Miami art week 2024 has officially kicked off, with visitors flocking to the Magic City for a dose of sunshine and stone crabs to round out the year. Alongside pop-up exhibitions, gallery shows, and of course a slew of mainstay art fairs, museums are showing off their wares with a spate of must-see exhibitions. Below, we’ve gathered six of the most exciting shows to see.
“Hurvin Anderson: Passenger Opportunity” at Perez Art Museum
Hurvin Anderson, Passenger Opportunity (1966). Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery.
In the departure lounge of Kingston Jamaica’s international airport, there’s a pair of large murals by Carl Abrahams. Considered a pillar of 20th-century Jamaican art, Abrahams is best known for his surreal religious work, though in the airport works he tells the country’s story. The paintings stayed with Hurvin Anderson, a British painter born to Jamaican parents of the Windrush Generation, who encountered them while traveling back and forth from the island in 2022.
Anderson’s response is Passenger Opportunity (2024), an ambitious 16-panel piece. Lush Caribbean landscapes have long been a hallmark of Anderson’s paintings; here, however, they are largely abstracted into washes of color, with characters appearing in black and white, as though ripped from the pages of a newspaper. The series offers the airport as an in-between space occupied by tourists, immigrants, and emigrants alike—is there any place more fitting for such thoughts than Miami?
“Jacqueline de Jong: Vicious Circles“ at NSU Art Museum
Installation view “Jacqueline de Jong: Vicious Circles” at NSU Art Museum, 2024.
Jacqueline de Jong, the Dutch artist whose genre-defying practice challenged conflict and capitalism for six decades, is receiving her first U.S. exhibition, and it’s about time.
Building off its nation-leading collection of works by the avant-garde movement CoBrA, (named for the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam from which its members predominantly came), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale introduces one of the group’s few female artists and shows how she adopted its radical tenets.
A painter, sculptor, and engraver with little formal training, de Jong joined the anti-capitalist group Situationist International in the late 1950s. She founded the periodical The Situationist Times, through which she platformed kindred artists (though she was eventually expelled by movement’s Guy Debord). Combining Dadaist, Abstract Expressionist, and Pop art elements, de Jong was forever channeling contemporary politics into her work. The paintings on show at “Vicious Circles” remain pressing, revealing that little has changed.
“Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue“ at the Bass
Installation view of “Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue” featuring Adnan’s mural on the left, 2024. Photo: The Bass.
Paris-based German artist Ulla von Brandenburg typically stages her exhibitions amongst site-specific installations. Her new show at South Beach’s preeminent art museum, however, grounds her wide-ranging practice in late Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan’s ceramic mural Untitled (2023), which the Bass recently acquired. According to the museum, Adnan’s mural “serves as both a protagonist and theatrical backdrop” for von Brandenburg’s presentation—even though they also elected to commission a site-specific work from her, for good measure.
Von Brandenburg famously folds painting, photography, film, performance, and sculpture into her multidisciplinary practice, on her quest to amass the ever-alluring gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art.) As such, “In Dialogue” presents a selection of the artist’s latest efforts in film, sculpture, and watercolors. This vivid lineup cloaks the Bass with a frenzy of color and form.
Indeed, these two accomplished creatives share a fascination with geometric abstraction. The cross-cultural, intergenerational conversation that ensues elucidates their belief that the genre can at once probe and provoke the social and spatial structures that subtly govern daily life.
Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths at ICA Miami
Lucy Bull, 3:13 (2023). Photo: courtesy ICA Miami/Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Often, the most compelling works of abstract painting float familiar forms in front of a viewer before subtly slipping them away. Lucy Bull’s oil-on-linen works are in this camp: expanses of warm color (some measuring more than 10 feet across) whose beguiling layering owes something to the frottage of Max Ernst.
In marathon sessions, Bull stamps, splays, and stretches the brush across the surface of her works. It’s a personal, idiosyncratic process that has turned the thirty-something into one of the most in-demand artists on the market. “I want to draw the viewer in and create something that hopefully they can get lost in,” Bull told Artnet earlier this year. Across the 16 paintings at “The Garden of Forking Paths,” visitors can do just that.
Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early at Contemporary Art Museum North Miami
Installation view, “Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early” at Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami.
For decades now, Andrea Chung has simultaneously critiqued Western notions of paradise while celebrating the Caribbean islands’ innate beauty. The Newark-born, San Diego-based artist’s survey of works from 2008 through today carries that mantle forth across engrossing installations, powerful films, and decadent collages. The show is serious and playful, celebratory and grieving. Hence the show’s title, which evokes Chung’s power to hold conflicting truths.
The spectacle opens with an immersive gallery of cyanotypes, a medium Chung returns to often. Collages guide guests to each of the exhibition’s following chambers—first, a series made with paper from Taschen’s book on cyanotypes, then her most iconic collage series celebrating Black women through impeccably arranged flowers, archival photographs, ink, and glimmering beads.
Installation works, however, prove the show’s true focal point—from protruding hands to a site-specific piece titled The Wailing Room, where hanging bottles crafted from the historically loaded commodity of sugar each bear imagined messages from a mother who was forced to sacrifice her child for his safety. These vessels have been decomposing since the show opened, falling and melting into rich puddles on the floor.
Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice at Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
William H. Johnson, Harriet Tubman (ca. 1945). Courtesy of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.
As the story goes, the entire oeuvre of the Black American art star William H. Johnson almost ended up in the trash after his death. Fortunately, a friend saved it. Johnson’s folk art has since received several acclaimed outings, featuring most recently amongst the National Gallery of Art’s “Afro-Atlantic Histories” show in 2022 and the Met’s acclaimed Harlem Renaissance exhibition earlier this year. His full “Fighters For Freedom” series, meanwhile, has been on tour since 2022, marking only its third showcase in 75 years. This edition in Miami is the exhibition’s third to last stop.
Johnson produced these works of oil on paperboard throughout the early 1940s, at the height of his output. Using imagery sourced from newspapers, Life and Ebony magazine, and the New York Public Library’s archives, he amassed a pantheon of freedom fighters old and new, Black and white, like Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, Indian emancipator Mohandas Gandhi, and legendary singer Marian Anderson. Each of the 27 paintings on view pays its dues in Johnson’s signature style. Flat, colorful depictions give rise to complex compositions that use symbols to convey each figure’s complex story, and sometimes, how they all worked together.