out that both were impacted by international influence, and both were women.
Borrowed Works Tell the Story
After Morrison there’s Joan Mitchell paired with Hans Hofmann.
On loan from collector Jorge M. Pérez’s contemporary art space El Espacio 23 in Allapattah is Hofmann’s “Yellow Glow” (1960).
“It’s a small work, but it really packs a punch,” Galpin exclaimed.
Hans Hofmann’s “Yellow Glow” (1960), courtesy of Jorge M. Pérez, El Espacio 23, is featured in “Abstraction as Legacy” at MOAD at the Freedom Tower. Photo by Oriol Tarridas.
Patricia Hanna, the curator of the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, said that the selection of the painting was an intentional and smart choice by Galpin. “It’s a kind of transition between the hard-edge abstraction to more gestural with hints of figuration,” Hanna explained.
As visitors move through the gallery they encounter works by Sam Gilliam, Lloyd Kiva New, Noemí Ruiz, Young-Il Ahn and Vaughn Spann.
The “coda” of the exhibition is a salon-style wall of works from MOAD’s collection.
“The collection was really founded by Miami artists, the two Bobs, Robert Thiele and Robert Huff, who were employed by Miami Dade College as professors and built the collection for this space.”
Hanna said that a show focused on the legacy of abstraction and its history in the U.S. that includes works from Miami collectors at the Freedom Tower was an exceptional choice for America250.
“People think about Miami as everything new and contemporary, but there are art collections in Miami that have this historical perspective.”
WHAT: “Abstraction as Legacy”
WHERE: Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd., Miami
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 18
COST: $18, adults $14, seniors (62 and older), $12, students and children (ages 7–12) Free for MOAD members, Miami Dade College students, faculty and staff with ID, and select other visitors. Admission includes access to Freedom Tower exhibitions.
Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié's work, currently in the 61st Venice Biennale, echoes the Italian exhibition in “From Venice with Love” in Miami Beach at The Betsy Hotel.
“The Science Behind Pixar” at Frost Science takes visitors behind the scenes of Pixar films with more than 50 interactive experiences exploring animation, engineering, math and technology.
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