The Everywhere Studio
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami, until 26 February 2018
“It’s important to us to open this museum with an exhibition centred on the lives and work of artists,” says Alex Gartenfeld, the deputy director and chief curator of the ICA Miami, which has just opened its new building. “The studio is the perfect metaphor for the place where life and work come together.” The show has around 100 pieces that depict or explore the artist’s studio by artists including Faith Ringgold and Carolee Schneemann. It “begins with the idea that the studio is central to an artist’s myth and the way that we come to understand the work of art and its meaning in society”, Gartenfeld says. The young Detroit artist, who works in 3D-printed ceramics, has brought his studio on-site. He will be intermittently making work in the gallery throughout the show’s run.
Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (2017) Image courtesy of the artist
Mika Rottenberg
The Bass, until 30 april 2018
You will probably never look at a plate of spaghetti Bolognese in quite the same way after seeing NoNoseKnows (2015), a video installation by the Argentine-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg. In it, plates of endless varieties of pasta are magically created each time the story’s protagonist, Bunny Glamazon, sneezes. The same could be said for the way you will think about the Chinese workshops and factories, an issue explored in Cosmic Generator (2017). Both installations deal with the idea of production—a theme that underpins much of the artist’s work. Rottenberg is interested in the processes behind the creation of objects, from the use of raw resources to the way finished objects are traded globally. Her work seeks to create images of the hidden labour involved. “If art has any power, it is in making things visible,” she says.
Dara Friedman, Play (Parts 1 & 2) (2013) Dara Friedman, courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York
Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger
Pérez Art Museum Miami, until 4 March
The German-born, Miami-based artist Dara Friedman has her first mid-career retrospective at Pamm, which is showing around 16 films from 1991 to the present. For her more recent works, Friedman has recruited dozens of actors, dancers, and musicians through Craigslist and open-call auditions. The 48-minute film Musical (2007-08), for example, casts 55 people who individually burst into a song of their choice—from a Michael Jackson number to America, the Beautiful—in public locations across midtown Manhattan, while crowds of passersby scarcely notice them. The work was partly inspired by Friedman’s memory of seeing a woman spontaneously sing Amazing Grace at New York’s Grand Central Station.
Alison Zuckerman at work at the Rubell Family Collection
Still Human and Alison Zuckerman: Stranger in Paradise
Rubell Family Collection, until 25 august 2018
In the Rubells’ annual group show, 29 artists—including Ed Atkins, Simon Denny, Cécile B. Evans, Isa Genzken, Jon Rafman, Charles Ray, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Hank Willis Thomas and Christina Quarles—explore the human condition in works that address developments in artificial intelligence, bioethics, planned obsolescence, surveillance, digital identities, and more. Anicka Yi’s ALZ/AZN (2015) consists of inflatable Mylar domes that enclose fragile, tempura-fried flower sculptures, while Josh Kline’s plastic-wrapped, discarded office drone Thank you for your years of service (Joann/Lawyer) (2016) comments on the effects of productivity technology on the labour force. Shahryar Nashat’s installation Hard Up for Support (2016) runs cool and hot, pitting the tactility of a pink marble totem against a high-definition video that offers tantalising glimpses of a human form. Running alongside with some thematic crossover is a solo show of works by Alison Zuckerman, the collection’s most recent artist-in-residence. She used the foundation’s largest gallery to produce colourful large-format paintings and sculptures that mash up art historical quotations in the mode of internet memes, as in A Serenade in the Courts (2017), with nods to Cézanne and Caravaggio.
Triángulo: Loló Soldevilla, Sandu Darie and Carmen Herrera
Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, until 4 March 2018
Three giants of Cuban abstract art—Carmen Herrera, Loló Soldevilla and Sandu Darie—are the focus of the latest exhibition of around 50 works drawn from the collection of the Latin American philanthropist Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, and organised with the independent curator Elsa Vega. “Herrera, Darie and Soldevilla are artists who are all very close to my heart and I have watched their work garner the recognition that it deserves,” Fontanals-Cisneros says. Visitors will also be transported to Cuba via virtual reality technology developed by Microsoft, allowing them to explore some of Darie’s best-known public commissions, including the sculpture Construcciones (1977), from Havana. The show also brings another piece to life: Estructuras Transformables (Untitled), a fragile kinetic sculpture made in the 1950s that is rarely activated in front of a general audience.
Jasper Johns, 0-9 (1959) Jasper Johns, photo courtesy of the Margulies Collection
Pop Art
The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, until 10 December
The non-profit arts space in Miami’s Wynwood district, which houses Margulies’s art collection, is presenting sculptures and paintings from 1959 to the early 1980s by Pop Art heavyweights such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. A highlight of the Warehouse exhibition, titled simply Pop Art, is a set of five boxes created by Warhol in 1964 from appropriated packaging, showing the Kellogg’s, Heinz, Del Monte, Brillo and Campbell Soup Company labels. The painted and silkscreened boxes were first shown at the Stable Gallery in New York, which gained a reputation in the 1950s and 60s for showing work by new artists. According to Hinds, they were “stacked together and placed in rows on the floor, imitating a factory warehouse and using the throwaway packaging from grocery stores as a model”.
Force and Form
De La Cruz Collection, until November 2018
The 40 artists in this exhibition from the De La Cruz Collection, including Félix González-Torres, Mark Bradford and Peter Doig, “work with progressive practices” to challenge the traditions of paintings, sculpture and installation, says Rosa De La Cruz. The show of around 100 objects opens with a piece comprised of flowers on bleached linen by the cross-media artist Dan Colen. Contemporary works are contrasted with pivotal pieces from the collection, such as Dalí’s portrait of Carlos De La Cruz’s mother, Dolores Suero Falla, which the Spanish Surrealist painted in 1955. Other highlights include two pieces on linen and one on canvas by Laura Owen, and Nate Lowman’s mixed-media map of the US, In Pieces And In Stitches (2017).
A poster by Klinger promoting a masked carnival ball in Munich in 1914 Courtesy Wolfsonian—Florida International University
Julius Klinger: Posters for a Modern Age
The Wolfsonian—Florida International University, until 1 April 2018
It is fitting that the Wolfsonian—the largest repository in the US for works by the Austrian graphic artist Julius Klinger (1876-1942)—should be behind the designer’s first solo exhibition in the country. More than 100 posters, prints, drawings and book illustrations tell the story of the artist who was at the forefront of 20th-century European graphic design but whose career, and eventually life, were tragically cut short by the Nazis in 1938. Four years later, Klinger and his wife Emilie were deported to a concentration camp in Russia, where they died. Klinger principally worked in Vienna and Berlin as a poster designer, graphic artist, satirist and typographer, but his talent also took him to the US twice: once as a design consultant for the car industry in Detroit and later to New York where he taught poster design at the New School.
Another Kingdom (2017), one of Oka Doner’s vivid photographs of sea life at the Lowe Michele Oka Doner, courtesy Lowe Art Museum
Michele Oka Doner: Into the Mysterium
Lowe Art Museum, until 14 January 2018
The Miami artist Michele Oka Doner’s was inspired by the mysteries of the deep to create a new series of photographic works based on the collection of 93,000 specimen jars containing samples of underwater life at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. A related four-channel video project evokes an immersive and ethereal experience thanks to a soundtrack created by a master conch blower. Visitors in a hurry should beware, though, as there is a touch of the sirens’ song in the piece. “The imagery washes over you, lulling you into a quiet, meditative state,” says Jill Deupi, the Lowe Museum’s chief curator. “It is very easy to get lost in the installation, where time seems to magically stand still.”
Rafael Soriano, Serena imagen (Serene Image) (1991) Rafael Soriano, Private Collection
Rafael Soriano: the Artist as Mystic
Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, until 28 January 2018
When the exiled Cuban painter Rafael Soriano died in 2015, aged 95, his family kept his Miami studio completely intact. This inspired the Frost Art Museum, which is hosting the final leg of a travelling survey of the artist’s work, to bring some of the studio objects—paintbrushes, easel, palette and chair—into the exhibition of around 90 of his paintings and drawings. It is “a true homecoming” says Jordana Pomeroy, the museum’s director. The show, organised by Elizabeth Thompson Goizueta, focuses on three distinct periods of the artist’s career: his early geometric Abstract work created in Cuba; his more Surrealist biomorphic paintings made after he fled with his family to Miami in 1962; and his later mystical images from the 1980s and 90s that explore light and shadow and resemble auroras or hazy nebulas. “I do not pretend to transmit a message of reality,” Soriano is often quoted as saying. “I am moved by the longing to travel through my paintings in a dimension of spirit, where the intimate and the cosmic converge.”