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    in Exhibitions

    How an Aluminum Mine in Jamaica Became the Conceptual Core of Breakout Artist Jamilah Sabur’s New Miami Show

    Jamilah Sabur approaches her artistic practice the same way a mathematician solves an unproven theorem: through a slow, methodical “long exploration,” as she calls it, done over many years.
    Since her time as an undergrad, “it feels like I’ve been working through the same thing,” Sabur says. “It’s like this one, continuous [line where] everything folds into itself.” And it will take her “50 or 60 years,” she guesses, to really make sense of what that thing is. So at the age of 34, the artist is only just getting started.
    Given the depth of Sabur’s conceptual preoccupations, it is no surprise that she refuses to confine herself to one medium. She once said she has “an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach,” putting “every damn thing in there like a mind map.”
    Early in her career—around the time she was working on an MFA degree at UC San Diego— she was dabbling in experimental filmmaking, but Sabur refuses to be hogtied to the genre. Two years after her debut solo show at Miami-based Nina Johnson Gallery, which featured a series of sculptural wall pieces, her latest exhibition there, “DADA Holdings,” focuses on paintings and should be considered in tandem with Bulk Pangaea, Sabur’s video installation in this year’s edition of Prospect New Orleans. Her work has also been included in “The Willfulness of Objects,” a group show featuring works by an all-star line-up of artists from the Bass Collection in Miami Beach.
    Jamilah Sabur, Ust Luga (2021).
    Given the back-to-back culmination of these projects, Sabur admits to feeling a bit frazzled; she feels like she’s now “deep underwater.” The reference seems fitting given how strongly geology factors into her practice. Sabur often uses science as an entry point for examinations into the social, political, and climate conditions throughout history of any given place. And according to Sabur, her latest projects—the paintings and the video installation—are about “the relationship between colonial and postcolonial extraction.”
    For her installation at Prospect, Sabur, who was born in Jamaica in 1987, started by asking herself, “Well, what is the geology of New Orleans?” That simple query set off a series of discoveries that tied New Orleans to Jamaica—and incorporated Belgium through the image of an escarpment (a cliff or steep slope), which the Belgian army once used to defeat Napoleon, just as freed African slaves living in Jamaica had against the British almost a century early.
    Sabur’s explorations started with the Michaud fault, a geological formation that runs underneath the eastern part of New Orleans. Through her research, Sabur then learned that NASA builds their rockets in a manufacturing facility located directly on the fault. And what are the rockets made from? Aluminum. Wondering where the aluminum came from, Sabur found out that it was partially supplied from Jamaica, where she lived until she was 4 years old.
    Sabur then traveled to Jamaica to film the aluminum mine, the mountainous rainforest surrounding it—where enslaved workers once attempted to escape from British and Spanish colonizers—and the ship that exports the natural resource to Louisiana.
    Jamilah Sabur, In this Act (2021).
    Converting stills from Bulk Pangaea into stereoscopic images, Sabur’s paintings and text works in “DADA Holdings” are an “object-base[d] exploration,” she says, of the same themes. The works reference the Jamaican mining act of 1950, which cemented the island’s role as the major supplier of aluminum to North America. Continuing her deep dives into “networks of extraction across the planet,” she explained in an email, Sabur feels as though “the actual sites of extraction are just the shadows of what has already happened.”
    To that end, this work is, for one, “a commentary on how this extraction of natural resources is very similar to the colonization of certain spaces, and her thinking about the impact of both extraction and colonization on indigenous people” Erin Christovale, the Hammer Museum curator who organized her first major solo museum presentation in 2019, told Artnet News.
    Jamilah Sabur, Black Forest, Bauxite, Black Sea (2021).
    Clicking Into Place
    Sabur’s exhibition at the Hammer was her breakout moment. Familiar with her work since visiting her 2014 thesis show at UC San Diego, Christovale felt like Sabur’s films “always needed to branch out, to be multi-dimensional and function more as an installation or an environment.” So the curator let Sabur take over the Hammer’s project space with Un chemin escarpé (“a steep path”), an immersive, five-channel video installation.
    The work is something that viewers “can really inhabit,” Sabur said, rather than simply just watch, and the videos mainly show landscape images, with no linear narrative or dialogue, only a score the artist herself composed. The installation is also a sort of precursor to Bulk Pangaea now on view at Prospect, mining “geographical spaces as a way to think through colonization, environmental justice, and the politics of immigration,” as Christovale noted in her announcement of the show on Instagram.
    Prospect curator Diana Nawi has been following the evolution of Sabur’s practice for nearly a decade. Of late, she feels as though “Jamilah has landed on forms and ideas that I think can really carry her through her practice for a long time,” she said. “They’re timeless but also so relevant to our moment.”
    Jamilah Sabur, Nord Stream (2021).
    In the last few years, her “ideas around place, science, geography, and geology have become more expansive within her practice,” she continued. “I think her Hammer Project and what she’s done for Prospect both really speak to that.”
    Her piece for Prospect, in particular, is also deeply personal. Incorporating images of various Jamaican landscapes, along with the symbolic use of the rhomboid shape—a reference to the threshold of her mother’s old home on the island—Sabur not only leans into her history as a citizen living primarily outside of her home country, but also addresses the idea of feeling stuck between two places.
    She also utilizes her background in performance, engaging in deliberate, ritualized movements in the videos, which give viewers the sense they’re not only inhabiting the installation space, but also crossing through a portal into Sabur’s innermost psyche.
    What Christovale was immediately drawn to in Sabur’s videos was how they “really challenged what you assume of a Black experimental video artist,” she says, in that “there’s a very specific Black American history [with] various signifiers that are not really expressed or seen in her work.”
    Instead, Sabur re-centers Black history through a primarily Caribbean lens, “often pulling from landscapes and ideas and languages that are not American, but that obviously have direct ties to her personal history,” Christovale adds. “So it doesn’t always quite register as an American work.”
    Jamilah Sabur, Cockpit Country (British Army base 1728-1795) (2021)
    The Perpetual Outsider
    Sabur’s work doesn’t register as American for a reason—until recently, she wasn’t one. After moving from Jamaica to Miami with her family, she grew up as an undocumented immigrant, only obtaining her American citizenship in 2018. Her personal struggles with “feeling stateless,” as she put it, have been significant.
    In that way, she has often felt like she doesn’t quite belong to either culture. Ultimately, much of her Jamaican identity “has been formed in this relationship to memory, my parents retelling of this landscape of this place,” she said.
    In Un chemin escarpé, she uses memory as a way to see “a landscape from another vantage point,” she wrote in an email, scrutinizing how bodies move through and encompass multiple dimensions in time and space.
    Sabur creates her art as someone whose perspective isn’t clouded by any ties or allegiances, as though she’s removed enough to be an objective observer, someone attempting to provide answers to questions that those steeped in a single cultural heritage don’t even think to ask.
    After getting her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009, she considers her time in grad school at UC San Diego as a real turning point in her practice.
    “I went there following the legacy of Allan Kaprow and Lorna Simpson,” she says. What she found “was this program rooted in these conceptual practices”.
    That experience continues to shape her thinking, and has led to what ultimately keeps her practice going: the search. Which she is only a fraction of the way into. Similar to how she goes about her work, Sabur takes a bird’s-eye view of her practice as a whole. When asked how she wants it to grow, she wrote: “I just plan to continue this evolution of thought.”
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    ‘I Discovered All Sorts of Things About Myself’: Artist Lubaina Himid on Mingling Works From Different Eras in Her New Survey

    British artist Lubaina Himid was awarded the Turner Prize in 2017 and since then has been a quietly powerful presence in the art world.
    In 2019, she exhibited at the New Museum in New York and then at Wiels in Brussels in 2020. Now, in a homecoming moment, she has opened an eponymous survey of her work at Tate Modern. Featuring paintings, sculptures, installations, and sound works, the show lifts the lid on Himid’s practice beyond the most recent paintings for which she’s best known, revealing the journey that brought her to this point.
    “I suppose the last few years have been full of those sorts of things—not big risks, but those sorts of risks where it could go wrong, but where I discovered all sorts of things about myself,” Himid mused as we spoke at Tate Modern.
    The pandemic was an opportunity to slow down, she said. But it was also a chance to focus on painting and thinking about art after a whirlwind year that saw her on the frontline of debates about media representation, culminating in an unorthodox residency with the Guardian newspaper after she accused its staff of enforcing racial biases.
    “It gave me a chance to make a particular kind of painting and to do this collaboration that I did with Magda,” she said, referring to sound and film artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan.
    The resulting collaborative show at Wiels last year (“Lubaina Himid: Risquons-Toutwith”), which explored the color blue, its senses and its meanings, was inspired by the Joni Mitchell album Blue. Some of the show is also part of the Tate Modern exhibition, the sound design of which took place ahead of the curation of the rest of the work, providing a framework for the visual works in the show. The sound flows and bleeds from room to room, much like the sea, which is a theme throughout the show.
    Lubaina Himid, Blue Grid Test (2020) at Wiels. Photo © Lubaina Himid
    “What Magda and the sound the team did was sort of compose the whole space at once,” Himid said. “I think what it allows is audiences to go at a particular pace. You’re pulled [through], but you still have the memory in your body. You certainly have it because you can still just hear what’s behind you, but there is something else pulling you through.”
    In a sound work titled Blue Grid Test (2020), the soothing recital of “blue, blau, bleu,” with poetic evocations of the color blue, wrap the viewer in calm. But then you step out into open water, into the sound of the unrelenting movement of the ocean filling the next, huge room.
    Lubaina Himid, Tide Change (1998). Photo © Lubaina Himid Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens
    “When you leave The Blue Grid Test, that was the innocence for lost, safe space. But we gave you that and then you’re out in the open, where everything is dangerous. Then when you reach [a] big square, and you’ve got old boats, new money. A boat, a wave, the shore—the history of the capturing of Africans and the shipping of Africans.”
    Lubaina Himid, Man in a Shirt Drawer (2017–18). Photo Courtesy Tate © Lubaina Himid
    The show explodes in a later room with huge, beautiful paintings of figures in discussion. But somehow, their interior worlds speak more loudly than their gestures. There is tension in each painting, as though we have just missed something, or as if something pivotal will happen the moment we walk by.
    Two series dominate the selection. First is the “Pastry Chefs,” which deals with the inner dialogue and outer behavior of men, and the power dynamics they negotiate.
    “If you imagine, all day long, these men are in a fast and beautiful kitchen making fabulous creations of spun sugar and chocolate,” she said. “It’s not necessary, but it’s kind of fabulous.”
    Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern. Photo Sonal Bakrania Courtesy Tate
    The second series is the “Le Rodeur,” in which Himid imagines life on a fabled ship that came from West Africa to the Caribbean on which nearly everyone went blind. Upon arriving at their destination, an indigenous Caribbean tribe cured their sight. But who were the lucky ones, Himid asks? The ones who arrived to enslavement, or the one who were thrown into the sea on the way?
    “They don’t know what’s happening,” Himid said of the newly arrived enslaved men and women. “They don’t know where they are. They don’t know what the sea is. They don’t know what boats are. They don’t know whether they’re going to hell. They knew nothing—and on top of that, they’re going blind. And top of that, some of them, in their blindness, are being thrown overboard.”
    Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern. Photo Sonal Bakrania Courtesy Tate
    Himid intends these works and the entire show to raise more questions than it answers. She sees the non-chronological order as a risk worth taking. The works ask monumental questions of the viewer, but their vivid beauty—they are great paintings—hold you in a safe place as you contemplate them.
    Throughout the show are sails, pulleys, ropes, and waters, a constant theme of balance and navigation, the ever-moving waters and shifting sands of an identity thrown into chaos by a cataclysmic event.
    The show ends on a stark note, with a sound work in which the names of slaves are spoken aloud, accompanied by music with a connection to Blackness from Baroque to jazz. Nearby are a haunting sculpture, an empty bike, and smoking shelter graffitied with the phrase, “Do you want an easy life?” It’s a cliffhanger of an ending to what is essentially a show filled with emotion.
    “You have a shot at Tate Modern and then the temptation is to absolutely play it safe and play the same formula, because we know what works,” Himid said. “You know, start chronologically, go through the career, and end up with your recent work. But that’s not quite the way I think, or the way I work. It’s all, for me, about pushing things a little bit within the confines of a museum or an art gallery or within visual arts.”
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    in Street Art

    “El Vencedor” by Juan Salgado in Puerto Rico

    The experienced artist Juan Salgado presents a mural to help transform a community in his native Puerto Rico.The history that surrounds the community of Santurce and El Hipódromo ward in Puerto Rico, has served as inspiration for the well-known artist, Juan Salgado, to create his most recent work called “El Vencedor”, and in this way contribute to the transformation of the zone in that community.This is part of an initiative of Doctor’s Center Foundation and produced by Zumare Studios that will impact the Santurce communities.  The mural presents an adaptation of the history that the Santurce community in San Juan holds, Since its foundation, Santurce served as the home of those ancient slaves who achieved their freedom. Under the title “El Vencedor”, Salgado seeks to highlight all those who managed to overcome the chains of slavery, leaving behind the inequality and prejudices of the time.“I am extremely happy with this project. As an artist I seek to impact people in different ways, and I believe with this mural, we are remembering a valuable history of the Santurce and Puerto Rico area. We can never forget our roots and what has made us all diverse”, commented the world-renowned tattoo artist.The community of Santurce has undergone great transformations, but Salgado wanted to highlight that moment in history where freedom was the center of this iconic San Juan community. “Slavery in Puerto Rico was abolished only 148 years ago. This work is dedicated to all those victorious people who traced the path to freedom and managed to escape from the imposed race”, Salgado mentioned.Juan Salgado has over 400 thousand followers on his social media accounts, and has captured his work on the skin of great artists and renowned personalities. He has left his mark and creations in various areas of Puerto Rico, and in countries such as Italy, Australia and at Wynwood in Miami, Florida. Also, he has participated in several international competitions recreating a mixture between fantasy and reality, making the viewer contribute his point of view to his works.Check out below for more images of “El Vencedor”. More

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    in Street Art

    Artist Retrospective: The London Police

    The London Police is an art collaboration between Chaz Barrisson and Bob Gibson that started in 1998 when the artists visited Amsterdam to rejuvenate the visually disappointing streets of the drug capital of the world. The artists display an art in illustrative and innovative expression.They were part of a small group of artists at the end of the last century that helped pioneer a new street art movement. After a few years of mixing traveling and making art in the street, TLP began to receive worldwide recognition for their contribution to the graffiti/street art movement. They were included in many of the books documenting the scene and invited for shows and live drawing performances all over the globe. Their work has adorned buildings and galleries in more than 35 countries, like England, Holand, Singapore, Italy, Norway, Slovakia, USA, among others.Mural in Odintsovo, Russia for Urban Morphogenesis, 2019The duo combine styles on every piece they produce, often mixing in a tall portion of antics and mock-seriousness along the way. In these playful fantasy cityscapes ‘the Lads (the circular characters)’ are constructed and move around freely, in turn helping to build further elements of the city. The London Police creates a place full of interaction between their circle and line paintings.Scroll down below to view more of The London Police’s best works through out the years.“Fish Eat Fish” in Cozumel, Mexico, 2015In 2015, The London Police collaborated with Tristan Eaton for the excellent SeaWalls: Murals For Oceans. The team spent about five days to create this impressive piece which is featuring each artist’s distinctive style and technique. A monochromatic layering for Tristan Eaton combined with a bunch of signature characters from The London Police.“900 Dogs by a Chocolate Factory” in Germany, 2018The collective from Amsterdam created a work in Germany which in the background we see a detailed city panorama. This element is kept in a turquoise-blue combination separated by a purple line. In the center of the mural appear the LADS, i.e. three smiling dogs in black and white, a signature element from the artists’ works.Mural in Houston, Texas for Hue Mural Festival, 2015Mural in Berlin, Germany for Urban Nation ONE WALLIndoor Mural for Goodbye Monopol 2 Festival in Luxembourg, 2013Mural in Covington, USA, 2013Mural in Covington, USA, 2013For more updates on the artistic duo, check out our #TheLondonPolice page! More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Next Gwangju Biennale Has Been Postponed to 2023 Following Meager Attendance at This Year’s Event

    The 14th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, originally set for 2022, has been postponed by a full calendar year.
    While the delay coincides with a new wave of concern about global travel caused by the Omicron variant of Covid-19, today’s announcement from the show’s organizers stressed a more positive motive: the move is designed to move the art event to a new spot on the calendar, so as to extend its duration.
    The Gwangju Biennale, one of the most attended art events in the world, has traditionally run for 66 days starting on the first Friday of September during even-numbered years. Now, the next edition will be expanded to 94 days, kicking off earlier in the year. The rescheduled show is set to take place April 7 through July 9, 2023.
    “There were a number of people in the past who were disappointed that they have missed the Biennale due to its limited duration,” Gwangju Biennale Foundation president Yang-woo Park said in the statement. “It is our hope, as the longest Gwangju Biennale ever to take place, the 14th Gwangju Biennale will also contribute to the general expansion of culture and art.”⁠
    The previous edition was pushed from September of 2020 to the spring of this year, due to the Covid-19 crisis. Visitor numbers for this year’s iteration were severely depleted, and only a handful of participating artists could attend. 
    Not mentioned in the official statement were the very public controversies that have dogged the Biennale over the last 8 months. 
    A visitor walks past a poster for the 13th Gwangju Biennale at an exhibition hall in the city of Gwangju on April 1, 2021. Photo: Jung Yeon-je / AFP via Getty Images.
    Following the event this spring, the Foundation announced that it would not renew the contract of its president of four years, Sunjung Kim. The news came amid allegations from the biennial’s labor union that Kim had verbally abused and unfairly fired employees—claims which were subsequently investigated by Gwangju’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, as well as the South Korean Ministry of Employment and Labor.
    Kim officially vacated her position in June. Shortly thereafter, she spoke out against the accusations, calling them “unfounded claims and factual distortions,” suggesting that her critics were responding to the “long overdue systematic changes” she implemented during her tenure.
    “I have tried my best to oversee the administrative process and organizational structure of the foundation with fairness and due responsibility,” Kim said at the time. “I also did not hesitate to reform outdated practices where necessary.”
    Representatives for the Gwangju Biennale did not immediately respond to Artnet News’s request for information about the postponement of the 14th edition.
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    Looking to See Some Art Beyond a Fair Booth? Here Are 16 Museum and Gallery Shows to Visit During Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

    During Miami Art Week (November 29–December 5), there will be plenty more to see beyond the Miami Beach Convention Center, the Ice Palace, and the beachside tents. As the city’s museums, nonprofits, private collections, and galleries return to form after the off year of 2020, they have saved some of their best programming for December, when they can seize the international art world’s attention. Read on for our picks.

    “There Is Always One Direction” 
     de la Cruz CollectionOngoing through 2022
    Installation view of “There Is Always One Direction” at the de la Cruz Collection. Photo courtesy of the de la Cruz Collection, Miami.
    Since 2009, collectors Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz have operated a private museum that showcases new selections from their holdings each year. The current outing takes its name from Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction) (1994), which is on view alongside works by the likes of Tauba Auerbach, Hernan Bas, Wifredo Lam, Glenn Ligon, Christina Quarles, Sterling Ruby, Vaughn Spann, Reena Spaulings, and Christopher Wool.
    The de la Cruz collection is located at 23 NE 41st Street in the Miami Design District. Admission is free.

    “Will Ryman: The Situation Room, 2014” 
    Margulies WarehouseThrough April 30, 2022
    Will Ryman, The Situation Room (2014). Photo courtesy of the Margulies Warehouse, Miami.
    Mega-collector Martin Z. Margulies is staging no fewer than seven shows at his private museum this year, including ones dedicated to Arte Povera, new work by Anselm Kiefer, and Will Ryman’s life-size replica, in glittering black charcoal, of President Obama and his security council in the titular situation room during the covert Navy Seal operation that assassinated Taliban leader Osama bin Laden.
    The Margulies Warehouse is located at 591 NW 27th Street. General admission is $10.

    “Zhivago Duncan: Pretentious Crap”
    Pérez Art Museum MiamiNovember 30, 2021–September 25, 2022
    Zhivago Duncan, Pretentious Crap (2010–11). Collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Diane and Robert Moss.
    In addition to current shows by Jed Novatt, Meleko Mokgosi, and Marco Brambilla, and of African and African diaspora artists from the Jorge M. Pérez collection, PAMM is staging an installation of Zhivago Duncan’s elaborate multimedia work Pretentious Crap (2010–11), which Diane and Robert Moss donated to the museum in 2014. The piece is by the artist’s alter ego Dick Flash, the sole survivor of a global apocalypse who has forgotten life before the end of the world, collecting scraps from a ruined civilization he doesn’t understand. The resulting display, with vehicle parts spinning aimlessly in a massive cabinet, parallels contemporary artists’ struggles to make work that explains our complex world.
    PAMM is located at 1103 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami. General admission is $16.

    “Shattered Glass”
    Presented by Jeffrey Deitch at the Moore BuildingNovember 29–December 5, 2021
    Delfin Finley, Two Sides of the Same Coin (2021). Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch.
    After five years of teaming up with Larry Gagosian to bring blue-chip art to the Design District’s Moore Building, Jeffrey Deitch is going it alone this year with “Shattered Glass.” He’s re-staging a show of new art by emerging artists of color that debuted at his Los Angeles space back in the spring, which attracted more than 1,000 daily visitors in its final weeks. Curators Melahn Frierson and AJ Girard are expanding the exhibition to include 15 additional artists. It’s also the last time Deitch will occupy the space because, according to the dealer, its being taken over by a “concept creation collaborative” called Woodhouse.
    The Moore Building is located at 191 NE 40th Street, Miami Design District, Miami. Admission is free.

    “Witness: Afro Perspectives”
    El Espacio 23Through Winter 2021
    “Witness: Afro Perspectives” at El Espacio 23. Photo courtesy of of El Espacio 23, Miami.
    PAMM namesake Jorge M. Pérez opened his own private art space in Allapattah, the Dominican neighborhood that is also home to the new Rubell Museum. The second show, of over 100 works by African and African Diaspora artists, is guest-curated by Tandazani Dhlakama, of Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCA, in collaboration with Pérez Collection curators Patricia M. Hanna and Anelys Alvarez. Featured artists include Belkis Ayón, Lorna Simpson, and Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, tackling weighty themes such as systemic oppression and identity. A companion show, “Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection,” is also on view at PAMM (through February 2, 2022).
    El Espacio 23–Jorge M. Pérez Collection is located at 2270 Northwest 23rd Street, Allapattah, Miami. Admission is free.

    “Ellen Lesperance: Amazonknights” 
    ICA MiamiNovember 30, 2021–March 27, 2022
    Ellen Lesperance, Amazonknights. Womonspirit. Womonpower. Glory. (2017). Collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; museum purchase with funds from Helen Kent-Nicoll and Edward J. Nicoll. Photo: Dan Kvitka.
    In addition to “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight,” which opened in late October and runs through April 17, 2022, the ICA is unveiling a quintet of solo presentations by Ellen Lesperance, Shuvinai Ashoona, Harold Mendez, Hugh Hayden, and Anthea Hamilton during Miami Art Week. Inspired by the women weavers of the Bauhaus, the Pattern and Decoration movement, and 1970s and ’80s feminist art, Lesperance has made paintings and sculptures based on hand-knitted garments worn by women activists who took part in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp protests against nuclear weapons in Berkshire, England, between 1980 and 2000.
    The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami is located at 61 NE 41st Street, Miami Design District. Admission is free.

    “Alex Israel x Snapchat”
    Bass Museum of ArtNovember 29, 2021–May 1, 2022
    Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (Pelican with Fish) (2019). Courtesy of the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.
    Alex Israel’s collaboration with Snap, which debuted at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2019, uses augmented-reality technology to create five AR experiences that each correspond to one of his “Self-Portraits.” At the museum, viewers can take in the physical paintings with their eyes, and then download the AR “lenses” to view the work though their smartphone, watching as the works come to life. A sixth AR work activates the museum’s Art Deco facade, transforming the entire building into a pedestal for a giant virtual sculpture of Israel himself.
    The Bass Museum of Art is located at 2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. General admission is $10.

    “My Name Is Maryan”
    MOCA North MiamiThrough March 20, 2022
    Maryan, Personnage (Soldat), 1974. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.
    Polish-born artist Maryan was a survivor of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, where he sustained injuries that necessitated the amputation of his leg. After the war, he studied to become an artist in Jerusalem and Paris before moving to New York in the 1960s. His paintings, sculptures, drawings, and films often feature fictional figures he called his personnages, from the French word for character. This exhibition surveying his four-decade career, curated by Alison Gingeras, opens with an installation that re-creates Maryam’s studio at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where he lived during the 1970s.
    Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is located at the Joan Lehman Building, 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami. General admission is $10.

    “Reginald O’Neal: As I Am”
    Rubell MuseumNovember 29, 2021–October 2022
    Reginald O’Neal, Thyself (2020). Courtesy of Spinello Projects, Miami.
    At the last proper Miami Art Week, in 2019, the opening of Don and Mera Rubell’s private museum was one of the most hotly anticipated events of the year, putting the city’s Allapattah neighborhood on the art-world map. This year’s offerings are from 2021 artists-in-residence Kennedy Yanko, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Cajsa von Zeipel, and Reginald O’Neal, a figurative painter whose work focuses on the Black experience. The Rubells commissioned two new paintings from the Miami-based artist, and will show them alongside works from his solo debut “At the Feet of Mountains,” held last year at Miami’s Spinello Projects. O’Neal will have a simultaneous show, “They Dreamt of Us,” at the gallery (through January 15.)
    The Rubell Museum is located at 1100 NW 23th Street, Miami. Admission is free.

    “Every Wall Is a Door”
    SuperblueThrough 2022
    Es Devlin, Forest of U, (2021). Installation view of “Every Wall is a Door,” Superblue Miami, 2021. Photo: Andrea Mora.
    Superblue Miami’s inaugural exhibition—named after stage designer Es Devlin’s immersive mirrored environment of the same name—opened in May, adding even more visual star power to the Allapattah neighborhood. The show also includes one of James Turrell’s light-based Ganzfeld works and Drift’s kinetic installation Meadow, plus a digital experience from TeamLab.
    Superblue Miami is located at 1101 Northwest 23rd Street, Miami, Florida. General admission is $36. 

    “Bernadette Despujols: I Love You, Man”
    Spinello Projects
    Through January 15, 2022
    Bernadette Despujols, Andres (2021). Courtesy of Spinello Projects.
    Bernadette Despujols has previously painted naked women, creating works that confront society’s objectification of the female body. Here she turns her painter’s eye on the closest men in her life, creating intimate portraits of her friends, family, and lovers.
    Spinello Projects is located at 2930 NW 7th Avenue, Miami. 

    “Nadia Hironaka, Matthew Suib: Field Companion” 
    Locust Projects
    Through February 5, 2022
    Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, Field Companion, still. Courtesy of Locust Projects, Miami.
    Locust Projects, a highly regarded nonprofit alternative art space, reliably hosts some of Miami Art Week’s most interesting offerings. This year, Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib have created an immersive film installation of Field Companion, a film loosely inspired by the forests of the New Jersey Pine Barrens but filmed in a terrarium in the artists’ studio. Mirrored walls make it seems as through the microcosmic film set, captured with a motion-controlled camera, stretches into infinity. Fantastical (digitally rendered) creatures inhabit this tiny world, which speaks to issues of coexistence and sustainability, and the the importance of nature.
    Locust Projects is located at 3852 North Miami Avenue, Miami. Admission is free.

    “Dominga’s Photo Studio” 
    Wolfsonian–FIUDecember 1–8, 2021
    Photo: Juan Luis Matos. Courtesy of the Wolfsonian FIU, Miami Beach.
    It’s not just wealthy art collectors who can leave Miami Art Week with an original piece of art. In exchange for posing for a photographic portrait with Juan Luis Matos during his weeklong residence at the Wolfsonian’s Bridge Tender House, you’ll get a a print of the work. Each portrait’s pose and setting will be inspired by images in the Wolfsonian collection. The project is a collaboration with Bakehouse Art Complex and Miami Beach Open House.
    The Wolfsonian–Florida International University is located at 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach. General admission is $12.

    “Retrospectrum: Bob Dylan”
    Patricia and Phillip Frost Art MuseumNovember 30, 2021–April 17, 2022
    Bob Dylan, One Too Many (2020). Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.
    Beloved singer-songwriter and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan gets his first U.S. retrospective of his work as a visual artist. The show, which originated at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, features more than 180 paintings, drawings, ironwork, and ephemera, and teases out the connections between his material output and his music and lyrics.
    The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University is located at 10975 SW 17th Street. Admission is free.

    “Margarita Cano: 90 Years”
    NSU Art Museum, Fort LauderdaleThrough February 13, 2022
    Margarita Cano, The Tumbler (1997). Collection of the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; gift of Isabel Hernandez in memory of Benjamin Holloway. © 2021 Margarita Cano.
    Entirely self-taught, the Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Margarita Cano turned 90 this year. This exhibition celebrates her celestially inspired oeuvre, which includes miniature books, votive portraits, landscapes paintings, prints, and photographs.
    Nova Southeastern University Art Museum is located at 1 East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale. General admission is $12.

    “Judy Chicago: Judy Chicago In Glass”
    Nina JohnsonNovember 30, 2021–January 15, 2022
    Judy Chicago, Hand on Fire (Hands—Studies/Ancillaries) (2004). Courtesy of Nina Johnson, Miami.
    Pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago may be notorious for the ceramic plates she made for her massive installation The Dinner Party, but she has also developed her own techniques for painting on kiln-fired glass. Her second show with the Nina Johnson gallery will mark the debut of Mortality in Glass, her largest glass piece to date, as well as works from her glass sculpture series “Head’s Up” and “Hands.” Chicago has also re-fabricated Zig Zag, a Minimalist sculpture originally from 1965, in powder-coated steel.
    Nina Johnson is located at 6315 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. Admission is free. 
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    How Doug Aitken, Andy Goldsworthy, and Other Artists Turned a Former Retreat for San Francisco Elites Into a Stark Reminder of Climate Change

    It’s almost impossible to think about San Francisco without thinking about its landscape: the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the 1989 Earthquake. California’s Golden City, a boom-and-bust town with an economy, immigrants, and urban identity so tied to its environment, that the climate itself is a central character in San Francisco’s story. 
    It was no surprise then that when For-Site Foundation founding director Cheryl Haines began to consider the next exhibition for the Bay Area-based organization, the climate crisis would be its central query. In the last decade, the city has been plagued by drought and fire, they too becoming local residents in the psyche of San Francisco. But it was when the National Park Service all but tossed Haines the keys to Cliff House, the Victorian-era landmark leisure complex on the Pacific Ocean, that the theme of the new exhibition, titled “Lands End,” really began to take on tones that might otherwise not be there. 

    Cliff House, once the gilded getaway of the wealthy and later an overpriced tourist trap and wedding venue, fell prey to the pandemic and shuttered its doors on the last day of 2020. It remained unoccupied until last month, when For-Site opened the show there. It will occupy the space through March, free and open to the public, at which point the National Park Service hopes to have a new tenant.
    Haines and her team had about six weeks to pull the exhibition together, and only in early September did they begin to install the works by 26 artists, including Doug Aitken, Andy Goldsworthy, Olafur Eliasson, and Ana Teresa Fernandez.
    Despite the urgency and tattered timeline, Haines, who was also behind the 2014 Ai Weiwei show at Alcatraz, felt the exhibition was a necessary endeavor for the foundation: “Because we’re a project-based organization, we disappear in between projects,” she said. “We can’t stay financially viable if we’re quiet for too long.”

    It felt uncomfortably ironic that the day I visited “Lands End,” while it was being installed last month, the Bay Area had just been battered by historic rainfall (effectively ending fire season, the other end of the region’s climate crutch). The water-logged fire alarm inside Cliff House wouldn’t stop beeping throughout the hour Haines took me around. (Sounding the alarm? So on the nose it could have served as a piece of art itself.)
    Instead, inside the 1960s travel lodge rehabbed into a 1990s corporate structure, you’ll find sculpture, painting, video, and social practice works by an impressive roster of bold-named artists in a complete utilization of all spaces (including the trash room!). It’s evocative and ghostly, as well as quite literally a confrontation of our climate. 
    Brian Jungen, Tombstone, (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver, B.C.
    Haines personally installed some of the commissions for artists who weren’t able to travel. Of his Geophagia, an experiment in California Kaolin clay, Goldsworthy said: “I wanted to see if it would be possible for me to make this work from a distance—it’s difficult for an artist for whom place is so important. Cheryl would have to be my hands.”  
    The clay is laid over dining tables in the former cafe space, cracking as it dries, and evoking the many themes of California: topography, drought, fault lines, fragile resources, and, as Goldsworthy said, “a reminder that when we dine, we eat earth.” 
    Meanwhile, Ana Teresa Fernandez’s site-specific On the Horizon (2021) is a series of six-foot-high plexiglass tubes, filled with ocean water collected in buckets from outside, materializing the projected sea-level rise. 
    Ana Teresa Fernández, On the Horizon,(2021). Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.
    Andrea Chung offered Sea Change, a cyanotype not made with the climate in mind, but in her interest exploring Caribbean colonial histories. Hung near huge picture windows facing the ocean, Chung’s work echoes ideas of the “reshaping of land because of colonialism. What we know of the Caribbean is all imposed fantasy of trying to create the garden of Eden, and there are consequences to that that people don’t consider in altering the land.“  
    Though the exhibition is one of discovery—especially of art in unlikely places—that sparks dialogue about the changing nature of our world, “the artists I select don’t hit you on the head,” Haines said. “They’re not aggressive in their messaging, they’re inviting you to consider, and asking questions more than presenting answers.” 
    With a topic as existential, anxiety-provoking, and seemingly insurmountable as climate change, it was important that Haines frame the curation intentionally. “Beauty and seduction of beauty is always a device I’ve used to bring people to big ideas,” she said, “but I’m feeling it more in this show than I have in the past.”
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    ‘They’re Just Really, Really Absurd’: Watch Sculptor Jes Fan Make Art With Testosterone and Melanin to Challenge Our Assumptions About Identity

    Jes Fan’s media of choice might make other people squirm. Instead of paint or clay, Fan makes art with E. coli, semen, melanin, testosterone, blood, and urine.
    After developing some of these culturally loaded materials in a lab with the help of scientists, Fan transforms them into sculptures with glossy finishes and near-erotic shapes. The result walks the line between beauty, absurdity, and the grotesque. And for Fan, that’s the point.
    “A lot what I’m trying to do with what we consider as gendered materials, or racialized materials, they’re just really, really absurd,” the artist said in a 2020 interview for Art21’s “New York Close Up” series. “I was thinking a lot about how race, especially in the U.S., is seen as infectious. Think about China and coronavirus. Think about SARS and being in Hong Kong. And think about Jim Crow era, not sharing bodies of water. That idea of it being infected.”
    Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Jes Fan: Infectious Beauty.” © Art21, Inc. 2020.
    By injecting decaying biological matter into smooth, bulbous forms, Fan hopes to challenge viewers to examine closely held assumptions about what our culture values and what it rejects. “That eroticness seduces you,” Fan says. “It’s beauty in the gloss, and the possibility to see your own reflection in it. At the same time, you’re actually staring at something that repulses you, that actually is considered infectious or unclean.”
    The artist, who was born in Canada, raised in Hong Kong, and now lives in Brooklyn, tackles these same themes in a video included in the New Museum Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” on view at the New York museum through January 23, 2022. Xenophoria (2018–20) chronicles Fan’s pursuit of eumelanin pigment, the molecule responsible for skin color.
    As Fan dissects squid, harvests fungi, and locates moles in the film, the artist underscores the absurdity of the fetishization of a molecule that has caused centuries of racial discrimination, showing how it exists within all of us.
    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. “Soft Water Hard Stone” is on view at the New Museum in New York through January 23, 2022. 
    [embedded content]
    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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