ART CIRCUITS
CRITIC'S CHOICE DECEMBER 2021
Living in pandemic times has taught us to appreciate the small wonders of daily life.We are particularly excited and grateful for the in-person opportunities to gather and participate in Miami Art Week, the return of Art Basel, and the general panacea South Florida’s art scene has offered us all year. Nhadya Lawes and I have enjoyed working together with Art Circuits to offer critic’s choice, where we were able to highlight the creolizing dynamics of artists and institutions grappling with how to constitute Miami as a city of tomorrow rooted not only in its diversity, but also grounded in equity and meaningful inclusion.We close out this year with the luxury of shows that explore the value of rituals, community and place.We look forward to following the art roadmap that the next critic will provide to navigating our region’s many dynamic arts institutions.
MUSEUMS
The Betsy
Tamary Kudita: African Victorian
Recognized as the Sony world photographer of the year, Kudita centers continental African women in Dutch-waxed Africanized Victorian dresses, the subject of portraiture and landscape photography.These photographic contemporary images vary from urban streetscapes to countryside where the black female viewing subjects return the photographer’s gaze.
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ICA Miami
Shuvinai Ashoona: Drawings
Nov 30, 2021 – May 1, 2022
In “Shuvinai Ashoona: Drawings,” the first US show, viewers are exposed to the art of the Inuit carvers and printmakers.Transformed in Ashoona’s drawings through large scale drawings and meticulously prints, dynamic practices of everyday life from seal cleaning to yoga classes enigmatically render the evolution of indigenous Arctic life.
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Ellen Lesperance: Amazonknights
Curated by Stephanie Seidel
Nov 30, 2021 – Mar 27, 2022
Honoring feminist activism,llen Lesperance’s exhibition “Amazonknights” presents new and existing paintings and two new sculptures. Drawing inspiration rom Bauhaus-era female weavers, the Pattern and Decoration movement, and feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s centered around the female body, Lesperance reframes image-making outside of male-dominated Western painting traditions while honoring the creative labor of women standing up against social and political ills and environmental destruction.
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EMERSON DORSCH
Yanira Collado: Alchemic Chants/ Reliquías Fragmentadas
On view through Feb 5, 2022
In this solo exhibition, Collado transforms the gallery with a site specific homage to the Port au Prince Market, a neighborhood bodega that previously occupied the space. Using fragments of cardboard, fabric, mesh, and other materials, she pieces together personal and community histories of migration, resistance, and spirituality to create a home for memory and ritual.
See exhibition
MUSEUMS
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
Jared McGriff: Where We Are You
On view through Feb 13, 2022
With lush watercolors McGriff’s first solo show inserts his family history into the larger great migration narratives of African Americans leaving the rural south to west.
If These Streets Could Talk: An Historic Exploration of Black Miami (Part I)
Curated by Timothy Barber
Opens Dec 1
Evoking James Baldwin’s influential novel, this exhibition transports viewers to Black Miami’sneighborhoods before displacement from urban renewal and gentrification.The revitalization of key black institutions is the positive part of the story.Part 2 opens during Black history month in 2022.
Feels Like 97°
Curated by: Michelle Lisa Polissaint
On view through Jan. 23, 2022
Ode to Bakehouse
Opens Nov. 13, 2021
On View through March 27, 2022
To continue the festivities, Bakehouse has also commissioned a new public art project with text by poet Arsimmer McCoy and visuals by artist Chris Friday.
Ode to Bakehouse — Bakehouse Art Complex (bacfl.org) .
Ode to Bakehouse — Bakehouse Art Complex (bacfl.org)
Locust Projects
On view November 20, 2021 through February 5, 2022
The gallery showcases the works of artists who re-imagine the entangled relationships between gardening and botany toward making new speculative, fantastical but certainly democratic futures between humans and their natural environments.
Field Companion features an immersive forest-placed video installation by Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib. Transplanted to the forest as a natural ecosystem that provides refuge, especially in pandemic times.
A landscape longed for: the garden as disturbance
Guest curated by Adler Guerrier and Laura Novoa featuring Andrea Bowers, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Ebony Patterson, and commissioned works by Miami artists, Ema Ri, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Onajide Shabaka. This exhibition invites reconsideration of the garden not just as manicured spaces produced for leisure, but rather as sites of disruptive worldmaking.
The Depths
Guest curated by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and featuring short films and video installations from the global south, these works explore the entangled relationship between the environment and humans--centering the textures and point of view of the former as much as the latter. Features Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Isabelle Carbonell, Miguel Hilari, Los Ingrávidos, and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy.
