Sarah Morris has spent her career examining how cities communicate—through their façades, their patterns, and the hidden systems that organise both movement and meaning. Her paintings and films translate these urban codes into sharp, graphic compositions that feel at once analytical and cinematic. So when Burberry invited her to rethink its sculptural façade in Miami’s Design District, the project felt like a natural extension of her ongoing question: How do we read a city, and how might an artist shift the way that reading unfolds?
The building itself offered an unusually resonant point of departure. Its three-dimensional Burberry check—cast directly into the concrete—was already speaking in its own language. Morris approached it much as she would a city grid: attentive to its rhythm, responsive to its internal logic, and ready to fold it into her own visual system. The result is an intervention that sits between painting and architecture, subtly recalibrating how the street is perceived and experienced.
In our Whitewall conversation, Morris reflects on the fluid space between art and fashion, the evolving identity of Miami, and what it means to work with a surface encountered by people in motion rather than within a gallery. The exchange offers a glimpse into how she thinks about cities—not as backdrops, but as active, living structures that shape how we see, move, and inhabit the world.
Reading the Façade as an Urban Surface with Sarah Morris
Courtesy of Burberry and Sarah Morris.
Courtesy of Burberry.
WHITEWALL: Sarah, it was wonderful to see your installation in person in Miami. To begin, what drew you to working with a fashion house façade in the Design District, and how did you think about the surface of the building as part of your work?
SARAH MORRIS: What struck me immediately was the surface itself—the Burberry façade is a very particular kind of architectural surface. It already had this three-dimensional component built into it, which is unusual today and incredibly exciting to work with. As I mentioned when I saw you in Miami, it’s a very cool façade because the 3D check — the tartan — is literally baked into it. It had elements that were very easy for me to respond to.
There’s a long, though not often used, history in architecture of treating façades in a three-dimensional way. Edward Durell Stone did façades like that—he would design his own concrete block and use it as a modular surface. Years ago, I did a project in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on an Edward Durell Stone building (2013) that was similar in spirit to this.
So I was very easily convinced this would be a great project: because of the location, because of the brand, and because of that architectural component of the façade.
“Fashion and art have always chased each other,”
-Sarah Morris
WW: Art and fashion have long been intertwined as cultural systems. How did you think about that shared history and exchange when approaching this collaboration?
SM: Fashion and art have always chased each other—been entangled with each other—throughout history. It’s not new, and it’s certainly not unique to Miami; it’s simply a historical and international reality.
These collaborations are often dismissed as shallow, but I don’t see it that way. You can’t assume that putting fashion and art together won’t produce something meaningful. It can be incredibly productive. Think of Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress—it’s witty, iconic, and now part of cultural history.
I’ve always been interested in the Bauhaus idea that art can be useful, that it doesn’t need to be confined to a category called “fine art.” Why can’t art be a fork? Why must it remain precious and isolated? I think those boundaries should be far more fluid—and it’s worth asking why some people insist on keeping them rigid.
Of course, no one wants a collaboration without substance. But here, the alignment felt genuinely compelling.
WW: The façade is modeled on your painting Department of Water and Power [Los Angeles]. What made that composition resonate for Miami today, and what changes when one of your painted “urban codes” becomes an architectural façade?
SM: Many of my painting titles come from institutions or buildings—places that exist or once existed in cities around the world. When I thought about this building in Miami—its particular urban context and also my own long history with the city—it became clear that Department of Water and Power [Los Angeles] would be the right reference for this project.
I was thinking about what could work with the diagonal zone of the façade, and also about the history of the check—the tartan. My own system and the check are parallel: connected, but parallel. The composition came to me immediately.
I kept returning to how the green foliage on that street would interact with the vivid colors in the painting—the reds, greens, yellows, and blacks. I knew it would sit incredibly well in that tropical environment.
Miami as System Memory and Architectural Code
Sarah Morris, “Department of Water and Power (Los Angeles),” 2004. Courtesy of artist.
WW: Your work often maps hidden structures of cities—bureaucracy, movement, systems of control. How did this collaboration open up new perspectives on Miami, particularly in the Design District?
SM: As I’ve said, I have a long history with Florida. My American grandfather lived there, so I went every year from the age of two. My first Chinese food was in Florida. It has always felt like a kind of Mecca for the American dream.
Architecturally, Miami operates almost like a pre–Las Vegas strip—but in a way more straightforward, because it isn’t casinos. It’s people’s residences; where they inhabit. Places where they live, work, swim, play tennis.
Miami’s history has always been politically complicated. Joan Didion’s Miami is one of her most interesting books, in my imagination. The largest CIA outpost inside the U.S. was in Miami because of the geopolitical tensions with Cuba. The city has this layered, politically charged history that people often overlook.
And then there’s Morris Lapidus—the hugely important, sometimes forgotten, American architect. He introduced the idea of commercial space existing inside the residential or hotel structures, something that was once considered taboo. Now it’s the dominant architectural model. So Miami has a very particular architectural DNA, and there’s a lot to engage with.
WW: You filmed in Miami in 2002. How does that connect to this new façade?
SM: I shot a film called Miami in 2002 and showed it at the then called MOCA Miami. It was the first year of the art fair, which felt radical at the time. We filmed amongst many places at the Hialeah stadium, and I saw the Design District long before it became what it is now—before the development, when there were still many competing ideas for that area. I saw the place in an earlier state, before it transformed into what it has become.
WW: When a façade becomes your surface, do you see it as a third kind of portrait addressed to a moving public?
SM: In a way, yes, but it doesn’t matter to me how people encounter it. Of course I’d like people to know its meaning or its intention, but many may not. They’ll simply notice that their environment has changed. They may like it or not—but it’s a change.
I also love a detail I didn’t anticipate: there’s a Sol LeWitt wall painting inside the next building to the right. So there’s this nice interplay between the exterior of one building and the interior of another. I didn’t know about that, and it was a lovely surprise.
As an artist, you’re always navigating between your own headspace—your production space—and invitations that lead you to new contexts. The invitation to do something in Miami now, on that building, with this company, made complete sense.
Sarah Morris on Working Within an Icon
Burberry Winter 2024.
WW: You mentioned that you’ve always had a personal relationship with Burberry. Could you tell us more about that?
SM: I’ve always thought Burberry was a very interesting company. I’ve always had it in my house. In my front hall closet, there’s a vintage Burberry trench that has been hanging there for years. I look at it every day when I open the closet, and I love it.
What I like is that it feels beyond any sense of gender — it’s neither male nor female. I don’t even know whose trench coat it originally was. It simply exists there, and it gives me pleasure just to see it, whether I wear it or not.
To me, it’s an icon — like a briefcase. It suggests travel, polish, a certain kind of intention. And it also has a bit of The Pink Panther in it, a bit of Peter Sellers. There’s a quiet level of comedy in something so iconic, and I find that very appealing.
“I’m always streamlining complexity into something that appears simple,”
-Sarah Morris
WW: In this project, the Burberry Check becomes more than a brand signature — it’s treated as a visual material within your own system. How did you think about engaging with an existing code like that?
SM: The check is a simple, very strong code — instantly recognizable because it’s so iconic. And it can mean completely different things to different people.
I thought a lot about how to work with it. In my practice, I’m always streamlining complexity into something that appears simple. Any good artist gets punished for that — people say, “It looks easy” — but of course it isn’t. The challenge is conceptual: what to keep, what to distill, how to move it forward.
So yes, the simplicity of branding interests me in a parallel way. The communication technique. And in that sense, this really was a dream assignment. The strength and clarity of what Burberry already has aligns very naturally with my own system.
Moving Between Miami, Osaka, and London
Portrait of Sarah Morris by Steve Benisty.
WW: How do you see your intervention responding to Miami’s cultural moment during Art Basel?
SM: The art-fair structure—wherever it takes place—is part of the larger spectacle of art becoming ubiquitous. It transforms art into an event, not just an object. So it was inherent that this project would be realized during that week. Miami is increasingly defined by this moment each year; it has become part of the city’s global identity. The installation folds into that energy—amplifying it, really—to the nth power.
WW: Speaking of scale and architectural space, you also have a major retrospective opening in Osaka.
SM: Yes. It opens at the end of January at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka. It’s a full retrospective, and we’re publishing a book called Transactional Authority, in Japanese and English. I’m proofreading, checking color, making sure everything is correct—the book goes to press on Christmas Eve.
It’s a huge honor to have a retrospective, and an even bigger honor to show it in Japan. I’ve been included in museum shows there, but I’ve never worked in Japan in a sustained way, even though I feel very aligned with it.
There’s new work in the exhibition: seven or eight recent paintings, and a very large wall painting—about six meters high and roughly nineteen meters long—that will be executed throughout January.
I’ve worked on extreme scales before. The lines in my paintings often extend beyond the frame in your mind’s eye, and it’s wonderful when you can bring that expanded field into actual architectural space.
WW: And you’re preparing an exhibition with White Cube.
SM: Yes. I have a show opening on March 10 at White Cube Mason’s Yard. It marks thirty years of showing with White Cube, which I can hardly believe. We’re doing a special exhibition, and we’re also remastering my first film, Midtown (1998).
After this interview, I’m actually taking a negative reel downtown to a production house for scanning and remastering. I’m moving between 1998 and 2026. (She laughs).
