Having grown up in a city that has been subject to the whims of outsiders, I can’t tell you how it turns my stomach when I hear the phrase, “Miami is a new city.” Miami is not a new city. Give a read to Michael Grunwald’s 

 and you’ll learn the history of South Florida as told through the Everglades going back to prehistoric times. The Miami-is-a-new-city myth has been sold to outsiders for as long as there has been the concept of land to sell. Find a copy of the now out-of-print 

 and you’ll learn about entire communities whose histories have been erased, literally out-of-print, to give rise to “new neighborhoods,” often developed by profit seekers coming from elsewhere to impose their ideal utopia on South Florida’s ecosystem. Alongside the sale of that myth is the just as frequent defense of pretty much anywhere else, particularly New York, i.e. why Miami will never be the new New York.

For the 16 years I have owned my gallery, I have answered the question, “Why are you in Miami?” The tone of how this is asked has changed over the years. When I first opened the gallery, Miami was seen as a kind of cultural backwater; Art Basel had recently begun the Miami Beach leg of its fair, and the general consensus was that anything interesting piloted into Miami for the week and piloted out just as quickly. Of course, this lack of attention or interest made it appealing to artists and creatives of all types. It was inexpensive, relative to most major American cities, global in its relationship to the Americas and easy to navigate. It made the politics of the place semi-irrelevant; the general assumption was that for not a lot of money, you could, as they say in the Florida Keys, “come as you are.” Most recently though, the focus of this question has become more judgmental and specifically political.

How could I, a liberal progressive whose life revolves around culture, possibly find a home in the increasingly politically oppressive state of Florida? Tax purposes? Family obligations? There had to be a reason I hadn’t decamped to Los Angeles or New York, particularly as our exhibition schedule became more international and our client base less centralized.

 article caught my eye: “Once a refuge for the divorced, bankrupt and unemployed, Miami has evolved into a paradise of freedom.” The thing is, Miami was not just a refuge for the divorced, bankrupt and unemployed. Yes, there has always been an element of underworld runaway in Miami; I was in high school when OJ Simpson moved in around the corner from my parents’ house. Miami has also been a refuge for everyone else unwanted, discarded. A refuge for immigrants from Cuba, from Haiti, from Central America, from Europe. When my parents relocated from Detroit to Miami, my mother, originally from Guatemala, was so relieved to be in the sun and among Spanish speakers she landed in the ER with sun poisoning. She had lain in the sunshine for 12 hours, rinsing off the decade of Detroit’s gray cold, back within a three-hour flight of her family and home, in a city where her employer wouldn’t likely ask questions like, “Do people in Guatemala live in trees?” It seemed inconsequential to her that this was the same year 

Magazine declared Miami “The Most Dangerous City in America.”

When I was in elementary school, my mother would drive me to South Beach to get my curly hair cut in the apartment of a hairdresser who understood what to do with hair that is not straight. I distinctly remember him telling my mom that he had moved to Miami because so many of his friends in New York had died because he wanted to be on the beach and outside of the struggle, outside of the pain of his past. I loved these visits; they would take me outside of the suburban Miami where I was raised and into an early ’90s South Beach. The beach then was weird, colorful, old. The buildings were all relatively small, 3-5 stories and brightly colored in Deco pastels. There were rollerblades and drag shows, thrift shops and artist studios. I was too young to understand why his friends had died, but looking back, I recognize him as part of a community of AIDS survivors who came to South Florida in droves. Félix González-Torres, who died in Miami in 1996, was part of this community.

When my husband and I graduated from art school, we pulled up Craigslist, the then go-to for rental housing and searched three cities: Boston, where we were currently living and had gone to school; New York, where it was understood anyone serious about the arts would move; and Miami, because why not? We quickly realized that for the same rent we’d be paying for a studio apartment far outside New York City, we could rent a two-bedroom house with a garage in Miami. The “why not?” was affordability. This was a few years after the first Art Basel Miami Beach.

When I first opened my gallery in the fall of 2007, I didn’t pay much more in commercial rent than I did for our home. This meant that for the majority of the gallery’s formative years (then called Gallery Diet), I could experiment. I hosted performance shows, installation shows— this was the heyday of relational aesthetics, and I had grown up to believe that whatever you’d show, someone would buy it. 

 was then talking about institutions acquiring performance pieces. During one of our exhibitions, I was so excited about the performance that I ran down the street to a private collector’s public exhibition space and, in a move that would have been tragically uncool anywhere else, I grabbed his arm and dragged him to the gallery. The intimacy of Miami meant that everyone had to come; it didn’t matter that I had just opened, that the program was untested. Every exhibition was a learning curve. I didn’t have a master’s degree, and Miami afforded me the chance to make mistakes. I just wanted what Dave Hickey called “A clean, well-lighted place,” and in Miami, I found that.

What I have found in South Florida, by not leaving, is a definitive sense of identity and community. Those who choose to stay in a place that is mired in problems (wealth disparity, pressing environmental issues as a result of climate change, political oppression, affordability crisis) are often driven to change it and are often choosing to do so because they are simultaneously driven away from something else. They are often forced to be somewhere because there is nowhere better, or at least nowhere better they can afford, which increasingly seems like a position most of us are going to find ourselves in as a result of climate change, despite economics. The author of the 

article says, “If this is what the future of America looks like, I’m not sure I want to be a part of it.” Certainly, this is a sentiment most of us can relate to, but where will we all go?

When I first opened the gallery, I sat at my desk day after day, anxiously waiting for visitors to come, assuming that clients and the culturally curious would just step in the door. Of course, that’s not how it works. I have spent the better part of the past 16 years building an audience, often placing works with people who are making their first art purchase and working with them through the years to contextualize those pieces with other artists across generations. Miami also gave me the space to show “all the weirdos that don’t fit anywhere else.” I didn’t think twice about offering Katie Stout a solo exhibition when she was barely out of college and making functional objects; to me, they were Sculpture, and they were glorious. Another dealer recently said to me that what they admired most about the gallery program was our interest in showing work across disciplines. I was grateful but also reluctant to take credit. I never set out to show work “across disciplines;” I was just interested in showing what I liked and what, it seemed, wasn’t being given space elsewhere. I was less interested in the limiting parameters of what was allowed.

The constraints of working from within Miami also meant being unconstrained by the rules of a male-dominated art world; rules that weren’t really that old but somehow universally entrenched, particularly in the major cities. Somehow, despite it being a result of naivete, necessity and desire, a community began to emerge that was bound not by geography but, rather, by a shared outlook: artists who were sick of being mistreated by dealers, aspiring collectors who were less interested in becoming part of some exclusive “club” and more interested in educating themselves, curators who were increasingly being referred to as “artist-friendly” because they were more interested in the artist’s historicity and process than in their own fame.

Nina Johnson

I was less interested in the limiting parameters of what was allowed.

Why Miami?

It’s strange that Miami’s broader reputation remains built upon fake tans, early-bird specials, and bottle service—at least enough so to curtail longstanding intrigue from the urban elite. In reality, those qualifiers are small pieces of Miami’s greater, fragmented identity. It was dubbed “The Magic City” in the late 1890s as a marketing ploy intended to lure settlers to its eternal summer. It worked: By the 1920s, the city experienced an unprecedented boom in real estate and tourism.

That growth maintained as Miami became the recipient of various exoduses, taking periodic populations of immigrants and tax-evading retirees. More recently, it has labeled itself a crypto capital, successfully encouraging a substantial migration of Silicon Valley runaways its way. This year’s acquisition of Lionel Messi for a once hugely failing MLS team positions the city as an early site for transforming an insubstantial American “soccer” stadium into an internationally respected “football” league.

Miami is a city in flux, defined by its ability to absorb and propagate cultures and communities in fast succession. There are physical pieces of it, though, that persist—in the art that occupies its permanent collections (which count John Baldessari’s 

, and Iggy Pop’s melted bronzed abs (and the rest of the musician) among them) and, more enduringly, in its disparate architecture. Miami is made of a multiplicity of identities: the picture-perfect postcard of sandy beaches and cerulean seas, the punk hub, the Cuban oasis, the emerging art scenes. The city is fast-changing, and so its structures exist among the few lasting relics of its many identities.

Relic (1) is an explicit instance of historical preservation. In South Beach, sandwiched between crumbling art deco and vape shops, 

 stands with foreboding allure: white and windowless, encrusted with carved sandstone frieze. Originally constructed during that population boom in the ’20s, the building—like many structures of its time—was designed to resemble the architecture of the Mediterranean coast to further propagate its coastal allure. Initially serving as a storage facility, the building took in Mitchell Wolfson Jr.’s expansive collection of rare objects and books in the late-’80s. His high-end cache quickly swelled to fill 90 percent of the building’s space, prompting his purchase of it and its subsequent development into the museum. A new exhibition, 

Silhouettes: Image and Word in the Harlem Renaissance

, starts around the same period in which the building was first constructed. Looking north to the New York neighborhood, the show charts the artists in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s who painted a less publicly-familiar picture of Black life, marked by a collaborative spirit.

, which turns its eye to the societal evils to which Black communities have been subjected. Surveying more than three decades of multimedia examinations of racism in American culture, Gary Simmons’s work is even more striking against the natural ease of Relic (2). 

 was designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in Downtown Miami in response to its environmental circumstance: situated on the waterfront, the building is elevated on stilts to protect it from storm run-off; its exterior walls are made of glass, offering views of the surrounding nature; a canopy that hangs over its whole coupled with tropical plants produce a microclimate within it.

PAMM lives in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, a picturesque lagoon with shallow waters drawn in full-bodied Crayola colors, palm trees that stretch over warm sands, and dense mangrove forests. The themes of 

 are made especially confrontational against their new tranquil surroundings. Eight pairs of gold-plated trainers glint in the sun, with an enormous police height chart serving as its background. The remains of a 1964 World’s Fair pavilion painted in pigment and oil stand in the foreground of a vibrant blue canvas, its color becoming almost sickly saccharine against the warm Miami water just steps away.

The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

 is founded on the ever-evolving now and new. It’s a piece of imagination in North Miami, equipped with walkways to government structures like the local police department. Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s forthcoming 

at MOCA North Miami indulges in the fantasies of the past, reimagining Afro-futurism and Black mythologies in paintings, films, and installations. Richmond-Edwards overlays the past with the present and the future in references and material: Egyptology blends with biblical imagery, historical figures are displayed beside self-portraits, natural disasters converge with the cosmos.

The design of MOCA North Miami itself employs more empirical imaginations for the future. Founded in 1981, the Center for Contemporary Art ballooned in 1996, transforming its modest single gallery into a 23,000-square-foot facility and adopting a new name the following year. MOCA’s strange and striking layout is designed to encourage the flow of art in and outside the building. For MOCA North Miami, modernity is rooted in accessibility, and so, it plans to further open itself up in a forthcoming renovation of its outdoor plaza that will introduce new light fixtures, space designed for group activities, and trees lining pathways to City Hall and the nearby police department.

 opened in Miami’s Design District—which hosts more than 100 galleries, showrooms, architecture firms, antique dealers, and luxury fashion stores—in 2017. It's constructed to replicate a magic box, its exterior wears shiny, geometric shapes. Its back is lined with large windows looking onto a sculpture garden below. Fitting for the internet era in which it was designed, the aesthetic of its facade is a principal piece of its reputation, made to resemble a large-scale, textured magnet, drawing visitors its way with its reflective sheen. It’s appropriate, then, that it should host the work of Charles Gaines, whose work is considered pioneering to conceptual art, especially through his employ of technical mechanisms. 

 spotlights the second half of the artist’s career, seeing him engage with materials of historical weight—including the Black Panthers’ manifesto and texts from Franz Kafka—for multimedia pieces.

was born in Florida International University’s Primera Casa building in 1978, but over the following decades it expanded, requiring a building of its own. Its new home, which opened in 2008, is L-shaped, constructed around a lake and ficus tree on the University’s campus in Miami. Its structured angles and curves made from pink-gray granite appear more minimalistic when occupied by

, a selection of works from the collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth. The exhibition primarily features pieces from the Pattern and Decoration movement, filling the space with meticulous embroidery, delicate mosaics, and complex fiberworks.

Relic (6) bears patterns in its symmetry. 

 was one of the first Art Deco structures to grace the city, designed to mirror the gardens of Collins Park. The style, which eventually became definitive in Miami, was intended to prompt a sense of pride amid the Great Depression. In an exhibition that will overlap and extend beyond Basel, The Bass will stage 

, premiering alongside the reveal of the gallery’s original windows. The works of 

 are supposed to challenge how audiences interact with and learn from art, and the newly unveiled windows will offer a means to do just that, introducing transparency between the museum’s interior and exterior. Unique to The Bass’s makeup is its oolitic limestone cladding. Coupled with its carved ornament, it resembles the Mesoamerican architecture of the Yucatán—a tangible emblem of the city’s desire to become the primary link between North and South America.

The self-conception of Miami as a city of the future is undoubtedly tenable. Flashy and trashy, upscale and accessible, its humidity is matched only in its density of mores. Miami’s many pasts will always permeate into its present, made of ever-proliferating layers of culture.

Megan Hullander

Miami’s many pasts will always permeate into its present.

Pieces of a City in Flux

There’s no shortage of things to look at in Miami, especially during Art Week. Now, a partnership between the 

 bringing monumental digital signage to the Museum’s grounds is more than the latest addition to Miami’s topography of glamor and capital; it’s a case study in alternative revenue streams for museums across the country. It’s also the latest move to blur the line between art and mass media. To discuss this partnership—and the relationship between art and advertising—we spoke with Pérez Art Museum Miami Director Franklin Sirmans and Orange Barrel Media CEO Pete Scantland.

Discovery: How did you guys come to work together?

Our company, Orange Barrel Media (OBM), has been working with arts institutions for a long time, primarily as a content partner. In many cases, we’d commission an artist to make work for our digital signs, or we would help them to promote an exhibition that was happening inside the museum. In the back of my head, I was always thinking, 

could we do this at an art museum and combine some of the work we're doing as content partners with a business partnership

Because in many cases, museums are blessed with a prominent building that, if it were anything other than a museum, would solve a lot of their financial problems. PAMM, if it weren’t serving the public, would be one of the most valuable pieces of land in Miami. It could be condos. This is a way for them to not only open up a window into what’s happening inside of the museum to the hundreds of thousands of people who drive by every day but also to create a revenue stream that’s independent of box office and all of the more traditional earned revenue channels that museums have worked so hard to develop over the last 20 years.

Making use of our architecture and our location wasn’t brand new to us. We are directly across the water from the 

 here in Miami, which has a pretty significant digital sign on the side of its building. We’re in Downtown. We are right next to the highway that goes between Miami and Miami Beach. We are right across from the arena where the Miami Heat play. So we’re part of this constellation of potential opportunities around… I hesitate to use the word “advertising” because it’s more than that. It’s like talking about Times Square. When you talk about Times Square, my reference point to Times Square always had art in it. I grew up in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, and the billboard was used as an art space; not all the time, but periodically. We have a work in our collection by Alfredo Jaar that comes directly from that. So there’s that kind of opportunity that’s in the back of our mind when we think about signage and its presence within the growing orbit of Downtown Miami.

The idea that it could be something special meant that it had to be with a special partner. We had been approached by other folks more traditionally, and let’s say there wasn't so much of an appetite for engaging in that way, because what is the point? Where does the art come from? What is the difference? What sets us apart? How is this contributing and not just about us trying to make a little bit of money? That's not our thing. We’re a nonprofit. And so from the moment we started talking and learning more about Pete's collection individually, personally, and his relationship with artists, in addition to, of course, our curatorial bridge, something felt right.

OBM has new ways of seeing. They have to because that is the focal point of their presentational spaces. And so I think we’re learning from each other. We’ve got a curatorial team here, they’ve also got a curatorial team, and we're exchanging ideas and trying to figure out how to move the needle forward.

Discovery: That piece you mentioned, “A Logo for America” by Alfredo Jaar, was in the first collection show when the museum opened. You walked past the ticket desk and that was the first thing you saw. Pete, let's talk about your story here. How does collecting and working in advertising come together?

We’ve always tried to use our medium to benefit art, which has been my passion since I was a little kid. Artists and institutions are interested in working with us, frankly, for the same reason that brands are: because they want to reach a lot of people. They want to do it in a channel that is impactful and that people notice. As Franklin mentioned, there’s a long tradition of artists not only learning the devices of how to communicate effectively but also using the channels that commercial actors use. And many artists started in communications. You can think of everyone from Andy Warhol to James Rosenquist, to Barbara Kruger, to Ed Ruscha, and many of the young artists today. Right now I’m looking at a painting by Jaime Muñoz, who started as a sign painter.

In art school and advertising school, you learn many of the same formal approaches and many of the same devices. Artists today know how to use mass media, for their work to have more of an impact. Hank Willis Thomas, an artist with whom we work a lot, is a brilliant artist, but part of why he's making such a big impact in the world is because he is also leveraging the tools and techniques of commercial marketers, and doing so in an effective way that has allowed him to share his work and the work of other artists with a much bigger audience. We're excited to be a part of that.

Discovery: Franklin, for the readers who can’t have the pleasure of being on this Zoom with you guys, I’m looking behind you at a Kehinde Wiley painting that is part of the marketing campaign LACMA created for 

, the show that you put together back in 2014. From your early work with Basquiat, up to the show, which will be open at PAMM,

, you often engage artists who are exploring popular culture or exploring ways of communicating with larger audiences.

It’s huge. The thing that came to my mind while listening to Pete is the relationship between that outdoor public presentational space and its relationship to graffiti and to the history of writing that you touch on a little bit, in mentioning Basquiat in particular. Artists have strived to share their work with the world for a long time. We throw around the term “art world,” and we know what we’re talking about when we say it, even though we know that there are different art worlds. But so much of what I find interesting in artists today is this thing that we’ve been striving for, which is that [art is] a part of everybody’s life. It’s not a rarefied space, these types of presentation spaces are out there in the world. Like all of the artists that we’ve mentioned, it allows people to have a better understanding of what artmaking is and why it’s important in our lives, as opposed to just something for a small segment of society.

That part has always been central for me since the first large exhibition I ever worked on, 

One Planet Under a Groove: Contemporary Art and Hip Hop

. It was trying to tap into this idea that there is something way bigger that informs a contemporary artistic practice, just like those artists Pete mentioned. Design, fashion, and comics—those were the languages of a much wider public, and thus Warhol, Ruscha, and Rosenquist would tap into those spaces to highlight the fact that there is something for everyone inside of artmaking. If you’re a contemporary artist working today— Marco Brambilla, for instance— you're working in this space; a space that is still evolving and dynamic and yet is capable of speaking to wide swaths of humanity.

You mentioned Kehinde. He's been able to do that not only through the paintings, which we all know and love, but I have so many friends who know Kehinde because of the bags, or he’s got his art on jackets. It’s a different kind of enterprise which allows for it to speak to so many different people. But it all begins with the painting. It all begins with the work of art.

Discovery: This conversation particularly is apt to come out on the eve of Miami Art Week. What do you all think about the backdrop for this partnership and your respective missions with OBM and PAMM?

We get to have this one week a year that celebrates art. It has changed how people think about art in the broadest context you could imagine. It’s not a foreign word. It’s cool to do. It’s something social, it’s something dynamic, it’s something entertaining, it’s something fun.

One of the great things about Art Week is that it means different things to so many people. For some people, it’s about showing up on Wednesday at 10:00 AM for the first look at the fair. But for a lot of people, it’s going to the museums, it’s going to events. You go to Franklin’s party on Thursday night where there are a couple thousand people there who are just out celebrating each other, celebrating art, celebrating Miami—this amazing-amazing city that is attracting people from all over the world to come and celebrate art for a week every year. So it’s terrific. It’s a terrific way to showcase art.

We’re talking about a new space to present art. We’re talking about that digital component that everybody’s exploring. I think a little idea of the potential around structure will be in some people’s minds because they would’ve seen 

 [in Las Vegas]. But the thing that struck us immediately, and I say us because it was all of us, was that we were making a sculpture. We’re making a structural thing that is an innovative work of art in itself. I had one person on my committee who went to L.A. to see the structure of what OBM made on Sunset Boulevard. That was the thing where it was like, 

oh, now I get it. It’s not just a digital thing. It’s a thing

. As an artistic institution, we better be going in that direction.

One of the things that we've been focused on at our company is how we could redefine the formal qualities of the structure itself to be something beyond the typical sign-on-a-stick typology that has been standardized within our industry. [For PAMM,] that requires us to develop new content that is specific for this location and that makes everyone go out and think about this more deeply, of what works in this context with this audience, with this kind of mode of experiencing it in terms of how people are going to interact with it and to develop something that's a unique solution for this site and all of our sites. That is one of the things that we’re always focused on—what new form can we come up with that works for this location? We’re excited about what we’ve developed in partnership with PAMM.

Discovery: What will be on the screen during Art Week?

There will be two different screens. What’s up right now is on PAMM’s eastern side, where all the gatherings are. That screen is up right now, and a hundred percent of the time it will serve PAMM. Artist commissions, and if there's an event, it could be a backdrop for the performers, that kind of thing.

 It will be another space for artists to play around and experiment. In this iteration, we will have some content by the performing artist George Clinton on Thursday night.

That's going to be amazing. The second component, which we plan to launch in February, is at the northwest tip of the property, adjacent to the building and visible to the Causeway and to 395. That will be a combination of PAMM-related content and commercial content. That’s what powers the business model that we've talked about. PAMM will be the largest single user of it, but there will be other brands that will use it as well. The fees those brands pay to use it enable the investment in the infrastructure itself and the financial benefit that supports PAMM’s mission.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Franklin Sirmans

Pete Scantland

New Ways of Seeing

To round out our Miami Issue, We’ve collected advice from the pros. Meet the journalists, artists, curators, executive directors, and, of course, publicists who have spent years refining their Miami methods—from first look at the Convention Center, to two-for-one at the Deuce. Because Art Week is the friends you meet along the way and then meet again at the next party.

. Over the years, that is where I’ve discovered and acquired work by artists who are now in the highest demand. It opens on Tuesday this year—so if you miss the boat, you have no excuse!

Favorite place for calories (liquid and otherwise)...

(1971). This print is in every room at the Fontainebleau. My winner, based on volume alone.

. I’m not necessarily a fan, but given the state of *waves hand vaguely* 

 I’m kinda curious to know what that guy has been thinking about lately.

Dunk your whole entire head into the ocean at least once. Don’t just get your feet wet. Commit. You will feel so, so, so much better.

Last year, I tried this Cuban diner called 

 in South Miami Beach. It’s a cozy little respite with perfect ropa vieja.

The sheer amount of art that will be on view in Miami before Art Basel even opens on Wednesday. There’s a private opening for the Hernan Bas show at the Bass on Monday—a Monday opening! The next night, just across the Bal Harbour causeway, 

 opens at MOCA North Miami. NADA seems to have an especially stacked lineup this year, and it opens on Tuesday, which is a new thing. By nighttime, I’ll be hopping around the Design District, going from the 

 in the Dacra office to the show jointly staged by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch—all before heading to the 

, and then to, no joke, three dinners. And that's just Tuesday!

Avoid the causeways at rush hour. Choose one side of Biscayne Bay and stick to it. That, or get a boat.

The emerging sectors at the main fair are always bursting with amazing galleries from cities I could never visit, giving me a glimpse into an art scene I otherwise would have zero insight into.

Joe’s Stone Crab! I dream of Joe’s Stone Crab all year round, and then on the Monday of Art Basel Miami Beach, there it is.

(1989), permanently installed at the Rubell Museum

My first major Artadia event as the executive director! We’re gathering our community of Awardees and Jurors with our Councils (thanks to Liberty Mutual!) to celebrate our Boston Awardees: 

. It’ll be a nice moment of community as we head into our 25th year.

Find your inner zen while sitting in traffic on the causeways.

Run around the fairs with an artist friend! Artists are always looking, discovering and thinking, so I’ve consistently turned to them to learn.

, of course, has kept me going for 16 years. (You can straight up imbibe that vinaigrette, right?) 

Leroy’s Retirement Lunch at Break Table Behind Stew Leonard’s #6

A special moment we (Pace) have planned with Venus Williams. Plus, 

’s show at the Bass Museum. I adore Hernan and worked with him for many years. He’s a Miami native and among the most talented painters full stop.

Make hard choices. To go or not to go to the boat party, to the third late night at 

, to that a.m. beach yoga class you promised your friend you’d do this year, to sleep or to sacrifice it, to share the last juice in your portable charger or pretend it’s already dead. And a real honest must: When in Miami, one must dip their toes in the sea. You will never regret it.

Look up from your phone! And do the fairs with a buddy… sometimes four eyes can be better than two. More than four, and you’ll be comparing calendars (and back on the phone) instead of looking.

Favorite place for calories (liquid and otherwise)…

Beverly’s is an arts organization I have been working with for a long time, and we’re almost ready to relaunch our physical space, which we will be announcing formally with a very righteous happening during Miami time. Stay tuned!

Not forget your portable neck fan. And be careful, or you will never leave.

Talk to the person sitting next to you at 

Most of the ones I liked closed in the past three years, so as long as there’s a wooden bar and spinning seat, I’ll be happy.

Executive Director, American Friends of the Louvre

’s art at Prizm. I'll also be checking out 

Prioritize acknowledging you can’t do it all. Make sure to visit ICA and allocate a few hours for beach time—a lesson learned from earlier visits when I missed out on the beach entirely.

Frequenting galleries and museums provides the complete experience. Additionally, I use Instagram and screenshots as tools for discovery and reference.

When it comes to satisfying my taste buds, 

 is the go-to spot for both liquid and solid calories.

Miami, encapsulated in one work of art, resonates as “It’s So Hot, I Can Smell It” by 

Vice President of Programming, Oolite Arts

Adam Abdalla

Annie Armstrong

Nate Freeman

Patton Hindle

Sarah Levine

Azikiwe Mohammed

Thomas E. Moore III

Esther Park

Chana Sheldon

András Szántó

Christian Viveros-Fauné

Marcella Zimmermann

Advice and confessions from art week regulars.

Stone Crab Dreams

Issue 3 

Miami in December is a pretty good place to be. The other day, our senior team was adding up their collective years of art weeks. The figure tipped into middle-aged territory. Just what is it that makes this city, at this time of year, so special? Why do people keep coming back, knowing the frustrations—the exhaustion, the traffic—that ground the moments of beauty and excitement? Commerce, of course. But what else?

In putting together this issue, we wanted to crowdsource advice and recommendations from repeat offenders; we wanted the perspectives of those who have come up with the art scene; and we wanted to look at the unpredictable yet remarkably durable relationship between the city’s fluctuations of dollars and people, and its arts institutions.

In short, we wanted to present both a guide and a deep dive into this most special of places. Imagine skimming across the bay on a jet ski, diving off and swimming down, past the coral and into the porous bedrock, where the forces of art and culture, politics, and ecology slosh like a tray of martinis being rushed to your table. That’s what we’re going for.

It would be hard to find a better Virgil to guide us through Miami than Nina Johnson, whose eponymous gallery has showcased many of the city’s artists alongside a mix of those from across the world for over fifteen years. In an essay that roams through relationships with artists and culture-makers, much like rivers do Miami, Nina explains why she has chosen this protean, unpredictable city to set down gallery roots. And as the city morphs with the tides, its arts institutions continue to dominate the horizon. Reporting on the museum beat, Megan Hullander explores the architectural topography of the city’s museums, highlighting, as she does so, the exhibitions on view this season. Start at MOCA North Miami, then head south.

You’ll arrive at PAMM, the canopied marvel screwed into the shore of Biscayne Bay. If you’re approaching by car—which we bet you are—you’ll likely catch a glimpse of some fresh signage. Take note, and then read this conversation between PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans and Pete Scantland, the CEO of Orange Barrel Media, as they talk art, advertising, and how museums everywhere could be making a lot more money.

Speaking of money—turns out there’s a lot of it in Miami. Especially at this time of year. But what do you do with it? Well, we reached out to a handful of our closest confidants and demanded their intel as to where to see art, maybe even buy it, and where to get a bite or a drink. Our first port of call is the Deuce because 

, but it’s only going to get weirder, and wilder. 

And it’s hard to be as weird and wild as “Pull Your Coat,” a TV pilot from 1986 created by artist Ed Bereal, the intro of which adorns this issue’s cover. To see the whole episode, swing by Elizabeth Leach’s booth in the Survey section of the main fair.

Welcome to the Miami Issue