Nine must-see shows in Miami

José Parlá, ‘Homecoming’ — Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)

At PAMM, Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá returns to his native Miami with monumental abstract paintings that thrum with references to his Cuban-American identity. Energetic brushstrokes evoke Latin American music, hip hop and reggae, while layers of paint, plaster and reclaimed posters recall the textures of urban architecture. Anchored in the personal, Homecoming also offers an intimate view of Parlá’s artistic process. Alongside recent work, he unveils a new mural, painted live on-site, as well as a recreation of his studio filled with his record collection and other objects that fuel his creative world.

pamm.org

Rachel Feinstein, ‘The Miami Years’ — The Bass Museum of Art

A bikini-clad woman in heels dances in an invisible disco, black dolphins leap over plastic coral reefs, a surfboard with monstrous bite marks hangs on the wall — the 1980s Miami of Rachel Feinstein’s youth is a world of strange paradoxes: escapist yet raw, glitzy yet worn, natural yet artificial. On show at the Bass, her sculptures conjure the surreal south Florida landscape, where fantasy collides with reality. The artist has also installed scenography specially created for the show: theatrical flats, wallpaper and a 30ft painted, mirrored wall panel, all of them reflecting the city’s flair for artifice.

thebass.org

Billie Zangewa, ‘Field of Dreams’ — Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum

Malawian artist Billie Zangewa stitches silk fragments into tender collages that captivate with their depiction of everyday moments. In Field of Dreams, she moves away from her familiar domestic scenes with works that more broadly contemplate the human condition. Solitary figures stare out from lush, natural landscapes (“Traveller”) or emerge from azure oceans (“In My Element”), each work exploring what the exhibition describes as “the interconnectivity of all living things”. For the first time, Zangewa includes antiqued mirrors among her fabric pieces, lending an air of reflection and introspection.

frost.fiu.edu

Keiichi Tanaami, ‘Memory Collage’ and Lucy Bull, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ — Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

Two shows at ICA Miami spotlight a Pop pioneer and a rising painter. On the second floor, Memory Collage presents the first US survey of Keiichi Tanaami, the late Japanese artist known for confronting the traumas of the second world war in his dense, psychedelic collages. Spanning 1965 to 2024, the retrospective overflows with advertising logos, magazine clippings and erotic imagery, clashing together in hallucinatory visions. Upstairs, current art market-favourite Lucy Bull receives her first museum exhibition. The Garden of Forking Paths is an apt description of the American painter’s kaleidoscopic abstractions, in which colours and forms diverge, shift and splinter.

icamiami.org

Nicholas Galanin, ‘Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente)’ — Faena Beach

The Faena hotel group is back with another beachfront installation for Miami Art Week. Towering 40ft high, “Seletega” by indigenous Alaskan artist Galanin is a partially buried Spanish galleon, its masts, sails and rigging rising from the sands of Faena Beach, evoking the pivotal moment in 1519 when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés deliberately sank his ships to keep his crew from retreating. As a Tlingit and Unangax artist, Galanin has long tackled the legacy of colonial violence. Here, he invites viewers to contemplate the past while also confronting our own uncertain future.

faenaart.org

Vanessa Raw, ‘This is How the Light Gets In’ — Rubell Museum

The Rubell’s artist-in-residence programme has been an important early-career step for many contemporary names since 2011. Past recipients include Amoako Boafo, Oscar Murillo and Sterling Ruby. In the spotlight this year is British artist Vanessa Raw, known for her large-scale sensual paintings. Raw depicts female figures in intimate scenes, relaxing or passionately embracing against idyllic backdrops. Richly rendered animals, flora and fauna heighten the ethereal qualities of these images, which seem to envelop her subjects in dreamlike worlds. The new works she has created over the month-and-half-long residency will be on show for a year.

rubellmuseum.org

Andrea Chung, ‘Between Too Late and Too Early’ — Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

Andrea Chung often transforms sugar — a commodity entwined with the transatlantic slave trade — into a symbol of grief and resilience. For her new exhibition at Moca, the San Diego-based artist, who has Jamaican and Chinese heritage, suspends bottles moulded from melted sugar from the ceiling, their caramelised surfaces inviting sweet connotations that belie a deeper gravity. Etched with messages from enslaved women to their children, these vessels strike a haunting note that reverberates throughout the show. Chung’s broad practice unfolds across 80 works, including collages, works on paper and sculptures, each probing the colonial legacies embedded within island nations.

mocanomi.org

Joel Meyerowitz, ‘Temporal Aspects’ and Jacqueline de Jong, ‘Vicious Circles’ — NSU Art Museum

Just north of Miami in Fort Lauderdale, the NSU Art Museum presents two icons — one of photography, one of painting. Known for embracing colour photography in the early 1960s, Joel Meyerowitz captured fleeting moments in vibrant, vividly precise images. Temporal Aspects, which draws on the museum’s recent acquisition of 1,800 works from his archive, guides visitors through a chronological journey of his oeuvre with a focus on the role of time in his work. Alongside, Vicious Circles marks the first US survey of the late artist Jacqueline de Jong, a key figure in postwar European avant-garde. Known for merging art with politics, De Jong’s expressive, humour-filled paintings address themes of war, power and protest. The exhibition explores her radical legacy as an artist, editor and publisher.

nsuartmuseum.org

Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6–8, 2024

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