This fall in Miami, The Bass Museum of Art raised the curtain on “Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years,” an experiential and otherworldly presentation currently on view through August 17, 2025. Growing up in Miami’s 1970s and ’80s grit-meets-grandiose atmosphere had a colossal effect on the artist. Visitors to the far-reaching exhibition at The Bass have the rare opportunity to voyage within the past, present, and future of Feinstein’s clever and proficient creative language—walking beside her into a dream world that makes very real inquiries into human vulnerability as contemporary life propels us deeper into the vast unknown.
Whitewaller checked in with the artist about what she treasures most about having grown up in a cultural wasteland, and transporting audiences to sincere states of childhood.
Rachel Feinstein in her New York studio.
Rachel Feinstein Reflects on Her Past and Present in Miami
WHITEWALLER: “The Miami Years” is a comprehensive exhibition that beckons visitors into nearly 30 years of your creative investigations. What was the starting point for this highly significant show as the first major presentation in your hometown?
RACHEL FEINSTEIN: James Voorhies (chief curator at The Bass) and I started the discussion together with my earliest work from the 1990s like Jazz Brunch, Little Man, Mirrored Ball, Forest Flat, and Hawaiian Wedding. Many of these were in my first solo show at White Columns in New York City in 1999. These sculptures are the closest expressions of my childhood in Miami since I was still in my twenties when I made them, and everything felt close chronologically.
“These sculptures are the closest expressions of my childhood in Miami,” —Rachel Feinstein
Courtesy of The Bass Museum and Rachel Feinstein. Photo by Zaire Aranguren.
WW: When did the critical themes that you place at the heart of your practice—including female identity, intimacy, and illusion—first reveal themselves to you as a kind of celestial roadmap?
RF: When I was younger, I just made art and didn’t think about why and what anything meant. I was excited to create whatever came into my head, and I particularly enjoyed trying to choose the right materials for the ideas floating in. One of the pieces in my show, Hawaiian Wedding, was made from plaster, foam, and paint, but then I added blue velvet dolphins, green plastic beads, and green felt to denote seaweed. In the ‘90s, I would be on the treadmill planning out how I would make my visions later in the studio. I think this may be similar to other artists; when I was young I was just trying to get the work out there, and only later did I start connecting the dots. While installing my first survey show at the Jewish Museum in 2019, I began to understand these themes more clearly between my earlier work and all the other periods of my art. And most of these themes originated from my childhood in Miami.
“When I was younger, I just made art and didn’t think about why and what anything meant. I was excited to create whatever came into my head,” —Rachel Feinstein
The opening of Rachel Feinstein “The Miami Years” at the Bass, photo by Zaire Aranguren.
WW: Are there specific long-standing memories of growing up in 1980s Miami that have colored the artworks of this exhibition—perhaps sensorial recollections of scent, sound, or pigment?
RF: All of the artworks in my show at The Bass have a longstanding memory from my childhood in Miami. Little Man is a stage flat-style version of a scary gray van with one of those weird black bubble windows because as a kid playing alone all the time, I was terrified of being kidnapped by a child killer. When I was little, a boy called Adam Walsh was lured away from his mother in a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida, and the police found his decapitated head shortly after. The giant cobra in my Panorama of Miami painting is in reference to the Serpentarium, a place near my family’s house. The Serpentarium had an alligator pit where a six-year-old boy fell in and was eaten by a giant alligator named Cookie right in front of his parents’ eyes. It was like being the little girl in “Hansel and Gretel,” or “Little Red Riding Hood.” I felt all alone and highly aware that I could be eaten at any time if I wasn’t careful.
Courtesy of The Bass Museum and Rachel Feinstein. Photo by Zaire Aranguren.
