Letter from the Editor

Rendering of Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre’s Miami Reef Star, 2024. Image Credit: Mateo Rembe. Courtesy of The ReefLine.

Cover Image for Letter from the Editor


It’s strange around the office this week. Recovering from Miami Art Week, wrapping the year, balancing holidays at home with apartment-bound hibernation, with the streets slightly emptier, as the rest of New York does the same. After a year of convention centers and jetbridges, it’s an occasion to think about the places we inhabit.

At year-end, we’ve returned to Miami with a series of articles that explore this place and its surrounding region as an impossibly choreographed knot of biological, environmental, and designed forces that equate to something like home.

Because your approach to Miami will likely be buffered by water—the same element that threatens the city from all directions—Monica Uszerowicz explores the local art scene through a liquid lens, “imagin[ing] us safe, whole, swimming in Biscayne Bay…”

Caroline Hatchett looks to one of the city’s Little River neighborhood to explore how the food scene charts both daily rhythms and the ceaseless hum of development.

Further south, Alexandra Martinez begins her essay with a drama familiar to many in Little Havana, its lineup of characters including a rooster and a wrecking ball.

We round out the issue with a conversation from elsewhere, speaking with Dorraine Duncan and Jhordan Channer of the Kingston-based Island City Lab, whose practice exploring the built environment of island nations interacts with cities across the Caribbean: places of accumulated capital, and interacting people, both separated and linked by water...

...the elemental state that both separates us from, and links us to, The Reefline, the seven-mile sculpture park off the coast of Miami Beach that provides the cover art for this issue.

We hope this finds you well, wherever you find yourself at the end of this year, and wherever you’re headed to next.