Alongside Art Basel, now celebrating its 20th anniversary in Miami Beach, the South Florida network of museums, private collections, art spaces and satellite fairs has proliferated and matured in tandem. These institutions always serve up their shiniest offerings for the annual movable feast, and high-speed train service on the Brightline now makes it all the easier to sample shows as far north as West Palm Beach. Here’s a selection from the buffet.
MOCA North Miami
Embedded in a largely immigrant community and a longtime anchor for contemporary art backed by hefty scholarship, MOCA North Miami now is giving its spotlight to an artist from the museum’s own backyard. Didier William, born in Haiti and raised in North Miami, currently has his largest retrospective to date on view with surreal paintings, prints and sculptures that explore his coming-of-age as a Black, queer immigrant. Mr. William’s dreamy and disorienting landscapes are populated with figures tattooed entirely with eyes, like a protective and watchful bark, a motif that he began exploring after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.
Art in Common
This new nonprofit creative enterprise, co-founded by the curator Zoe Lukov and the cultural producer Abby Pucker, aims to tackle big issues — social, political, spiritual — through sprawling thematic exhibitions. Against the drumbeat of the climate crisis, the inaugural show titled “Boil, Toil + Trouble,” at a pop-up space in Miami’s Design District, looks at water in all its forms. Works by more than 40 leading artists, including Marina Abramovic, Radcliffe Bailey, Nicole Eisenman, Guadalupe Maravilla and Bruce Nauman, explore bodies of water as sites of migration and ancestral knowledge; and as the foundations of myths, rituals and everyday activities. Expect a bit of witchcraft, too.
Bass Museum of Art
Coming upon a theatrical large-scale environment by the sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas always delivers a jolt to the system, with full-size replicas of recognizable cultural artifacts strewn about in a state of decay and offered up for contemplation, such as Michelangelo’s David lying sideways like a fallen god. For his site-specific installation in Miami Beach titled “The End of Imagination,” the Argentine artist — working with the artist Mariana Telleria, also from Argentina — envisions the colonization of other planets and how that might affect our nationalistic practices of monument making — past, present and future. Whatever extraterrestrial landscape appears at the Bass will be full of surprises.
NADA Miami
This showcase for emerging galleries and independent curators run by the nonprofit New Art Dealers Alliance, or NADA, started in Miami a year after its showier sibling Art Basel, with just 35 exhibitors. Now in its 20th edition with 146 galleries, art spaces and nonprofits from more than 40 cities, NADA Miami — held at Ice Palace Studios near the Design District — retains its quirkier, more down-to-earth vibe. Discover some new names among the 37 first-time exhibitors, including Galería del Paseo from Uruguay and Peru, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery from Tokyo, Gattopardo from Los Angeles and Patricia Fleming Gallery from Glasgow, and check out the special Curated Spotlight section by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, director at the Jack Shainman Gallery of New York.
N.S.U. Art Museum
It’s worth the short trip north to Fort Lauderdale, one stop on the Brightline, to see “Lux et Veritas,” organized by Bonnie Clearwater, the N.S.U. Art Museum director and chief curator. She connects the dots between 21 artists of color who attended graduate school at Yale from 2000 to 2012 — including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Abigail DeVille, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley — who, in response to the predominantly white institution, invited a variety of visiting artists and thinkers to fill in gaps and created lasting networks. The exhibition makes a strong case for how these artists, among the more prominent working today, have collectively helped expand educational and art world practices.
The Bunker Artspace
Continue north to West Palm Beach where, in addition to visiting the Norton Museum of Art, you can make an appointment to tour the 20,000-square-foot Bunker Artspace, the enormous private collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, known for her passionate support of emerging and overlooked artists. The rotating exhibitions are drawn from more than 15,000 works, on view in a 1920s Art Deco building, formerly a toy factory. The seasonal rehanging includes five rooms focused on textiles and ceramics, as well as installations on the themes of film noir and smoking. Ms. DeWoody also invited Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Brooklyn Museum director, Anne Pasternak, to reinstall the Bunker’s largest space. They choose to focus on artists that the collector supported early in their careers, including Calida Rawles, Jay Lynn Gomez, Kennedy Yanko and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
Hilarie M. Sheets
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