Tis the season! Art lovers have alighted in Miami Beach kicking the city’s annual art week into full swing. While the main circuit of art fairs, events, and buzzy museum exhibitions offer an overabundance of world-class art, Miami galleries are also worth a gander—but where to start?

We’ve handpicked our must-see gallery exhibitions to see during Miami Art Week, from rising artist debuts to a historic reappraisal.

“Estefania Puerta: The Ghost in the Hallway” at Nina Johnson
Through January 4, 2025

Installation view of Estefania Puerta’s show “The Ghost in the Hallway” at Nina Johnson. Photo: courtesy Nina Johnson.

Scroll through Estefania Puerta’s Instagram and you’ll encounter a photograph of the artist bathing in a Roman fountain. Taken during Puerta’s time at the American Academy in Rome, the fountain is a playful reflection of a subject at the center of her new show at Nina Johnson—namely, the ability of something to simultaneously function as “place, object, and a literary document of sorts” (a slab of marble above the fountain is inscribed with its benefactors).

Though Puerta openly draws from the reliquaries and sarcophagi she encountered in Rome, “The Ghost in the Hallway” doesn’t feel conventionally morbid. Reproduction Question presents a purple plexiglass coffee table that it itself can be read. A trio of mounted wall pieces appear like elongated flowers with shimmering silver petals, inside each one contains drawings and trinkets (Roman postcard, chewing gum, artist’s spit) though you likely won’t spot them.

“Marlon Portales: The Last Man” at Spinello Projects
Through January 11, 2025

Marlon Portales, The Voyeur (2023). Photo: courtesy Spinello Projects.

Linger the extra moment with the color-pop paintings of Marlon Portales and it’s hard not to begin conjuring stories for its cast of characters. Partly, this is the consequence of the Cuban-born artist repurposing visual beats from the worlds of fairytales and art history.

When presented with a straw-hatted figure astride a white horse that’s leaping across a swimming pool, one inevitably asks: where are they headed and why such haste? Similar questions arise from the sight of an elegant cherry-red shoe crushing a sunflower or a pair of female centaurs stood in deep blue moonlight.

Thematically, the fluid nature of masculinity is the focus of Portales’ debut solo show at Spinello Projects. The title piece tackles the matter directly. Out on a lake, Saint Sebastian, an icon of male beauty and homoerotic desire, is arrow-struck and falling. Beside him lies John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, the Pre-Raphaelite vision of feminine beauty, unconscious and fallen. The two, quite literally, are in the same boat.

“Ayiti Toma III: Spiraling, Silence, & Sirenes” at Central Fine 

Through January 14, 2025

Viktor El-Saieh, Se toune’l toune (2024) ©️ the artist. Courtesy of CENTRAL FINE and El-Saieh Gallery. Photo: George Echevarría

Despite its name, the first edition of “Ayiti Toma III” never took place. This absence is one the organizer Tomm El-Saieh hopes will highlight the erased culture of the Taíno, indigenous peoples who inhabited the Caribbean islands before the arrival of Europeans. The show’s name is a nod to dueling theories on Haiti’s etymology: one from the Indigenous Taíno language meaning “land of the high mountains,” and another from the Fon language meaning “from now onward, this land is our land.”

Alongside a show at New York’s Luhring Augustine gallery, “Ayiti Toma III” arrives at Central Fine in Miami and offers a broad sway of Haitian art, culture, and history over the past century and a quarter. There are the fantastical flat beasts of Georges Liautaud’s sculpture, some of the island’s mythologies told by Myrlande Constant’s intricate bead flags, and the ghostly white-etched paintings of Shneider L. Hilaire.

“Camilo Godoy: Neither one nor the other, but a wound” at Dot Fiftyone
Through January 31, 2025

Still from Camilo Godoy’s Renacemos a cada instante (We are reborn at every moment) (2024). Courtesy of Dot Fiftyone.

Today, Miami is a playground for the rich and famous. But, from 500 B.C.E. through the mid-1700s, the tropical idyll was predominantly home to the Tequesta tribe, vanquished by the Spanish, and then the English. For New York-based Colombian artist Camilo Godoy, the echoes of this history abound across America and the wider world. These influences come to the fore in the artist’s first Miami solo show, staged at the city’s longstanding contemporary art gallery Dot Fiftyone.

The exhibition takes its title from a poem about colonialism, and centers on an orange-lit room screening Renacemos a cada instante (We are reborn at every moment)—a video immortalizing the performance from Godoy’s New Museum residency this past year. The footage features three dancers performing choreography “inspired by mourning practices that celebrate the cycles of life and death,” a release states. Three further photos from Godoy’s series “What did they really see” depict the artist in enigmatic black on black, performing his take on Indigenous dances that Christian missionaries once recorded with disdain. In its entirety, the exhibition is a movement-driven healing rite, rendered across mediums.

“Alba Triana: Dialogue with the Primordial Sea” at Locust Projects
Through January 28. 2025

Alba Triana amongst “Dialogue with the Primordial Sea.” Image: Logan Fazio, courtesy of Locust Projects.

It really would not be Miami Art Week without Locust Projects staging a spectacle. This year, the lauded experimental art space has managed to outdo itself. Executive Director Lorie Mertes hand-selected Miami-based Colombian artist Alba Triana to stage her first solo show in the city amidst Miami Art Week. Triana’s immersive sound and light installations typically explore unseen relationships between nature and humans. For her largest project to date, the artist makes magnetic fields material.

Forty small hand-crafted setups pairing copper coils with spherical pendulums dot all four 16-foot-tall walls of Locust Projects’ 625-square-foot gallery. Each coil generates a magnetic field, which, independently, “is randomly activated by digital microcontrollers positioned at the base of each wall,” Locust Projects’ head of technology Andrew McLees explained over email. That activation yanks the corresponding pendulum from its gravity-induced oscillations, into a new position. Zoom out, and they all start to dance together during their demonstration of magnetism, which protects the earth from solar flares—and creates the sensation of touch (since atoms never actually interact, it’s all just charged electron clouds repelling each other.) Sound emanates from the thrum of these coils kicking on, scoring the mesmerizing dance of these miniature metal balls.

“Cosmic Currents: Lita Albuquerque & Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.)” at GAVLAK, West Palm Beach
Through January 4, 2025

Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Solar Flare #5 (2024). Image: GAVLAK, West Palm Beach.

GAVLAK is one of 32 galleries making their Art Basel Miami Beach fair debut this year. Back up in West Palm Beach, however, the gallery is placing legendary land artist Lita Albuquerque in conversation with their longtime roster artist Jose Alvarez (also known as D.O.P.A.) The show’s release notes that “both artists use light, materiality, and metaphysical themes to explore spirituality, cosmology, and the nature of existence.”

For her first collaboration with Alvarez, Albuquerque created a new gestural painting that honors the silhouetted forms of Ana Mendieta’s land artworks. Three recent installments in her acclaimed “Auric Fields” series appear as well, using light to bridge the gap between life on Earth and the rest of the universe. For his part, Venezuelan-born and Miami–based Alvarez offers numerous works from the past four years, including four “Solar Flare” tondos to compliment Albuquerque’s “Auric Fields”—and a range of watercolors and collages executed in the artist’s signature kaleidoscope hues. The show promises a transcendent experience from two creative masters of spirituality.