Twelve must-see exhibitions in South Florida during Miami Art Week

Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, until 30 March 2025
An icon of the Japanese counterculture who served as the first art director for Playboy Japan, the late Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024) was enormously influential in his homeland’s contemporary art scene. His cacophonous imagery, blending references to fine art and popular culture from within Japan and abroad, imprinted on a generation of artists. Like many artists of his era, Tanaami was heavily influenced by American culture and artists. He emulated Andy Warhol, whom he met several times both in Japan and New York, by pivoting away from pure illustration towards techniques like collage and printing.

“His graphic design was very inspiring to many young generations,” says Shinji Nanzuka, the founder of the Pop art-focused Nanzuka Underground Gallery in Tokyo, which started working with Tanaami in 2005. “His career, which started in the late 1950s, represents the conjunction between democracy and American popular culture against Japanese old traditions.” D.M.

Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early
Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, until 6 April 2025
In her solo exhibition, Between Too Late and Too Early at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Andrea Chung presents a powerful investigation of motherhood, the Atlantic slave trade and the legacies of commerce and labour. It showcases several bodies of Chung’s work, including collages on paper made from birthing cloths, lithographs and cyanotypes. The show also features a site-specific installation consisting of bottles made of sugar that are melting over the course of the exhibition.

“I’m drawn to the ephemerality of the material and that the work has its own lifespan, so it can’t be commodified,” Chung says. “I feel strange making something extremely personal or talking about trauma and then thinking that it could go up for auction or be bought and resold.” A.K.

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years
The Bass, until 17 August 2025
Rachel Feinstein’s exhibition traces nearly three decades of the artist’s multifaceted career, marking her first major exhibition in her hometown of Miami. The centrepiece is the new site-specific commission, Panorama of Miami (2024), a scenographic mirrored wall panel spanning 30ft that evokes Feinstein’s memories of the city and how it has shaped and continues to influence her practice.

“I believe that every artist’s life work and what they are trying to achieve from making their art stems from their childhood sights, sounds, tastes and experiences,” Feinstein says. “Growing up in Miami in the 1970s and 80s was the fertile ground where all my artistic visions were born. The eccentricity, lack of culture, encroaching jungle and faux-everything had a huge impression on me as a little girl.” G.A.

Hearst: Lampooning the King of Yellow Journalism
The Wolfsonian, Florida International University, until 2 March 2025
The notorious media mogul William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was a pioneer of sensationalism, publishing exaggerated stories involving sex, violence and scandals of all kinds with giant lurid headlines in order to sell his newspapers. The great-grandfather of clickbait’s “yellow journalism” prioritised profit over facts in a battle to gain readership for his New York Journal over his rival Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, which employed the same unethical tactics.

The Wolfsonian-FIU’s exhibition, curated by two Florida International University history students, collects archival materials from the university’s library with a focus on cartoonist caricatures of Hearst leveraging his media empire in an attempt to gain political power; he was briefly a congressman and unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York City, governor of New York and president of the US. Inspired by the fictionalised depiction of Hearst in Orson Welles’s famous 1941 film Citizen Kane, the show provides a peek into the backlash against the once-great titan as he languished, debt-ridden in his gaudy castle. E.G.

Marguerite Humeau: \*sk\*/ey-
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, until 30 March 2025
The French London-based artist Marguerite Humeau is a master of science-fiction, extrapolating future worlds informed by her research-intensive practice. For her first large-scale presentation at a US institution, she has envisioned a future in which gravity’s hold has loosened and Earth’s inhabitants are adapting to a newly nomadic, floating existence.

A video chronicles how this situation came about, including a mass migration and the rising of a new, humanmade sun. The show’s central, large-scale installation includes tree-like forms and a group of seemingly organic, floating figures, crafted from rubber, glass, silk, felt and wool. The resulting otherworldly environment offers a sobering analogy for our present reality of climate cataclysm and migrations spurred by floods, fires and heatwaves. B.S.

Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice
Frost Art Museum, until 5 January 2025
The Harlem Renaissance artist William H. Johnson’s prescient, social justice-forward final series of paintings, Fighters for Freedom, features 29 portraits of change makers—including Black scientists, singers, educators, activists, musicians and international leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Toussaint L’Ouverture. This is the first time the series has been shown together as a single body of work. Johnson’s Modernist style, described at the time as “modern primitive”, is characterised by simple forms and vibrant, flat colours.

“During the 1940s, images of African Americans were often negative, a collection of racist stereotypes intended to minimise Black people and rob them of their humanity,” says Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, which organised the touring exhibition. “Johnson offered an important counter narrative, showing how much African Americans had contributed to the nation’s history.” V.P.

Jacqueline de Jong: Vicious Circles
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, until 4 May 2025
The NSU Art Museum has organised the first US solo show devoted to Jacqueline de Jong, the avant-garde Dutch artist who died in June, aged 85. Featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper and magazines, Vicious Circles explores her interest in war, protest, humour and eroticism, as well as her involvement with European avant-garde movements, including the Situationist International and Cobra. The exhibition includes everything from De Jong’s early abstract explorations of colour seen in 1962’s Doomsnight (Doomsday) all the way to more figurative, harrowing scenes of the war in Ukraine in Mariupol (2022).

Although she worked prolifically from the 1960s, De Jong has only seen broad recognition in recent years. She died before being able to see the show but worked closely with the museum for nearly four years planning the exhibition. “Jacqueline is part of this epidemic of women artists who have had to wait until they are at the end of their lives to be critically recognised,” says Ariella Wolens, the exhibition’s curator. A.K.

One Becomes Many
Pérez Art Museum Miami, until 16 April 2026
One Becomes Many is one of the first exhibitions in the US devoted to themes related to Candomblé, an animist African diasporic religion that originated in Brazil in the 19th century. It includes works by ten Brazilian artists spanning the 1960s to today, most of which recently entered the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s collection.

“Perhaps other shows have referenced these themes here and there, but none has focused on them,” says Jennifer Inacio, the exhibition’s curator. “Still, it’s not didactic. The works should speak for themselves. Not all are specifically talking about Candomblé, but rather looking at ancestral history and how that informs the present.”

Notably, One Becomes Many has an overarching focus on abstraction. It features several drawings by Tadáskía, who had her breakthrough exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year. Other works—by artists including Emanoel Araújo, Mestre Didi and Antonio Obá—carry more explicit references to Candomblé, honouring the deity Oxumaré, the rainbow serpent in Yoruba mythology that symbolises regeneration, death and rebirth. G.A.

Virgil Ortiz: Slipstream
Lowe Art Museum, until 11 January 2025
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which has been called “the first American revolution”, was an uprising in which the Pueblos, Navajos and Apaches banded together to run Spanish colonisers out of what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico. Virgil Ortiz, an enrolled member of the Cochiti Pueblo, took inspiration from this event to create the around 30 works on view here. Foremost among them are the ceramic figures that draw on traditional Pueblo techniques he was taught by his mother and grandmother, which cast figures from the Pueblo Revolt in an aesthetic that blends historic and futuristic elements. These clay pieces, some of which also feature glass elements, are accompanied by video, photography, costumes and augmented reality (AR) features. B.S.

José Parlá: Homecoming
Peréz Art Museum Miami, until 6 July 2025
José Parlá has had more than one brush with death. The Cuban American painter spent his formative years as a “writer”—his preferred term for a graffiti artist—on the cut-throat streets of Miami in the 1980s. But dodging bullets was nothing compared to Covid-19. In 2021, he contracted the virus and survived a four-month coma, a stroke and bleeding from the brain. His gravelly voice, damaged by the virus, is a constant of the ordeal.

Parlá’s experience gives the title of his Pérez Art Museum Miami show another layer of meaning. He is not only returning to his hometown; he is returning to art-making after a near-death experience. “It’s not just me I’m here to represent,” Parlá says. “I’m representing a tribe of people, young men and women, who chose to make art in really desperate conditions.” D.M.

Smita Sen: Embodied
Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, until 6 April 2025
Smita Sen’s sculptures, performances and works on paper explore the movement of the body through space and time, with an eye towards the emotional weight it inevitably accumulates. Incorporating 3D models and scans, Sen considers the ways that bodies internalise their environment and the memories they collect. She attempts to work through the grief and trauma stored within via meditative exercises and narrative medicine drawn from South Asian cultural and religious practices.

A dancer by training, Sen often uses her own experiences of injury, both physical and emotional, in her work. Notably, she considers the physical ailments, or “ghost pains”, that she experienced during her father’s last days and after his death in 2019. Her sculptures, films and collages using topographical maps serve as both tangible manifestations of grief and pain and tributes to her late father’s career as a geologist. E.G.

Lauren Shapiro: Pastiche
Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, until 19 May 2025
To mark the 150th anniversary of its original artistic director, Paul Chalfin (1874-1959), Vizcaya commissioned the Miami-based artist Lauren Shapiro to stage a series of interventions at the historic home that resonate with his legacy. In the house’s enclosed loggia, reception room and breakfast room, Shapiro’s intricate ceramic, glass and Plexiglas sculptures blend human-made and natural forms to bring the property’s lush vegetation inside while alluding to the motifs in Chalfin’s designs. The show’s title, Pastiche, reflects Shapiro’s blending of disparate techniques and styles, as well as Chalfin’s omnivorous aesthetic.

“My approach to making objects combines digital fabrication technologies with traditional ceramic techniques,” Shapiro says. “The resulting artworks not only highlight each room’s distinctive characteristics but also feature a combination of forms from the natural world with Vizcaya’s design elements, blending architectural and organic shapes.” B.S.