Eliana Willis

A giant ape has overtaken Los Angeles exhibition venue Beyond the Streets—not King Kong, but Queen Kong. The official mascot of the Guerrilla Girls, in fact. This looming inflatable crowns “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” the first-ever L.A. exhibition for the famed anonymous art collective of rebellious women.
Each member of the Guerrilla Girls assumes the name of a historic female artist. They make public appearances only wearing their iconic gorilla masks. Regarding the exhibition’s title, founding member Käthe Kollwitz told me over Zoom, “We knew the show was going to start after the election, but we didn’t know how the election was going to turn out. It just seemed like a great motto for what we do.”
Exterior view of the new Guerrilla Girls exhibition “Laugh, Cry, Fight” on view in Los Angeles. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the show “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—which widely omitted women. They made posters highlighting the lack of female representation in art museum collections and posted them on the streets of New York art strongholds. This was a decade before Cost and Revs popularized wheat-pasted posters as street art—but six years after Jenny Holzer papered subway stations with her Inflammatory Essays. Reactions to the stunt were swift, widespread, and spirited.
“Laugh, Cry, Fight” encompasses the many methods and messages that the Guerrilla Girls have played with over the past 39 years. “It’s not organized in any usual way,” Kollwitz said of the show. “We have this giant wall, the biggest wall in the space, which has a crazy montage of some of our old work and a lot of our very, very recent work.” That includes English and Spanish editions of their infamous 1989 poster “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” which exposes the disparity between female artists and nudes in museums. A 1988 poster cites the “advantages” of being a woman artist, “which, of course, are all disadvantages,” Kollwitz noted.
Installation view, featuring posters from the Guerrilla Girls’s history. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Since then, museums have started “casting a wider net,” as Kollwitz put it, by diversifying the artworks they exhibit. The Guerrilla Girls have played a real part in this shift. Ten years ago, they inspired the Uffizi Gallery to make material advancements, and in 2008, the collective confronted the Tate Modern’s chief curator, Frances Morris. “You have completely changed my mind, and I am changing this institution,” Morris reportedly responded. “And she did,” Kollwitz said. “It’s quite incredible.”
Such real shifts have empowered the Guerrilla Girls to tackle wider social issues, like homelessness and inequality in the film industry. The collective has also turned its gaze towards art world machinations that materially impact the rest of the world, like the way rich museum donors use their art collections to enhance their wealth. Last year, for example, the collective stationed a nine-foot-tall monument bearing updates to its 1990 museum code of ethics outside New York’s premier museums. The sculpture, which states “thou shalt honor thine employees” and “not consort with art dealers or collectors who commit tax evasion,” appears in “Laugh, Cry, Fight”—alongside new works like Meet The Creeps Who Stripped Our Abortion Rights (2022).
Interior, featuring a vitrine of ephemera. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Despite their outsized reputation, the Guerrilla Girls aren’t a large group. Too many cooks would impede their efforts in the kitchen. “Our dirty little secret is that while we’ve had over 60 members, at any one time, we’re very small,” Kollwitz said. They typically have fewer than 10 members at once, she said, adding, “That’s how you get things going.”
But, while they don’t recruit new Guerrilla Girls, they would like fans to copy them. Although the group began in the streets, most of their projects—ironically, or perhaps fittingly—take place in museums. Beyond The Streets, meanwhile, is a different kind of institution—one that attracts the fine art crowd as well as those beyond it, from sneakerheads to Instagram girlies.
Installation view, featuring their Complaint Department. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Two installations at “Laugh, Cry, Fight” invite participation—a photo booth and an iteration of the Guerrilla Girls’ Complaint Department, where guests write what they’d like to change about society. “I would say it took about one hour for the entire thing to be totally filled up,” Kollwitz said. “We are used to that. People want to have their say, and they should.”
“Laugh, Cry, Fight” is on view through January 18, 2025 at Beyond the Streets, 434 N La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. More

The piano at the gallery entrance, with an array of framed photographs lovingly displayed on the lid, could be found in many family living rooms. But these portraits, along with more on the wall, depict members of the trans community in Argentina, collected by the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (Trans Memory Archive Argentina).
The 15,000-object archive, founded in 2012 to safeguard the history and memory of a community that has historically faced violence and the threat of erasure, contains newspaper clippings, police files, and personal letters as well as photos and films spanning the 20th century.
Selections from the archive are on view in an installation titled Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between Stars and Ashes) at New York’s Ford Foundation in the show “Cantando Bajito: Chorus.” It’s the finale of a three-part exhibition series celebrating artworks that fight for bodily autonomy and oppose gender-based violence, collectively curated by Isis Awad, Roxana Fabius, Kobe Ko, Beya Othmani, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes.
The Archivo was conceived of by María Belén Correa and the late Claudia Pía Baudracco, who died in 2012, mere months before Argentina passed the Gender Identity Law allowing transgender people to legally change their name and gender. It was a major step forward for trans rights in the nation.
Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina’s photo installation Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between stars and ashes), 2024, at “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” at the Ford Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
“Trans women were tortured [and] brutalized during the Argentinian dictatorship and even after,” Fabius told me during a tour of the exhibition. “So there’s the celebratory aspect of the gathering and the collecting, but also the aspect of gathering information for a case against the state.”
But the Archivo, like the exhibition as a whole, is less about the suffering experienced by vulnerable communities than it is about their ability to thrive despite their struggles.
A photo of women toasting at a party from the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina. Photo courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
The show’s title, which translates to “singing softly,” is inspired by Nicaraguan political activist Dora María Téllez Argüello. She remained unbowed in the face of two years of solitary confinement as a political prisoner, defiantly singing throughout, refusing to be silenced. (She has since been freed.)
The installation of photographs from the Archivo, showing women who were unabashedly themselves throughout decades of discrimination, reflects the same spirit. But where Argüello struggled alone, “Cantando Bajito” emphasizes the importance of banding together to combat gender-based violence.
Selections from Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s “Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection” on view in the “Collective Desk” in “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” at the Ford Foundation. Photo: Sebastian Bach, courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
The show also features a “Collective Desk” that brings together even more archival materials from trans and feminist communities from around the world, including the Cyberfeminism Index in the U.S.; FAQ?, a queer feminist collective from Tokyo; and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s project “Private Practices,” which features Asian American and Pacific Islander sex workers.
It’s an exhibition where art meets activism, past meets present, and tragedy meets triumph, the artists and their subjects rising above difficult circumstances against the odds.
“It’s the idea of not showing the violence, not showing the victim,” Fabius said, “but rather holding a place of resilience, resistance, and flourishing.”
“Cantando Bajito: Chorus” is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, New York, October 8–December 7, 2024. More

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 JohnsonThrough 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 ProjectsThrough 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 FiftyoneThrough 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 ProjectsThrough 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 BeachThrough 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. More

For so many of us, the first week of December means a pilgrimage to Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach. But this year, a herd of 100 wooden elephants are joining the party, as the conservationist-minded “The Great Elephant Migration” has made its way to the sand.
The life-size sculptures are each modeled after an individual elephant, mostly from the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in South India. They are the handiwork of the Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 local Indigenous artisans. Designed by Shubhra Nayar, they are made from lantana camara, an invasive weed threatening to overtake the natural habitat of Indian elephants.
After kicking off their U.S. tour this summer in Newport, Rhode Island, where the elephants roamed along the coastal cliffs near Gilded Age mansions, the herd spent much of the fall in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, strolling the cobblestone streets. But they make an even more dramatic spectacle on the South Florida beach, set against the bright blue sky and sparkling teal waters.
“It’s so nice, people in bare feet with the herd,” Ruth Ganesh, the British animal rights activist behind the roving art project, told me. “And elephants are nature’s greatest masterpiece. They are like a Surrealist dream.”
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
So far, the reception has been enthusiastic—perhaps a little too enthusiastic. A breathless Page Six exclusive reported that a security guard caught a couple having sex on top of one of the elephants. There were no arrests made, but Miami Beach Police are now patrolling the installation, to ensure the thousands of visitors behave themselves.
“We knew that people would love them, but we didn’t think they’d take it that literally!” Ganesh said. “My question is how? They have very bony ridges on their backs!”
Ganesh launched the traveling art project as part of her work with the Real Elephant Collective, a nonprofit she started with elephant researcher and scientist Tarsh Thekaekara. All the elephant sculptures are for sale, with proceeds going to 22 partnering conservation non-governmental organizations, or NGOs—benefitting elephants, but also other species. The aim is to promote a mutually beneficial coexistence between humans and nature.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
“I feel very proud of the indigenous creators for having captured Miami’s attention,” Ganesh said, noting that the collective is a well-paying job for a community that typically made low wages on nearby tea plantations. “Now there are 20 different villages with little workshops, and they’re all making elephants. And they know the elephants. These poor tribes actually know how to live with the elephants, and this rewards them for their ability to coexist.”
To date, 250 sculptures have already sold, staying behind as the herd has made its way down the East Coast. Prices range from $8,000 for a baby elephant to $22,000 for an adult males with tusks, which tops out at 15 feet tall. (Ganesh advises bringing the works indoors for the winter, but you can also cover them with a tarp.)
If you don’t have the space—indoor or out—for a life-size elephant, you can also support the cause by purchasing a bottle of the project’s signature scent. Coexistence, from Italian perfume house Xerjoff, costs €250 ($263) a bottle, with part of the proceeds going to the NGOs. The luxury brand is the sponsor for the Miami exhibition.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
“The perfume has been made with flowers that you would find in an Indian elephant’s habitat, so you have notes of jasmine and damask rose,” Ganesh said.
(When I asked Sergio Momo, Xerjoff founder and creative director, if he was concerned that people might get confused and think that the perfume smelled like elephants, rather than their habitat, Momo told me King Charles made the same joke when the artwork was on view in London in 2021.)
In Miami, the elephants are also joined on the beach by a set of 46 3D-printed stars, laid out on the sand in a star-shaped formation. The artwork, titled Miami Reef Star, is the work of artist Carlos Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre. It’s a prototype for an underwater sculpture that will be the first piece in the ReefLine, a seven-mile artificial reef and sculpture park planned for Miami Beach.
Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, Miami Reef Star (2024), rendering. Image by Mateo Rembe, courtesy of the ReefLine.
When “The Great Elephant Migration” was planning its trip to Florida, the ReefLine, which looks to restore Miami Beach’s decimated coral reefs, was a natural partner.
“We are about the water. They are about the land. And we’re both about preservation. So we decided to join forces,” Ximena Caminos, founder and artistic director of the ReefLine, told me. (The overarching presentation, which also included a Daniel Buren regatta at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, is called “Star Compass.”)
The ReefLine is being funded in part with a $5 million grant courtesy of Miami Beach taxpayers, who approved new arts and culture funding in 2022.
The first work, Concrete Coral by Leandro Erlich, is slated to be submerged 600 feet offshore, 20 feet below the waves, in spring 2025. The sculpture, of 22 cars, is a new take on the sandcastle traffic jam the artist created on the beach for Miami Art Week in 2019.
Leandro Erlich, Concrete Coral, rendering. Image courtesy of the ReefLine.
The individual arts of Miami Reef Star are designed to mimic the natural habitat of local fish, creating comforting nooks and crannies where they can relax, hidden from predators.
Both works will be made from CarbonXinc, a newly developed eco-friendly concrete, and will use Coral Lok technology, where lab-grown coral can be literally plugged into the art to kickstart the growth of the reef.
Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, Miami Reef Star (2024), rendering. Image by Mateo Rembe, courtesy of the ReefLine.
“We’re going to start with soft corals that are called gorgonians; these are kind of like sea fans that sway with the waves. It’s the dominant type of marine life you find in the couple of patches where there are still near-shore reefs in Miami,” marine biologist Colin Foord, founder of Coral Morphologic, the Miami multimedia aquaculture studio and science lab that will grow the coral, told me.
After the party wraps up in Miami Beach, “The Great Elephant Migration” will be back on the road. It will head to Hermann Park in Houston, Texas, in April; Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana in May; Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in June; and wrap up its journey in July in Los Angeles.
“The Great Elephant Migration” is on view on the beach between 36th and 37th Streets, Miami Beach, Florida, December 2–8, 2024. More

As the art world began to descend upon Miami for the annual circus that is Art Basel Miami Beach, artists faced off with Olympic sailors on Biscayne Bay Monday afternoon, competing in a regatta-cum-performance art piece from French Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (1938–).
Titled Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), the artwork, which features Buren’s signature colorful stripes on the boats’ sails, was originally performed in Berlin in 1975, and made its U.S. debut at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2018. The sails will be hung like paintings—Buren has called them “canvases that sail the wall”—in order of each color’s placement in the regatta at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
The piece was restaged outside the PAMM off the Museum Park Baywalk in Biscayne Bay as part of “Star Compass,” a series of three large-scale Miami Art Week art activations.
The projects also include installations of “The Great Elephant Migration,” a herd of 100 life-size elephant sculptures made by Indigenous artisans in India, and a prototype of Miami Reef Star, a set of 46 3D-printed concrete stars by Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre set to become an artificial reef off the Miami Beach coast. It’s all curated by Ximena Caminos, the founder and artistic director of the ReefLine, the forthcoming underwater sculpture park, and Dodie Kazanjian, founder of Rhode Island nonprofit Art and Newport.
Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), 1975/2024, regatta Miami Florida. Photo by Lee Smith.
“It’s a huge honor to have Daniel Buren in relation to Indigenous artists,” animal rights activist Ruth Ganesh, who founded “The Great Elephant Migration,” told me as we watched the sailboats tack across Biscayne Bay.
“The idea was that it’s migration and we’re on the beach, so let’s have something that moves,” she added. “It is also super joyful, like the herd!”
Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), 1975/2024, regatta Miami Florida. Photo by Lee Smith.
A small crowd had gathered to watch the event, with Pucci artistic director Camille Miceli loudly cheering for the blue sail as the boats crisscrossed the bay.
To find sailors to race the boats for the artwork, the curators turned to local sculptor and furniture designer Emmett Moore of the Miami Yacht Club. Among the competitors were his wife, Sarah Newberry Moore, and Lara Dallman Weiss, who represented the U.S. at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), 1975/2024, regatta Miami Florida. Photo by Lee Smith.
Also at the tiller were local artists Justin Long and Nicholas Harrington, and identical twin Olympic hopefuls Fynn Olsen and Pierce Olysen. The teen phenoms—who are part of the Olympic development program and hope to sail at the 2028 L.A. games—took first and second place, respectively, flying the pink and purple sails.
But with the breeze blowing and the warm sun shining, the prospect of a week-long, art-fueled celebration ahead, it briefly felt like all of us—the sailors, the curators, the collectors, the art journalists, and even the elephants—could be winners. More

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. More

The Museum of Modern Art opened its first exhibition, “Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” just weeks after the stock market crash that would lead to the Great Depression. On November 16, 1929, George Cutler, a produce executive, leapt from a seventh-floor window in the Munson Building, on Wall Street. The next night, in MoMA’s inaugural space on 730 Fifth Avenue, people gathered around Paul Gauguin’s bafflingly strange 1889 Portrait of Meijer de Haan and Cezanne’s somewhat unfinished-seeming The Bather from 1885. Both paintings are on view right now at MoMA, in “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” an exhibition focusing on Bliss, one of the museum’s three founders. Her art-historical impact is exemplified by these 40 major Modernist paintings—all but one, Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night (1889), having been part of her collection.
Installation view of “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025. Photo: Emile Askey.
Van Gogh was undeniably a brilliant painter, but perhaps because this painting has become such gift shop merch fodder—printed on scarves, umbrellas, and socks—Starry Night didn’t hit the way I thought it would when seeing it displayed. It’s an exception in “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” which runs until March 29, 2025. Not just because it’s safely behind velvet ropes, like the star we’ve been told it is, but because it’s the only work included that Bliss didn’t actually own. Curators Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn chose it as a stand-in for all the colossal work MoMA purchased through sales from Bliss’s collection. Temkin explained: “Bliss never had a Van Gogh in her collection, and it’s said that she always hoped to add one.”
Before her death at 66 in 1931, Bliss bequeathed a significant portion of her collection to MoMA, contingent on the museum’s ability to prove itself financially stable within three years. Her will allowed works from her donated collection to be sold by MoMA so it could acquire new, equally radical works. Starry Night was one of the first works the museum purchased with these funds, along with Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Constantin Brancusi’s The Newborn (1920). This gift came after Bliss co-founded the institution together with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan, believing New York needed a permanent home for Modern art. In 1934, MoMA staged the memorial exhibition “The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.” The current show is a redux of sorts, and follows the book, Inventing the Modern, which features Bliss and honors the under-sung female arts professionals and patrons who helped build and foster the New York institution over decades.
Installation view of the exhibition “The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.” May 14, 1934–September 12, 1934. The Museum of Modern Art Archives.
Nearly a century later, as figurative painting stages its 10th comeback in the past two and a half decades, much of the work shown in galleries downtown is clearly indebted to Modernist painting. Cezanne’s Still Life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl, and Oranges (1902–06), however, demonstrates that it’s not enough to just paint a still life. Cezanne was so good that his work will never look old. It could be said that he solved the problem of painting, and that anyone working after him is surfing in his wake. Nobody puts orange next to green the way he did, and his handling of small daubs of white paint is almost occultish. This modest still life overpowers the famous Van Gogh, and the mystery of that makes the show exciting. 
Genuine mystery also exists regarding Bliss herself. As the wall text explains, little is known of the prescient collector, largely because she demanded her personal papers be destroyed upon her death. Bliss moved out of the family home into her own apartment for the first time at age 60, then became aggressively philanthropic. A faint figure from history of whom very little is known about other than her serious undertaking helping to establish a world-class museum who then gave away her fortune and sought to be erased is tantalizingly mysterious. As to why she avoided posthumous notoriety, Silver-Kohn can only speculate: “She did have a life filled with many interesting people, and artists, and we can speculate that there were many romantic affairs, or just things she wanted to keep private.”
The music room in Bliss’s apartment, 1001 Park Avenue, c. 1929–1931. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
In an age where art collecting can seem very much like personal aggrandizement, with names emblazoned on the wings of museums and champagne-drenched private views at Art Basel, there’s something aspirationally noble about Bliss’s aversion to the spotlight. 
Beneath a different spotlight is Georges Seurat, who Bliss focused on collecting toward the end of her life. That I’d never paid him much attention I now see was foolish. Pointillism always seemed like a quirky gimmick, one that Roy Lichtenstein took to its logical conclusion. Admittedly, I’d mostly seen Seurats in reproduction, and wasn’t prepared for Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor (1888), which is almost aggressively modern. A one-inch border around the edge of the painting, made of small daubs of colors complimentary to the ones in the central image, is sensual and ornamental in a way I wasn’t expecting. Another stand out is his twelve-by-nine-inch conté drawing A Woman Fishing, from 1884. Strange and poetic, it could have been a New Order album cover. It offers nothing but the foggy view of a well-dressed woman waiting for a fish to bite. This is how women from the late 19th-century have mostly been depicted, as idle, attractive, and strapped inside tight corsets. 
Installation view of “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025. Photo: Emile Askey.
Almost all of the paintings in this exhibition are by men who, of course, have dominated a certain version of art history for a very long time. But three women are the reason MoMA exists, and the almost paranormally good taste of Lillie Bliss is the real star of the show. In organizing the exhibition, Temkin saw, as I did, how the collection demonstrates “the unity of one person’s eye.” More