The very best in fine art raises questions in the viewer’s mind. With every “why” or “how” that a painting, sculpture or installation conjures up, we reach ever closer to solidifying our own perspectives and preferences, in turn easing our ability to make sense of the information we’re consistently consuming.
Gean Moreno, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami’s Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, says offerings at ICA and its fellow South Florida fine art museums this season might just “renew people’s confidence in their capacity to critically question the structures and institutions that organize social experience.”
“Things that are ‘taken for granted’ need to be decoded,” said Moreno, who curated “Charles Gaines: 1992-2023,” which opens next month at the museum.
Gaines is a Black American artist who questions the discourse of aesthetics, politics and philosophy in his own abstract way.
“It is only when we can dig into how the categories that structure our lives work that we can begin to adjust them so that they serve the common good,” said Moreno.
By no means a complete list, here are the Biscayne Times’ selections for the 2023-24 season’s most moving and innovative fine art happenings.
Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
(Martin Seck.)
“Work by Juan Francisco Elso influenced many young artists who worked directly with him or who discovered his powerful practice years after his death. He was also in dialogue with a larger, global consideration of artists who have for many years used their artwork to engage with the legacy of colonialism on people of color within North America and the Caribbean,” says Adeze Wilford, who leads the MOCA curatorial department’s exhibition program. Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” opens at the MOCA November 1.
“Ancient Future,” opening Oct. 25, 2023, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA), is an exhibition of Detroit-born, interdisciplinary artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards’ works – immersive installations, forays into film and paintings incorporating soft sculpture that appeal tactilely as much as visually.
Adeze Wilford, who leads MOCA’s curatorial department exhibition program, says Richmond-Edwards seamlessly weaves together varying artistic mediums to explore themes of Afrofuturism and Black mythology to wonderous, expansive results.
“Her practice crosses collage, painting and draftsmanship, often within the same object. She builds symbols and allusions to the cosmos and Egyptology, and references to important Afrofuturist thought leaders, such as Sun Ra,” Wilford said. “Richmond-Edwards has used this exhibition as a springboard for world building and creativity within her own practice, and I would hope that that feeling of grandeur and creative expression resonates with [audiences].”
Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América,” opening at MOCA Nov. 1, 2023, celebrates the late Cuban artist with a collection of more than 70 works originally presented as part of Havana’s biennial in 1986. Through intricate, evocative paintings and handcrafted, three-dimensional works, Elso explores African, American Indian and European perspectives while creating records of Caribbean life.
Susanna V. Temkin, the curator of “Por América” who works at New York City’s El Museo del Barrio, says Elso’s legacy and works are strengthened when presented alongside contemporary artists hailing from Cuba and throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.
“In connecting artists from different places and generations – some of whom knew each other, others who are presented alongside one another for the first time – we hope that viewers identify and gain new perspectives about the liberatory possibilities raised by exploring shared ideas, traditions and cultural inheritances, and how this resonates with today’s world,” Temkin said. “As a rare chance to see so many of Elso’s works in a single show, I also hope that audiences leave feeling the same wonder for his material prowess and ability to create such powerful works from humble materials, like wood, mud and clay, as I have experienced while working on this project.”
Other exhibitions this season at the MOCA include “MOCA Collection: Light Play” and mosaics, paintings and video by Haitian-born artist Manuel Mathieu, both opening April 1, 2024. Visit MOCANoMi.org for more information.
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) kicks off Miami Art Week 2023 downtown with Gary Simmons’ “Public Enemy,” opening Dec. 5, 2023. A comprehensive exhibition – complete with a 10-by-10-foot boxing ring, interactive sculptures activated by local performers and the artist himself creating large-scale, wall drawings in real time – it will see Simmons employ mixed mediums to expose the anti-Black histories of arenas like sports, cinema, music and architecture.
Other exhibitions that continue into this season include Jason Seife: “Coming to Fruition,” which closes Aug. 11, 2024, and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s “Too Bright to See,” closing Jan. 28, 2024. Visit PAMM.org for more information.
(Zaire Aranguren)
The Bass Museum of Art will unveil Etel Adnan’s monumental, untitled mural set, as well as other works blending the artist’s dual loves for art and architecture, in “Painting into Space,” opening Nov. 24, 2023.
The Bass Museum of Art
On Nov. 24, 2023, The Bass Museum of Art will unveil
a larger-than-life, boldly colored wall mural set and other works that blur the boundaries between art and architecture by Beirut-born artist and writer Etel Adnan in “Painting into Space.”
Now through Aug. 16, 2024, Nam June Paik’s “The Miami Years” chronicles how the Seoul-born artist credited with coining the phrase “electronic superhighway” in the 1970s became a global leader in incorporating communication and media technologies into contemporary art, as well as his ties to Miami Beach, where he died in 2006.
Other exhibitions at The Bass this season include “Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists” and Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s “I Will Always Weather You,” both opening Dec. 4, 2023. Visit TheBass.org for more information.
(Frederik Nilsen)
“Numbers and Trees Charleston Series 1, Tree #3, Boone Hall Drive” is part of the “Charles Gaines: 1992-2023” exhibition opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami Nov. 16, 2023.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
“Charles Gaines: 1992-2023,” opening Nov. 16, 2023, is a 65-work survey of an artist whose output represents the multiplicity of possibilities
that accompanies experimenting with medium, method and systems.
Gaines is known for incorporating multiple languages and systems into his paintings, objects and immersive works, even using mechanisms to convert images and documents into numbers or music symbols. This collection of the artist’s most recent work sees him explore how society translates our liv
ed experience into categories, boxes that determine our identity and more, says Moreno.
“In Gaines’ early work, this process of turning one thing into another was
diagrammed in schematic ways,” Moreno said. “He would take a photograph of a nondescript plant, for example, and employing a series of rigorous but also arbitrary rules, he would translate the photo into a gridded and colorful drawing. [In his later work], rather than simply offering insights into race and identity, Gaines is much more concerned with reminding viewers’ of their critical capacities, of their aptitude to question the very categories that organize the world around them, such as race and identity.”
Other exhibitions of note this season include the unveiling of a site-responsive, quilted and sculptural monument by Tau Lewis Nov. 17, 2023, and the debut solo exhibition of New York painter Sasha Gordon, opening Dec. 4, 2023. Visit ICAMiami.org for more information.
(Courtesy of Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum)
Now through Jan. 14, 2024, the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at FIU’s main campus is presenting a solo exhibition of Addie Herder’s layered and complicated assemblage works, including “Big Black City.”
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
(Courtesy of The Wolfsonian-FIU)
The works on view now in “The Big World: Alternative Landscapes in the Modern Era,” like this Virginia Berresford painting, offer visitors to The Wolfsonian-FIU a variety of takes on the classic landscape form.
On display now through Jan. 14, 2024, at the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum on FIU’s main campus, “Machines for Living” marks the first time Addie Herder’s works have been presented in a solo museum exhibition since 1976. Herder’s intricate and careful assemblage works prove that explosively evocative art can come in very small packages.
Opening Oct. 7, 2023, is “Embellish Me,” which highlights the personal collection of the late Norma Canelas Roth, specifically her abundance of pattern and decoration works, art highlighting the American movement of the mid-1970s through the early ’80s characterized by unrestrained, visual and tactile excess. Think complex embroidery, brightly colored mosaics and gold foil accents galore.
Other upcoming exhibitions include “To Recognize a Pattern,” which arranges pattern and decoration artists alongside contemporary works bearing their influence, closing Dec. 10, 2023. Visit Frost.FIU.edu for more information.
The Wolfsonian
“The Big World: Alternative Landscapes in the Modern Era,” on view at The Wolfsonian at Florida International University, now through June 2, 2024, transcends traditional concepts of landscape art, displaying scenes that vary from the bucolic to the industrial, reminding visitors of the beauty that can be found at the intersection of nature and built environments.
Visit Wolfsonian.org for more information.
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(Brian Smith)
The Bass Museum of Art celebrates the legacy of Nam June Paik, the artist and thought leader credited for coining the term “electronic superhighway,” in “The Miami Years,” running now through Aug. 16, 2024.
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(Ron Amstutz)
Gary Simmons’ 1993 work “Lineup,” in which eight pairs of gold-plated sneakers rest under a chart reminiscent of the kind used to identify police suspects’ height, is one of several large-scale works included in “Public Enemy,” opening at Pérez Art Museum Miami Dec. 5, 2023.
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(Courtesy of Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum)
Bathe in the tastefully gaudy excesses of pattern and decoration art, like “Untitled Crown” from Thomas Lanigan Schmidt, with “Embellish Me,” opening Oct. 7, 2023, at Frost Art.
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(Courtesy of Paik Estate)
Nam June Paik’s “The Miami Years” exhibition is on view at the Bass through Aug. 16, 2024. It’s a collection of pioneering artworks incorporating media and communications technologies like “Bakelite Robot,” a single-channel video installation with LCD monitors and electric lights.