Art & Exhibitions

Musician and artist Nick Cave will have his debut commercial exhibition at Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels in 2024. Cave has called the work going on display as “a journey towards some kind of absolution from a series of shattering events.”
Cave was born in Australia in 1957 and has achieved worldwide recognition as a singer, songwriter, author, and composer. He studied painting at Melbourne’s Caulfield Institute of Technology before turning his attention to a musical career that has seen him lead bands including The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds since the late ’70s. In recent years, Cave has released a memoir Faith, Hope and Carnage, and has been exploring ceramics as a medium.
The show will open in April 2024 and presents Cave’s first major body of visual work, entitled “The Devil—A Life (2020–22).” The collection is made up of 17 glazed ceramic figurines following the cradle-to-grave story of the Devil. Stylistically, the sculptures are reminiscent of Victorian Staffordshire “flatback” figurines which were made from the mid-18th century and were popular for display on mantlepieces.
Nick Cave. Photo by Megan Cullen, courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.
Cave’s ceramic works were first shown in Finland in September 2022 at the Sara Hildén Art Museum as part of the group exhibition “We,” which also included works by actor Brad Pitt and artist Thomas Houseago.
In this new series, Cave frames the character of the Devil as a complex, flawed, everyday character. Told through the series of ceramic figurines, we watch as the Devil is born, inherits the world, falls in love, fights a lion, rides off to war, and is shunned for causing the death of his child, before he himself dies. This arc is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” from the 1623 comedy As You Like It: infant, schoolchild, lover, soldier, judge, dotage and decrepitude. As major changes occur in the Devil’s life, his appearance is altered, particularly the shape of his horns.
Nick Cave, Devil As Child (2020–22). Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.
Cave has long held an intense, if conflicted, interest in Christianity: “I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it,” he said in 2010. Over the years, themes related to faith and the Devil have popped up in his songs (“Up Jumped the Devil,” “Jesus Alone“), just as they were woven into his first novel, 1989’s And the Ass Saw the Angel.
In a statement, he characterized the ceramic series headed to Brussels next year, along with his songs, as centered on “the idea of forgiveness, the idea that there is a moral virtue in beauty. It’s a kind of balancing of our sins.”
“The Devil—A Life (2020–22)” is on view at Xavier Hufkens, 6-8, Sint-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussel, Belgium, April 5 through May 11, 2024.

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A deep red the hue of blood appears in many of the loose, figurative paintings that make up “Lovers Grave,” a new exhibition by Tracey Emin at White Cube New York. In some instances, the red evokes violence; others, love. More often than not, it’s both at once—an intense concentration of emotion communicated through saturation of color and force of application.  
That love and violence would be two poles guiding Emin’s new body of work makes sense: the artist, long known for her confrontational installations, sculptures, films, and other works, is just three years removed from being diagnosed with cancer. She beat it, thankfully, but not without major sacrifice—including an emergency surgery to remove numerous female reproductive organs from her body. 
Tracey Emin, Yes I miss You (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Projecting an artist’s trauma onto their work is not something to be done lightly, but in this case, it’s apt. Emin’s life has always intermixed with her art; her vulnerability is what made her a young art star in ’90s London and it’s what has made her work endure since. Just as she’s been open about other deeply personal experiences throughout her career, the artist has been candid about her surgery and its effects. She’s also been candid about the relationship that kept her tethered throughout. 
The name of “Lovers Grave” comes from the images that helped inspire it: that is, photographs from archaeological burial sites, where human remains were excavated in entwined pairs—skeletons in a perpetual state of embrace. You’ll find variations of that motif throughout the exhibition, though whether Emin’s figures are united in gestures of romantic comfort or carnal passion isn’t clear.  
Tracey Emin, There was blood (2022). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
This sense of equivocality may leave some thinking these are angry paintings, but it’s more likely that the opposite is true. These are some of the warmest artworks that Emin has ever made.  
“I had fucking cancer, and having half my body chopped out, including half my vagina,” the artist told Artnet News in 2020. “I can feel more than ever that love is allowed.”  
“At my age now, love is a completely different dimension and level of understanding,” she continued. “I don’t want children, I don’t want all the things that you might subconsciously crave when you’re young—I just want love. And as much love as I can possibly have. I want to be smothered in it, I want to be devoured by it. And I think that is okay.” 
See more paintings from “Lovers Grave” below.
Tracey Emin, The Beginning and The end of Everything (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Tracey Emin, We died Again (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Tracey Emin, Is Nothing Sacred (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Tracey Emin, There was no Right way (2022). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Tracey Emin, And It was Love (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
“Tracey Emin: Lovers Grave” is on view now through January 13, 2024 at White Cube New York. 

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A growing number of women abstract painters have had a revival in recent years, after decades of languishing in the shadows of their more famous male peers. The latest to join the crop is Emily Mason, whose turn towards abstract painting saw her follow in the footsteps of her mother Alice Trumball Mason, a co-founder the American Abstract Artists organization in New York in 1936.
Mason’s pioneering mother also introduced a her to a wider artistic circle, which included family friends like Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler. From this unusually creative upbringing, Mason went on to complete her studies at Cooper Union in 1955, and she recalls feeling encouraged to reject the course’s more rigid, traditional teachings on the advice of Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell.
Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn in their shared Venice Italy studio in 1957. Photo: Tinto Brass.
Soon after graduation, Mason moved to Venice, Italy on a Fulbright grant. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that she permanently resettled in the U.S. with her German husband Wolf Kahn. The couple and their two daughters lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village, which forced Mason to use her bedroom as a makeshift studio. Due to Kahn’s commercial success, Mason took on more of the domestic labor and spent shorter days in the studio. “The ’70s were difficult times as bringing up children, running a household, and continuing to paint all pulled me in different directions,” she later recalled.
Despite these frustrations, Mason greatly enjoyed her life at center of the global art scene. “That’s one thing about living in New York. You get to see a lot of what other people are doing, where their heads are at, and being able to talk with each other,” she said in 1975. “You feed off it, one way or another.” Nonetheless, she also struggled to get gallery representation in a very male-dominated world. One place of respite was the family’s farm in Vermont, where she would spent long, productive summers in the studio.
Emily Mason in her Vermont studio in 2018. Photo: Joshua Farr.
Mason gained recognition for her harmonious, fluid compositions made form layers of vibrantly colored pigment, an effect achieved by pouring paint onto the canvas as it lay flat on the floor. These unpredictable experiments in alchemy were sometimes adjusted afterwards, by hand or using a scraper or paintbrush to play with the pooling pigments.
“I like to feel that I work on a painting until something magical happens,” she said in 1975. “Until it becomes something outside of myself, a new vision… You lose a kind of control, but you gain something else.” Mason continued creating paintings using similar techniques until her death in 2019.
This earlier period of Mason’s long career is the subject of a new exhibition “The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968–1979” at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. Check out more works from the show below.
Emily Mason, Velvet Masonry (1978). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Emily, The Thunder Hurried Slow (1978). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Emily Mason, Lignite (1968). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Emily Mason, Pleasure Garden (1970). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Emily Mason, A Paper of Pins (1974). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Emily Mason, Defiant of a Road (1972). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.

“The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968–1979” is on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, 525 W 22nd St, New York, through February 3, 2024.

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Ten days after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, when the photographs of murder, torture, and kidnappings appeared all over the news and social media, artist Zoya Cherkassky posted her first artwork about the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Cherkassky, who immigrated to Israel in 1991 from the former Soviet Union, followed the grim toll in disbelief: 1,200 people murdered and 240 taken hostage.
“This was the only thing I could think about,” she said in an interview from her home in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “Normally my work is based on what I see, what’s around me. It was obvious that this would be the subject of my work.”
Now, the 12 mixed-media works on paper comprising Cherkassky’s “7 October 2023” series are installed at the Jewish Museum in New York as part of its expanded programming to address the war in the Middle East and its reverberations around the world.
One of the first initiatives by the Jewish Museum’s new director James Snyder, it will include installations and public talks, examining how artists respond to conflict and war through contemporary and historic lens. The show has arrived quickly for a major museum, opening on December 15, two months since Hamas’s attack.
Zoya Cherkassky, Bring Them Back Home (2023). Courtesy: Fort Gansevoort.
The project was key for Snyder, who took the reins of the Jewish Museum’s on November 1, encountering an art world (and world) divided over the war in the Middle East. “We felt it was important to demonstrate this kind of action through a cultural lens and to do it quickly,” Snyder said. He described Cherkassky’s series as “art activism.”
From the moment Snyder arrived, he set out plans to use the museum’s mandate—of exploring Jewish identity throughout history and across the global diaspora —to “realize a path to a brighter future and to find restorative pathways to the humanism that is the essence of our being,” he said in his first letter to the museum community.
“This shows how art responds to and resonates with things that happen. And we can see this in history. You can think of artists throughout time who’ve done it,” said Snyder. “You can see how Dadaism grew out of the chaos of World War I or abstraction grew out of the chaos of World War II.”
The Israel Museum, where Snyder served as director for 22 years, gave Cherkassky a solo exhibition in 2018. He was a fan and kept abreast of her work, visiting her solo show at the Fort Gansevoort gallery in New York earlier this year. So did Darsie Alexander, the museum’s chief curator.
Cherkassky created the series in Berlin, where she fled on October 9 with her 8-year-old daughter, leaving her mother and Nigerian-born husband behind in Israel. Modest in size (10-by-13 inches), the drawings were easy to transport and only needed to be framed for the installation.
Zoya Cherkassky, The Survivor, (2023). Courtesy: Fort Gansevoort.
“There were so many sirens and then you could hear the explosions,” the artist said. “My daughter was shaking all over. I didn’t know if there would be serious bombardment and decided to leave with her.”
Flames, blood, ashes, tears, screaming mouths, and tied hands appear in Cherkassky’s 12 haunting works, where frantic and forlorn figures are set against black backgrounds. She turned to the visual language of artists who depicted tragedy and war in the first half of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Beckman. She used pencils, watercolor, and wax crayons. “Somehow through these artists I was able to talk about this tragedy,” she said.
The early images of the atrocities at Kibbutz Be’eri made Cherkassky think of Guernica, one of Picasso’s most famous paintings, created following German bombing of the Basque town in 1937.
People look at Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) at the Reina Sofia Museum. Photo by Denis Doyle/Getty Images.
Kidnapped Women shows a multi-generational group of weeping and scared women walking barefoot, their colorful dresses set against black background. The elderly woman in the center of the group has “A24102” tattooed on her arm, alluding to her concentration camp past.
The Terrorist Attack at Nova Music Festival depicts young women running through a field, dotted with blood, their hair blowing in the wind, eyes huge with fear—an antithesis to the static Surrealist maidens of Paul Delaux. That so many characters in her drawings are women is not accidental; Cherkassky specifically wanted to call attention to sexual violence against women, including young women, by Hamas. “As a woman and a mother of a girl,” she said. “This is the scariest thing I could imagine.”
Zoya Cherkassky, Kidnapped Women, (2023). Courtesy: Fort Gansevoort
Only one work, Kidnapped Children, depicts real people, Cherkassky said. At the time she made the work, 18 kids were thought to be kidnapped and she drew their faces to raise awareness for the “Bring Them Back Home” campaign, she said.
The museum wall text notes: “Later counts reveal that almost 40 children were abducted. Since Cherkassky created this work in October, many of these children have been released, but as of early December, over one hundred adults and children are still in captivity.”
“No drawing can compete with photography in terms of being graphic,” she said. “I am very grateful to the Jewish Museum for not being afraid to show this work at the time when a lot of organizations, even Jewish ones, are scared to present the Israeli perspective.”

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It’s a tale that’s almost mythical. In 1987, an amusement park populated by rides and attractions created by the era’s leading artists landed in Hamburg, Germany, the brainchild of Austrian artist André Heller. There was an entrance archway designed by Sonia Delaunay, a carousel painted by Keith Haring, and to top it all off, a Ferris wheel dreamed up by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Dubbed Luna Luna, the fair only had a limited engagement in Germany, before its 30 pavilions were packed up and stashed in storage—left forgotten for nearly four decades. 
Enter Drake. Last year, the rapper’s entertainment company, DreamCrew, along with partners Something Special Studios and Charles Dorrance-King, announced plans to resurrect the amusement park, investing a reported $100 million. And lo, it has come to pass: “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” has opened in a 60,000-square-feet warehouse in Los Angeles, offering a recreation of the fantastical fairground with the original rides. 
Jean Michel-Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel at Luna Luna in Hamburg, Germany, 1987. Photo: Sabina Sarnitz.
Patrons lining up outside Roy Lichtenstein’s Luna Luna Pavilion at Luna Luna in Hamburg, Germany, 1987. Photo: Sabina Sarnitz.
“What makes Luna Luna so special is these marquee names that were locked away in this art-historical secret,” Lumi Tan, the project’s curatorial director, told CBS News. “André Heller saw it as breaking down the boundaries between artists of different generations and disciplines. You have Keith Haring, young Pop artist, but then you also have Roy Lichtenstein, one of the founders of Pop art.” 
The venue is divided into two spaces, conjoined by Delauney’s geometrically painted arch, adorned by the original Luna Luna sign. The first area opens up with David Hockney’s cylindrical forest pavilion, Kenny Scharf’s polychromatic chair swing ride, and Heller’s inflatable structure, Dream Station. In the second space is a view of Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, as well as works by Joseph Beuys, Jim Whiting, and Monika GilSing. 
Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Keith Haring’s painted carousel and murals. Photo: Jeff McLane.
A number of these pavilions are accompanied by music. Salvador Dalí’s mirrored fun house, for example, is backed by a soundscape of Gregorian chants by Blue Chip Orchestra, while Roy Lichtenstein’s glass labyrinth is soundtracked by Philip Glass’s minimalist notes. Performers wandering the floor will also interact with visitors, adding to the carnival-esque vibe. 
Alas, due to the delicate condition of these works, not all of them can be ridden, though they remain operational. Visitors, however, are invited to walk through and around the attractions. 
Luna Luna art technicians assemble Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel at the Luna Luna warehouse, Los Angeles. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/licensed by Artestar , New York. Photo courtesy Luna Luna, LLC.
This new iteration of Luna Luna was more than a year in the making. After the works were transported from a storage facility in rural Texas to Los Angeles, a conservation team led by Rosa Lowinger and Joel Searles commenced unboxing and restoring the attractions. “It was very fun,” Searles said about cracking open the containers for the first time in decades. “We knew it was a Haring and you’re unwrapping it like a present.”
The revived fair will also include an exhibition of archival photos, videos, and other ephemera that trace Luna Luna’s journey from its original run to its recent assembly. 
In-progress assembly of Kenny Scharf’s painted chair swing ride at the Luna Luna warehouse, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Luna Luna, LLC.
Back in the 1980s, Heller conceived of the original Luna Luna as a way to bring “art… to those who might not ordinarily seek it out in more predictable settings,” he said in a statement (Heller is not involved with the new project). It’s a prescient vision now fulfilled and expanded on by the abundance of Instagram-friendly, immersive art offerings—which the new Luna Luna now joins. 
And it’s only just getting started, according to Anthony Gonzales of the DreamCrew. “‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy’ is the first instalment,” he said in a statement, “of what will be a long-term project with a multifaceted approach exploring the world of art and its intersection with today’s modern world.” 
See more images from the exhibition below.
A performer in front of Sonia Delauney’s entrance archway at “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” Photo: Sinna Nasseri.
Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Kenny Scharf’s painted chair swing ride. Photo: Joshua White.
Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Keith Haring’s painted carousel and David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree. Photo: Jeff McLane.
Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Salvador Dalí’s Dalidom. Photo: Joshua White.
Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Kenny Scharf’s painted swing chair ride and surrounding sculptures. Photo: Joshua White.
A couple being “wed” at André Heller’s Wedding Chapel at “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” Photo: Sinna Nasseri.
Performers alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel at “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” Photo: Sarah Mathison.
“Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” is on view at 1601 E 6th Street, Los Angeles, California, through Spring 2024.

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Turns out, Daniel Arsham, the artist whose celebrated eroded sculptures have paved the way to high-profile collaborations, is also a low-key photographer. And we’ll get an eyeful next year, when Arsham unveils his decades-spanning archive of photographs for the first time. 
On view at Fotografiska New York from March 22 through mid-June 2024, “Daniel Arsham: Phases” will bring together a selection from the artist’s private photo archive, which numbers in the thousands. Featured here are about 25 images that the artist has shot over the years—of nocturnal cityscapes, views from airplanes, rare birds, centuries-old ruins—illustrating how photography has shaped his sculptural practice.  
“Daniel sees the world by both what is there, but also by what is not: negative space becomes subject matter. In his photographs, abstracted figures, skylines and natural elements are reduced to black silhouettes,” said Amanda Hajjar, the director of exhibitions at Fotografiska New York, over email. “Scale is another recurring theme: aerial views, images of space, the stars, the moon.” 
The photographs will be on view alongside a few of Arsham’s key sculptures, highlighting how his preoccupation with negative space, scale, and trompe l’œil has played out across mediums.
The artist Daniel Arsham. Photo: @danielarsham via Instagram
Arsham received his first camera at the age of 10 and would go on to develop a habit of photographing his family, travel, and other life experiences. “Photography was the first thing I made that I felt could be a piece of art,” he told Whitewall in 2015. “Before I made paintings, before sculptures—anything, really—it was photography.” 
Over the years, the artist has held on to his early cameras, including his first Pentax K1000, and amassed other vintage photographic and film equipment to immortalize them in his sculptures. His “Future Relic” and “Crystal Relic” series features various models, from Polaroid to Nikon to Hasselblad, their clay and cast resin bodies purposefully weathered.  
“Photography has always been in the background of Daniel’s career, informing—subconsciously or consciously—his other artistic practices,” Hajjar added. “It is quite revealing to see what he takes pictures of, what interests him, what he keeps coming back to. This exhibition feels like you’re getting an insider view into what piques Daniel’s creative interests.” 
“Phases” will be accompanied by the release of Daniel Arsham Photography, the first book to document his photographic practice. 
Arsham, in the meantime, just dropped his latest collaboration with Tiffany & Co., for which he designed an eroded Venus of Arles bust in bronze to hold the jeweler’s T1 bracelet. The release follows the serial collaborator’s many other partnerships with brands not limited to Hot Wheels, Moët & Chandon, Porsche, Pokémon, Hublot, and Ikea. About 30 of his sculptures are currently on view at “Score and Sound” at the Sculpture Center in his hometown of Cleveland. 

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Every December, the art world returns from Art Basel Miami Beach with a new lineup of rising star artists who caught their attention during the week. This year, at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Detroit-based artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s solo show, “Ancient Future,” wowed crowds early in the week with her inventive application of Afrofuturist aesthetics to American history. 
“I’m really fascinated with history, but particularly I’m fascinated by mythos,” Richmond-Edwards explained of the work on view. The artist created each work herself with no assistance, with the idea that this “self-torture” would create an intuitive visual aesthetic that is signature to her narrative voice. “Since time is cyclical, that means I can create the future. So, I want to pull out some of the myths of the past into my future.”
Among those symbols are dragons, comets, clouds, and other celestial images that are drawn or painted in phosphorescent bright colors. The largest piece in the show is a diptych titled Lullaby for Shooting Star (2023), which tells the story of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who died near Detroit in Windsor, Canada.
“Since I’ve moved back to Detroit, I see so many streets named after him,” said Richmond-Edwards. “His nickname was shooting star. There’s a mythos that talks about his brother who was a shaman, who was able to conjure a dragon.”
In the piece, the dragon wraps around a starry sky to nestle protectively over a self-portrait of Richmond-Edwards on one end of the piece, and her son on the other. “I’ve just been obsessively drawing dragons,” she said of her time back in Detroit. “Then I started to notice them in the architecture all around town.” 
Adeze Wilford, a curator at the museum, noted that Richmond-Edwards brings a new perspective into the current trend of Afrofuturism in fine art. “‘Ancient Future’ presents an opportunity to explore the concept of radical imagination and the possibility of reconfiguring a future released from the confines of racial and gender binaries,” she said. “In developing this exhibition with Jamea, it was important that the show is a reflection of these complexities.”
Other works in the show delve deep into America’s past, exploring the folkloric narratives that emerged during the War of 1812 as well as the discovery and colonization of America. Richmond-Edwards also brings contemporary events into the mix, such as the Vatican’s rejection of the Doctrine of Discovery earlier this year, which was a signal that the Catholic Church acknowledged how colonialism wiped out Indigenous populations; as well as imagery of the 9/11 attacks, Emmett Till, and Beyoncé’s history-making Renaissance tour. 
A still from Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s video installation Ancient Future (2023) at MOCA North Miami. Photo by Zachary Balber.
Though the wall pieces are the talk of the show, perhaps the piece de resistance is the three-channel video work titled Ancient Future (2023), which follows a former drum major from the HBCU Jackson State University alongside Atlanta’s Dancing Dolls and features an original score made by the artist’s son. “The drum major represents dragons dancing in the cosmos,” Richmond-Edwards explained.
Looking back over the total body of work, Richmond-Edwards said with a sense of satisfaction: “This process has really been about writing myself as the heroine of my own story. There’s escapism and there’s world-building, but it’s really about getting comfortable with seeing myself as my own savior.”
“Jamea Richmond-Edwards: Ancient Future” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 770 NE 125th St, North Miami, Florida, through March 17, 2024.

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The city of Miami Beach is in a full-on embrace of public art with several initiatives unveiled recently at the start of Miami Art Week.
City officials including tourism and culture director Lissette García Arrogante, Commissioner Laura Dominguez, and city manager Alina Hudak, were on hand on December 5 for the unveiling of Adora Vanessa Athena Fantasia (2023). The newly-commissioned art installation by Brazilian collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus (AVAF) honors drag culture at a crucial time, given the recent efforts by Governor Ron DeSantis to ban drag performances in Florida.
“We must defend drag. Stop criminalizing drag,” said artist and AVAF member Eli Sudbrack at the unveiling. “Drag performers are goddesses of our contemporary world. Their performances provide inclusive, warm, positive, nonjudgmental, open, and energetic content for everyone, including people who are not in the queer community.”
“The core goal of our projects and this installation in general has always been to provide a sense of freedom, liberation, and self-expression to the viewers,” he added.
Miami city manager Alina T. Hudak with Eli Sudbrack of Assume Vivid Astro Focus. Photo courtesy of City of Miami Beach
The five double-sided banners on aluminum are suspended up high on Espanola Way at the intersection of Washington Avenue in South Beach. Thanks to the cooperation of respective nearby landlords, the public private initiative is now in its third iteration. The AVAF art honors and incorporates details from local drag icons—bedazzled glittery eyes, nails, lips, wigs, furs, and jewelry—including Adora, Athena Dion, Carla Croqueta, Fantasia Royale, Juice Love Dion, Lady Paraiso, Persephone Von Lips, Power Infiniti, The Regina Black, Tiffany Fantasia, and TP Lords.
Drag performer Tiffany Fantasia at the unveiling of Adora Vaness Athena Fantasia (2023) by Assume Vivid Astro Focus in Miami Beach. Image courtesy the city of Miami Beach.
Tiffany Fantasia was also on hand to deliver thanks and remarks about the new work. “Please continue to support drag and support art. Without art, the world is boring,” said Fantasia as they discussed the importance of drag to the fabric of Miami nightlife.
Espanola Way in South Beach. Image courtesy of City of Miami Beach
During her remarks, Commissioner Dominguez noted that Española Way was initially an artist colony. Calling the overhead AVAF art installation “spectacular,” she added: “I’m an ally of the LGTBQ community and this work speaks wonders to our diversity that we have in Miami Beach.”
Hudak thanked the AVAF collective, adding, “I want to take the opportunity to commend the artist for his message, for his joyful, for his heart, and for everything that this installation represents to us and a city that really speaks to the message behind this beautiful installation.”
Adora Vanessa Athena Fantasia will remain on view through February 2024. 
Meanwhile, across the city, Miami continued the latest iteration of its “No Vacancy” art initiative that places site-specific art projects and installation at 12 Miami Beach hotels through December 14.
The juried art competition, presented in collaboration with the city’s visitor and convention authority (MBVCA) supports mostly local artists by providing each with $10,000 to create their installation at the respective hotel. Artists are selected from a call for submissions issued by the city.
Among the participating hotels, Riviera Suites in South Beach hosted Carola Bravo’s projected titled Yield to Immigrants.
A complete listing of the “No Vacancy” projects and hotel locations can be found here.
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