A Guide to the Best Shows in Miami

‘Invisible Luggage’ | Historic Hampton House Museum of Culture & Art | 2 – 15 December 

Billed as the first luxury hotel for Black guests, Historic Hampton House was a Green Book destination – included in the famous guidebook for Black American travellers seeking safe places and roads during segregation – whose patrons included Martin Luther King, Jr., Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke. (You may have seen it depicted in Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020), which imagines the night a young Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston.) The hotel, which closed in 1976 and was subsequently revived in 2002, is now a National Historic Landmark Museum, home to a wide range of cultural programming. For the next two months, it hosts its second annual exhibition, ‘Invisible Luggage’, which explores displacement, freedom and memory, themes inspired by the space’s history as a site of refuge. The diverse roster of 52 artists includes Firelei Báez, Myrlande Constant, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jacolby Satterwhite, Cecilia Vicuña and the Miami-raised Tomm El-Saieh.

Esdras T. Thelusma | Tunnel Projects | 30 November – 5 January 2025

Esdras T. Thelusma’s up-close-and-personal photographs illustrate the value of sincere trust and care felt between an artist and their subject: we see it in the insouciant way a boy leans on his car; how a father and baby relax together, unposed and vulnerable, as if a camera’s not in sight; the way the shine of a gold dental grill can feel like the sun. Thelusma zooms in on his sitters – celebrities, family, neighbours – but he also lets them be. ‘In Plain Sight’ is curated by painter Reginald O’Neal, an equally perceptive artist who also understands, intimately, portraiture’s potential for tenderness. This is a special one, and it’s appropriate that it’s on view at Tunnel Projects. The small studio and exhibition space, located in an underground parking lot in Little Havana, is dedicated to showcasing unique work and uplifting emerging artists, in the spirit of a slightly younger (pre-COVID-19, pre-crypto-fascist) Miami. 

Antonia Wright | Pérez Art Museum Miami | 5 September – 9 February 2025

In 2006, the state of Florida passed Amendment 3 – ‘Majority Requirement for Constitutional Amendments’ – which raised the threshold for the approval of constitutional amendments from a simple majority to one of 60 percent or more. That’s why, back in November, Amendment 4 – which would have protected abortion rights – failed to pass, despite winning the support of 57 percent of Florida voters. Antonia Wright’s visceral ‘State of Labor’, which went on view two months prior and had been in the works since 2022, now feels uniquely brutal. The generative, algorithmic sound composition is a compilation of noises captured during labour. When a data point is hit that corresponds to the average driving distance a person must travel for reproductive care, visitors hear the gentler sounds of childbirth: soft sobs, sighs of relief. When that ‘distance’ increases, the resonant chorus becomes louder, more guttural. Situated in a nearly-pitch-black room, lit by a single red light, the piece’s effect is gut-wrenching.

Emanuele Marcuccio | Olivia Edwards Gallery | 3 – 21 December

Picture a shooting star as children often draw them: a five-pointed burst of light, trailed by an arced, glowing streak. At the relatively new and not-to-be-overlooked Olivia Edwards Gallery, the multidisciplinary artist Emanuele Marcuccio renders them into puffy tufts. The tactile sculptures burst from the wall; slick, shiny, and brightly coloured, they’re described in the exhibition text as shooting star-comet hybrids, evocative of two celestial phenomena at once. Toying with shape and form, Marcuccio carefully considers each object’s production (profiling the artist for Conceptual Fine Arts in 2020, the writer Sofia Dati explains that Marcuccio requested from a tailor ‘a cushion in the shape of a shooting star’), subsequent interpretation and fundamental liveness. Here, the comets are presented alongside photographs the artist made while sitting in traffic. What do the hazy, illuminated orbs of headlights have in common with the cosmos? So much. 

Blank Space | Primary | 30 November – 18 January 2025

There’s something subtly, wonderfully subversive about the messaging of this upcoming exhibition at Primary; the 12 artists on view are, per the press release, ‘together yet distinct, speaking not to the divisions around us, but to the shared experience that lies beneath’. But perhaps that’s not the intention. Instead, the goal might be to simply bring together a dynamic, intergenerational cohort of artists, unable to be distilled into or described by a pithy thesis. At a space with a history of showcasing emerging interdisciplinary artists and the occasional storied legend, you’ll find Robert Crumb alongside local Luna Palazzolo-Daboul, plus works by figures ranging from Elberto Muller, an artist and writer whose recently published book Graffiti On Low or No Dollars (2023) chronicles his time riding freight trains across the country and doing graffiti, to Paula Santomé, an artist working across disciplines to reimagine the role of women in myths and stories.

Smita Sen | Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami | 6 November – 6 April 2025

In its permanence, grief is adaptable; unyielding, it transforms over time, changing shape and never disappearing. Smita Sen, who works with sculpture, dance and drawing, memorializes the experience of grief, as well as love, longing and pain – both physical and immaterial – in ‘Embodied’, examining how the body remembers. In the series ‘Feelings, Fossilized’ (2022–2023), Sen considers how grief materializes, visualizing the injuries and pain she suffered while caring for her late father. Graphite-and-watercolour anatomical illustrations seem to melt into new forms, a hip taking on the appearance of angel wings. Sometimes, the aching body belongs to the earth: in the dance film Grief Tectonics (2024), Sen visits the various sites where her father, a geologist, conducted research. Also on view and not to be missed is Andrea Chung’s ‘Between Too Late and Too Early’, exploring motherhood, memory and the historical trauma of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Outside, Nicole Salcedo’s Earth Gate (2024), an installation representing the animistic quality of the natural world, is an appropriate portal to the museum’s offerings.

^{Main image: ‘Invisible Luggage’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: Historic Hampton House; photograph: Oriol Tarridas}