The anthropomorphized manatee at the center of The Mother (2024)—a colored-pencil drawing from the artist Beatriz Chachamovits’s “Curandeiras” series, which renders familiar archetypes into aquatic Borgesian entities—fulfills her namesake. She has loving arms and the protective, curious gaze of a new parent; a fish peeks out from her cape, like a child hiding behind his mother’s skirt. “The Mother,” the image reads, “fosters growth and resilience of all new life, protecting our shared future with compassion and insightful guidance.” She inadvertently brings to life the story of Columbus mistaking three manatees for mermaids. In Chachamovits’s vision, a manatee-mother is certainly a curandera—a sacred healer, a living channel between this world and another.

The first time I saw the Curandeiras series at Chachamovits’s recent solo show at the Miami Design District, Meet me in the clearing between the waves, I thought of another image of healers I’d seen in 2017, when Hurricane Irma, then forecasted to impact Miami, veered west, sparing us but impacting the state’s Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, and a swath of the Southeastern US. That year, a cartoon GIF circulated on Instagram: Two white-clad santeras overlaying a map of Florida and the Caribbean—one in Miami, one near Cuba—waving away the hurricane with palm fronds, forever ping-ponging it toward each other, the storm never making landfall. At the time, before they knew Miami would ultimately dodge this major hurricane, families who could afford to evacuate headed north, many of them arriving in western North Carolina, then mistakenly deemed a climate haven.

In a recent interview reflecting on the impacts of Hurricane Helene with Science Friday, Jesse M. Keenan—the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning and Director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at the School of Architecture at Tulane University—stated that “climate havens are a fiction of the media.” Hurricane Helene was the deadliest storm to strike the mainland U.S. in 20 years, sweeping through western North Carolina on its way up from the Florida panhandle. Weeks later, Hurricane Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico, its power bringing John Morales, the typically cool-headed Miami meteorologist, to tears. Reflecting on the viral moment, Morales shared, “It’s hard these days to be nonalarmist… this is an opportunity for us to think about talking about this climate crisis more often.”

Here in Florida, as both the hurricane and election seasons end, we are—as we’ve always been—a punchline. When the presidential election results rolled in and Miami-Dade joined the red wave, I was surprised to see comments like “That’s why South Florida keeps getting hit with hurricanes; they deserve it” across social media, along with the infamous Bugs Bunny clip. Was it truly our fault this time? We weren’t a battleground state; the final call never hinged on us. The South Florida Latino vote for President-elect Donald Trump, while significant, mirrored nationwide trends. And no one need wish harm upon us: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, emphasizes climate resilience while refusing to name climate change or acknowledge the need for better energy policy, while Trump long ago dismissed the climate crisis. (At the time of this writing, Super Typhoon Man-yi hit the Philippines, strengthened by back-to-back storms—proving that while the Global North perpetuates and bickers about climate change, the Global South endures it, far more brutally than Florida has yet to.)

There is hope, but even then, Bugs Bunny’s dream isn’t unlikely. The waters around the peninsula continue to rise, eight inches higher today than they were less than a century ago, primarily the result of higher temperatures and worsened by Florida’s bedrock of porous limestone, oolite. Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee Tribe grandmother, educator, and activist, has announced that Florida’s Everglades are drowning—flooding unseasonably in response to the system of pipes and gates used to suppress their natural cycle of flooding and droughts, a process Toni Morrison once described as “remembering”: “‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” Meanwhile, billionaire-crook Michael Shvo is one of several developers funding a $2.5-billion stretch of luxury hotels on Collins Avenue between 14th and 20th Streets—an area vulnerable to sea-level rise—for a project he’s named “Billionaire’s Row.” It’s scheduled for completion in 2027. How high will the water be then?

Upon completion, Billionaire’s Row will surely be utilized by visitors to Art Basel Miami Beach, itself a luxury event that, despite its undeniable benefits for the city, is partially responsible for its increasing wealth disparity. Guests of this year’s fair can expect to be greeted by the water: the Coral City Camera (CCC), an underwater camera broadcasting from a coral reef in Biscayne Bay, will be projected on the walls of the Miami International Airport, over 200 species of fish made giant. A project launched by the artist duo Coral Morphologic—comprised of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician Jared McKay—the CCC is, as they’ve described, a way to engage the public to “protect what they love” by showing them who they ought to love: the surprisingly biodiverse group of manatees, squids, sea turtles, sharks, fish, and coral that make their home underneath Miami’s mammoth skyscrapers and cruise lines. Coral Morphologic has made a career of emphasizing the resilience of the city’s corals, reminding us that limestone is made from their skeletal remains. The corals are our ancestors; soon, McKay and Foord and this writer have said before, we might become theirs. The CCC is educational, beautiful, and not obviously subversive—though everything feels a bit subversive when we’re sinking.

The artist Antonia Wright’s studio is on the Miami River—not far from Coral Morphologic’s former lab—a body of water that, she says, “might one day be higher. It’s a secret that the river knows.” She likens the river’s depths to the hidden mechanisms of women’s bodies, our cycles invisible to everyone but ourselves. “There’s the potential for birth, for miscarriage. It’s almost like the water around Miami,” she explains. “There’s the potential for sea-level rise, for change.” State of Labor, Wright’s sound composition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), is a discordant but eerily mellifluous chorus: birthing people at various stages of the labor process, with guttural screaming, panting, sighing, relief, and pain encompassed at once. Some of the cries sound like babies themselves. The piece is generative, programmed algorithmically, so that when a data point reaches the average one-way distance one must travel to receive legal reproductive care, you’ll hear softer, gentler sounds; when that distance increases, the voices are louder, the grunts harsher. To listen, you must sit in a room lit only by a red light, located beneath a bench. It’s so dark I lost my way, gripping the walls, tears in my eyes, till I found the exit.

Wright was horrified by the recent rejection of Amendment 4, which would’ve enshrined abortion rights in the state of Florida—a majority of 57% voted in its favor, but Florida requires 60% of votes to pass amendments; DeSantis also fought mercilessly against Amendment 4 specifically. But State of Labor has been in the works since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Birthing bodies and the earth’s body, Wright notes, are treated similarly by the government—without regard for their futures. “Ultimately, it’s about power,” says Wright, citing the deliberately racist history of abortion laws. “You take away people’s autonomy for the rest of their lives. It’s a type of control, like the way they try to control the water.”

Calida Rawles contends with the sea more literally in Away with the Tides—also at the PAMM—an exhibition of her photorealistic paintings depicting Black residents of Miami’s Overtown neighborhood submerged in water. Some of the subjects, Rawles has said, had only recently taken swim lessons, but you wouldn’t know it. They look cradled, at home. In her paintings, water has always been both life-giving and alive itself, spiritual and full of liveness, charged by history, healing, and hallowed. It embraces those swimming in its waves, holding them like they’ve returned to the womb.

For Away with the Tides, Rawles drew parallels between her own signature practice and the histories of Overtown and the formerly segregated Virginia Key Beach. We Gonna Swim (2024), a three-channel video by Rawles in collaboration with Laura Brownson, accompanies the show and opens with the sound of laughter as it’s heard underwater—muffled, dreamlike. The subjects of her paintings are swimming in a pool in Overtown; there’s archival footage from Virginia Key, where Black families could freely swim and play, and of Overtown residents dancing and laughing years before the construction of the intersection between I-95, I-395, and the 836 spliced apart the neighborhood in the 1960s. Images of the demolition of homes—likely to make way for the highway—rhyme with the joyful splashing of bodies in the water: sounds of destruction disrupted by life. “This is my home,” a voice says.

In the spring of this year, Khánh Nguyên H. Vũ’s show, How we live like water, was displayed at the Window at Walgreens, a public exhibition space belonging to Miami’s Oolite Arts. The multimedia exhibition included ceramic vessels, paintings, and two black-and-white photographs cut into circles—one of the Jordan River, made in Occupied Palestine, the other of the Atlantic Ocean, made in Miami Beach. The words “From The” and “To The” framed the photos; when Oolite Board Chair Marie Elena Angulo received a complaint about the messaging, the work was immediately removed. Vũ was asked to replace it with something new, lest the blank wall be seen as a political sentiment, too. The public backlash was swift, as the given reason for its removal was the politicization of the phrase “from the river to the sea.”. Oolite has a history of displaying political work by other artists—why not this one?

But some signatories of an open letter in support of Vũ, signed by nearly 800 members of Miami’s arts community—a letter that decried the act of censorship and the institution’s refusal to display solidarity with Palestine—noticed a detail lost in the mire. It mattered that one of the depicted bodies of water was the Atlantic Ocean, an image Vũ made while looking toward the Caribbean, a region home to so many of Miamians’ ancestors. The rhythms of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic dance together. Storms circulate between us; we build neighborhoods—Little Haiti, Little Havana—in honor of each other.

The open letter affirmed that the phrase was “a reminder to viewers that water…connects us all,” from Palestine to Haiti to Vietnam, the place of Vũ’s birth. Water holds truths and memories and passes them back and forth across time and space; its different names (the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Caribbean) are ultimately arbitrary. Its strength and potential for danger are nearly superseded by its regenerative power. Perhaps if Miami floods, we will become like corals, a vision of the future as described by Coral Morphologic: worthy of love and protection, resilient and harmonious. Imagine us safe, whole, swimming in Biscayne Bay and beholden to each other.