7 Must-See Shows during Art Basel Miami Beach 2024
Calida Rawles, Impact, 2024. Photo by Marten Elder. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Miami Art Week caps off the yearly art fair calendar with its sunlit shores, legendary parties, and a deluge of internationally recognized art fairs, each prepared to show what’s now and next in contemporary art. Since Art Basel arrived in Miami in 2002, the event has evolved into the centerpiece of a massive ecosystem of art fairs, including Untitled Art, Design Miami, NADA, and Art Miami. Brimming with events from start to finish, Miami Art Week is expected to host more than 1,200 galleries.
It’s not just the visiting galleries that make a big splash—Miami’s network of galleries and museums also host a packed schedule of high-profile shows, from institutions like ICA Miami to local stalwarts like Nina Johnson. When you find a moment to step away from Art Basel Miami Beach in the Miami Beach Convention Center or Untitled’s shoreline tent, make sure to explore some of the local shows. Here are seven must-see exhibitions happening during Miami Art Week 2024.
Slawn, Mr Green Man, 2024. Courtesy of Saatchi Yates.
Slawn, Sssssstupid, 2024. Courtesy of Saatchi Yates.
If Slawn’s debut solo exhibition at Saatchi Yates in London was any indication, the Lagos-born artist’s gallery show in Miami will be one to watch. Born Olaolu Slawn in 2000, the artist has a magnetic bravado that draws crowds. Case in point: After the artist’s posts on Instagram, hundreds flocked to the London gallery inquiring if they carried “Slawn works,” prompting Saatchi Yates (who had never heard of him) to seek him out. Now, Saatchi Yates is showcasing a new collection of paintings by the rule-breaking artist during Miami Art Week in the Design District.
In this upcoming exhibition, Slawn produced 10 new large-scale paintings. He is influenced by his Yoruba heritage and contemporary youth culture, resulting in graffiti-like pieces that feature playful yet pointed commentary on racial stereotypes. Notable among his new work is Mr Green Man (2024), where an anthropomorphic cactus is depicted as one of Slawn’s frowning caricatures. Speaking to Artsy in September, he commented on this signature motif: “I say this in the most honest way, that is all I know how to draw.”
During Miami Art Week, Slawn’s work will also be included at the Rubell Museum’s presentation of its recent acquisitions.
Calida Rawles, Away with the Tides, 2024. Photo by Marten Elder. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Los Angeles–based painter Calida Rawles is known for her hyperrealistic paintings that capture Black individuals in bodies of water. Drawing from her personal connection to swimming—a source of comfort since she learned how to swim as an adult—Rawles uses these aquatic scenes to explore themes of racial identity and healing.
In her exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, “Away with the Tides,” Rawles explores Black life in the historic Overtown community in Miami, which has been deeply affected by gentrification and systemic racism. Her canvases, based on photographs taken there, depict Black residents engaging with significant water sites. These include historic public swimming pools designated for Black swimmers and Virginia Key Beach, which was the only beach accessible to Black visitors during segregation.
“People see water and they may think of leisure, relaxation, pools. But a lot of African Americans, when they see water, it’s a fear, and it’s a memory of a lot of history where we didn’t have access to it,” Rawles told the Miami Times. “Or we can even go deeper, in that the connection of all African Americans, per se, starts with the Middle Passage.”
An MFA graduate from NYU, Rawles is represented by Lehmann Maupin, which showcased her first major solo exhibition in New York in 2023.
Lucy Bull, Most Attractive, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
Living and working in Los Angeles, Lucy Bull often dedicates up to 12 hours at a stretch to her painting sessions. Using a technique similar to Max Ernst’s frottage, she meticulously builds up layers of oil paint on her canvases. Over time, these coats accumulate, allowing Bull to then etch into them, revealing the complex underpaintings. This intense process saturates her abstract forms with pulsating colors—teals crash into oranges and hot pinks swirl in eddies.
Now 34, Bull is presenting her first institutional solo exhibition in the U.S., “The Garden of Forking Paths,” at ICA Miami. The show features 16 of her paintings created between 2019 and 2024, including recent large-scale horizontal works that span over 10 feet across. In addition to her paintings, Bull will present the next stairwell commission at ICA Miami, which will be on view through September 2025.
A BFA graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bull mounted her third solo exhibition with her representing gallery, David Kordansky Gallery, in May. Her work is featured in collections such as the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others.
Andrea Chung, The Wailing Room, 2024. Photo by Zachary Balber. Courtesy of MOCA North Miami.
A series of hanging bottles made from sugar are slowly deteriorating in one of MOCA North Miami’s gallery spaces. These fragile vessels, part of American artist Andrea Chung’s installation The Wailing Room (2024), naturally contract and deform over time. As they fall apart, each bottle will reveal a handwritten note of apology to lost children. The work recalls the harrowing choices of enslaved mothers forced to commit infanticide to spare their children from slavery.
This installation is the central part of Chung’s solo exhibition “Between Too Late and Too Early,” which features over 50 mixed-media works and video pieces that explore the legacies of colonialism in the Caribbean. Inspired by her Chinese and Caribbean heritage, Chung is known for her subversive use of materials tied to colonial histories, creating works that address themes of love, loss, and resistance.
“77 Women Pulling at The Threads of Social Discourse and Guests: We Got The Power”
The Contemporary Art Modern Project
Through Dec. 20
The sixth edition of The Contemporary Art Modern Project’s “Women Pulling at The Threads of Social Discourse” brings together fiber works by 81 artists, all responding to the Ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s 2015 film Chi-Raq, which reworks the same story in modern-day Chicago.
The central narrative of both Lysistrata and Chi-Raq involves women withholding sex from men as a strategy for gaining political power. It’s a theme that has been much talked-about in recent weeks, with growing U.S. discussion of the South Korean feminist movement called 4B, which proposes a similar no-contact strategy.
In this context, the show is intended as a “frieze” of collective action, where fiber art is used as a technique for both resistance and storytelling. For instance, Caitlin McCormack’s embroidery Perhaps You’ll Bloom Again (2024) takes its title from a line from Lysistrata where women mock the men’s growing frustration. Crafted from hand-crocheted cotton string, glue, velvet, antique fabric, and synthetic fringe, the piece mirrors the sharp political and comedic tone of the original. Elsewhere, Shelly McCoy’s The Thong of Peace (2024) reimagines the thong as a non-wearable garment, made from galvanized barbed wire. Together, the 81 participating artists use fabric art as a way to address politics, environmental crises, sexual autonomy, and violence.
Peruvian artist Josué Sánchez’s first solo show in Lima faced harsh criticism from professors at his alma mater: the now-defunct School of Fine Arts in Lima. In an interview with the BBC, he recalled they “found my flat painting and the bright colors of my pictures unbearable.” Yet, that same night, his approach was validated by Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado, who encouraged him to embrace his colorful aesthetic. Heeding her advice, Sánchez continued to develop his vibrant style. His lush, boldly colored figurative paintings are now featured in his first solo exhibition in the United States, “Guardians of the Sacred Land” at Nina Johnson.
Sánchez uses saturated, expressive colors to depict tales of Andean folklore, with a magical realist style that characterizes his pieces. A standout of his upcoming exhibition is ÁRBOL DE LA VIDA (2014), a bright red canvas spanning 5 feet by 9 feet. It depicts a fantastical tree emerging from a fish-filled ocean, its dense, swirling branches ornamented by birds in a kaleidoscopic palette.
Rachel Feinstein, installation view of “The Miami Years” at The Bass, 2024. Courtesy of The Bass.
Rachel Feinstein first studied art as a child under the guidance of her grandmother in her hometown, Miami. Now a New York–based artist, Feinstein returns home for her first major exhibition in the Florida city: “The Miami Years” at The Bass. Known for her inventive approach to sculpture over her three-decade-long career—incorporating painting, video, performance, and installation—Feinstein often interrogates ideas of intimacy, vulnerability, and abjection. In particular, her uncanny, sculptural works examine human behavior and female identity.
The centerpiece of Feinstein’s exhibition at The Bass is Panorama of Miami (2024), a sprawling 30-foot-long installation of painted mirrored wall panels inspired by 18th-century panoramic wallpapers. Miami, for Feinstein, is a complex landscape where beauty coexists with decay. She captures a vista filled with the city’s landmarks: the Hotel Breakwater on South Beach’s Ocean Drive, the Atlantis Condominium (famous from the opening credits of Miami Vice), and the Serpentarium (a now-defunct reptile petting zoo). The unpopulated buildings, rendered in somber grays, starkly contrast with the vivid oranges of the natural landscape, creating a vision of how the city has changed since Feinstein was a child.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated that Calida Rawles learned to swim at age seven. The artist learned to swim as an adult.
