While exploring Miami Art Week, visitors will not want to miss these top exhibitions at premier and historic galleries and museums in the heart of Miami.
Leandro Erlich, “Swimming Pool,” 1999, Installation view: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2004, © Noriko Inomoto.
Leandro Erlich: Liminal
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) Downtown Leandro Erlich’s first North American survey, “Liminal” is an exhibition organized by guest curator Dan Cameron that fills the entirety of the special galleries at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Conceived as a series of everyday spaces, the exhibition displays 16 of Erlich’s most renowned site-specific works, where the viewer’s notions of perception come into question under the artist’s curious gaze. A walk through the presentation will lead viewers to encounter works like the glass-encased The Cloud, an interactive work called Hair Salon, and Swimming Pool, where a layer of contained water allows one to mimic the experience of looking up from the bottom of a pool or down to the people beneath.
Installation view of Adrián Villar Rojas’ “The Theater of Disappearance,” photo by Jörg Baumann, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Adrián Villar Rojas: The End of Imagination The Bass Miami Beach Known for employing rich materials to sculpt anthropomorphic and proto-human figures, Adrián Villar Rojas is sharing a series of new commissions and recontextualized artworks in the exhibition “The End of Imagination.” As is typical for Villar Rojas’s multimedia practice, the exhibition exists as an immersive space within an alternate reality, employing ideas of past and future, along with materials ranging from marble and fossils, to furniture, fire, ramps, and reproduced body parts of iconic statues. Along with the Argentine artist’s surreal spaces arise ideas around the fleeting nature of life and humanity’s ephemerality.
Didier William, “Just Us Three,” 2021, 104 x 68 in., acrylic, oil, wood carving on panel; courtesy of the collection of Jonathan Sobel and Marcia Dunn, and MOCA North Miami.
Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè MOCA North Miami North Miami MOCA North Miami presents the largest solo exhibition to date of work by the artist Didier William, including new paintings and a 12-foot sculpture referencing a religious column of Haitian vodou. The show, titled “Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè” (We’ve Left That All Behind), offers a comprehensive look into the artist’s career and intimate connection to the North Miami neighborhood in which he was raised. Personal impressions and stories are highlighted throughout the exhibition, playfully recontextualizing the immigrant narrative as a space for inquiry and liberation.
Alexandre Diop, “La Grande Odalisque,” 2022, 60 x 120 x 1 in., mixed media on wood; courtesy of Rubell Museum, Miami.
Alexandre Diop, Doron Langberg, Jo Messer, and Tesfaye Urgessa Rubell Museum Allapattah Opening for the occasion of Miami Art Week, four solo presentations of work by the artists Alexandre Diop, Doron Langberg, Jo Messer, and Tesfaye Urgessa are on view at the Rubell Museum, along with a special show of highlights from the collection. The Senegalese artist Diop, the current Rubell artist-in-residence, is exhibiting a collection of his signature mixed-media works. Langberg will be sharing commissioned works, while the Messer and Urgessa exhibitions will both feature suites of paintings.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Topology,” 2021, 3000 LED filament lightbulbs, DMX controllers, custom- made photoplethysmography sensors, computers covers any area between 1,000 and 5,000 square feet; © Rafael Lozano- Hemmer, courtesy Pace Gallery.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse Topology Superblue Allapattah In a collaborative vision of technology’s bright future, Superblue Miami presents a riveting installation by the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Topology,” on view during Miami Art Week. In a vibrant and meditative display, three thousand suspended light bulbs flicker to the pulse of participants. Custom pulse sensors record the heartbeats of visitors, replacing and adding to the recordings glowing above them. The immersive artwork was created in the name of a sustainable future, embracing technology’s capacity to be a sanctuary of human connection.
Nina Chanel Abney, “Crew,” 2021, dimensions vary, set of seven collaged works on panel; courtesy of the artist and ICA Miami.
Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy ICA Miami Design District In “Big Butch Energy,” the artist Nina Chanel Abney offers her first official exploration of gender and sexuality through the lens of the college experience, and specifically Greek student life, as it is depicted in films. Curated by the ICA Miami’s Artistic Director Alex Gartenfeld, Abney’s vibrant signature—cubistic figures immediately recognizable as belonging to the artist—is employed in compositions that harness baroque portraiture traditions. Paired with references to college life (riffing off of scenes from comedies like Animal House and Porky’s) this stylistic juxtaposition presents a visually fun and engaging ground on which Abney offers her viewers a narrative paying homage to the figure of the Black masculine woman. Through collaged panel works such as Mama Gotta Have a Life Too and What I Wanted vs. What I Got, Abney’s narrative unravels a desire for social belonging and the precarious balance between the affected obscenity portrayed in popular film culture and the respectability politics that Greek student life may often demand.
