27 Nov Miami’s Must-See Exhibitions 2024
Source Credit: Content and images from Ocula Magazine. Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/miami-must-see-exhibitions-2024/
Anticipating the return of Miami Art Week on 2 December, and with it Art Basel Miami Beach (6–8 December 2024), we share a selection of must-see exhibitions, including Keiichi Tanaami’s career-spanning survey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) and Hurvin Anderson’s 16-panel painting paying homage to Caribbean heritage and histories of migration at Pérez Art Museum.
Keiichi Tanaami, High Heel (1973). Oil and acrylic paint on illustration board. 35.56 x 25.4 cm. Collection of KAWS. Courtesy Nanzuka, Tokyo.
Keiichi Tanaami: Memory Collage
ICA Miami, 61 NE 41st Street
21 November 2024–30 March 2025
Spanning seven decades of Keiichi Tanaami’s artistic practice, Memory Collage is the Japanese artist’s first institutional solo in the U.S. Informed by his experience of American air raids during World War II and the consequent changes in postwar Japan, planes, search lights, and fleeing masses are prominent across the artist’s collages, as is sexual imagery referencing Japanese pop culture’s commercialisation of desire to distract from the horrors of the war.
Tanaami became the first art director of Japanese Playboy in 1975, and his imagery contributed to the introduction of psychedelic culture in Japan. Idyllic landscapes featuring distorted backdrops, advertising cut-outs, and anti-war slogans were prominent throughout the artist’s paintings in the 1970s, while the survey also includes Tanaami’s more recent large-scale paintings and moving-image works made shortly before his passing in August.
Marguerite Humeau, *sk*/ey-, works in progress in the artist’s studio (2024). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Eoin Greally.
Marguerite Humeau: *sk*/ey-
ICA Miami, 61 NE 41st Street
3 December 2024–30 March 2025
Marguerite Humeau creates works that offer glimpses into parallel worlds. Her first major museum exhibition in the U.S. stages a speculative, post-human future altered by climate change, where soil dislodges from the Earth and transmutes into flying entities. ‘I am extracting the essences of real events, and then expanding into “what if?” scenarios,’ Humeau noted in the exhibition text. Amid a desert landscape, sculptures pollinate, blossom, and harden, while a video conveys the artist’s imagined future, touching on the cosmology of a human-made sun, a great migration, and the transformation of Earthbound creatures into nomadic inhabitants of the sky.
Marlon Portales, The Last Man (2024). Exhibition view: The Last Man, Spinello Projects, Miami (2 December 2024–11 January 2025). Courtesy Spinello Projects. Photo: Zachary Balber.
Marlon Portales: The Last Man
Spinello Projects, 2930 NW 7th Avenue
2 December 2024–11 January 2025
In his new paintings at Spinello Projects, Marlon Portales draws from art history to speak to social expectations around masculinity. Referencing the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, who is associated with male beauty, the luminous portrait The Last Man (2024) features a male figure in gold armour pierced by arrows standing in a boat beside a sleeping woman, while a third naked figure swims below.
Borrowing from the Romantic aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelite painting, the Cuban artist creates an atmosphere of mystery and desire in his exploration of masculinity, relationships, and eroticism. Other canvases cite Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–1863) and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972).
Hurvin Anderson, Passenger Opportunity (2024) (detail). Acrylic on plywood in 16 parts. 406.4 x 975.4 cm. © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Hurvin Anderson: Passenger Opportunity
Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd
21 November 2024–17 August 2025
British painter Hurvin Anderson works across the genres of still-life, landscape, and portraiture to investigate how community and identity can be represented. Born to Jamaican parents in Birmingham in 1965, the artist became renowned for rendering the interiors of barbershops, conveying Afro-Caribbean industriousness, and depicting Caribbean landscapes.
His exhibition at Pérez Art Museum responds to Jamaican painter Carl Abrahams’ 1985 murals at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport, depicting scenes from local history, which Anderson came across while participating in the 2022 Kingston Biennial. Passenger Opportunity (2024), a monumental 16-panel painting featuring blurred snippets of travellers and journeys, nods to the hopes and dreams that underlie people’s desire to leave for seemingly greener pastures.
Exhibition view: Estefania Puerta, The Ghost in the Hallway, Nina Johnson, Miami (15 November 2024–4 January 2025). Courtesy Nina Johnson. Photo: Morgan Waltz.
Estefania Puerta: The Ghost in the Hallway
Nina Johnson, 6315 NW 2nd Avenue
15 November 2024–4 January 2025
Estefania Puerta’s latest exhibition questions the values we assign to materials and how they can hold personal and/or symbolic meaning. The Columbian artist is best known for her sculptures that combine organic and inorganic materials to create alien forms informed by personal histories of immigration and undocumented existence in the U.S.
At Nina Johnson, Puerta presents a series of mixed-media sculptures—vitrines, vessels, candleholders—that question how materials function as carriers. A number of works on view were inspired by the reliquaries and sarcophagi the artist first saw during her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2023. For Puerta, these objects exemplify multi-functionality, serving at once as historical document, physical symbol, and marker of place.
Exhibition view: Truth, Old Past, Zilberman Miami (5 October 2024–17 January 2025). Courtesy Zilberman. Photo: Evelyn Sosa.
Truth, Old Past
Zilberman Miami, 25 NE 39th Street
5 October 2024–17 January 2025
Ten artists envision utopian futures informed by their respective cultural experiences in this group exhibition curated by Omar López-Chahoud. As the exhibition literature notes, it is by looking to the past—in particular, the distant past—that we can learn from our mistakes. Macedonian artist Yane Calovski takes architecture as an entry point to post-Soviet Europe, questioning the histories we have been told in a series of videos, installations, and drawings.
Miguel Braceli explores conflicts in Venezuela driven by opposing political views, which have often resulted in a ruling system hallmarked by oppression and hopelessness. Exhibiting artists further include Sena Başöz, Cheen & Manuel Chavajay, Liz Cohen, Michail Michailov, Judith Raum, Jonathan Sanchez Noa, Kevin Umaña, and Heba Y. Amin. —[O]
Source Credit: Content and images from Ocula Magazine. Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/miami-must-see-exhibitions-2024/