Memories of Miami

When people ask me where I am from, I often conceal that I was born in Florida, rather than reply with a sense of pride. Sometimes, I tell them I am from Miami, but never Florida. More often than not, my evasion is met with naivety. Europeans will ask: ‘Isn’t Miami like Ibiza?’ Environmentalists will remark: ‘Isn’t that city going to be underwater in 50 years?’ Some people will even go so far as to focus on the city’s reputation as a stop on drug-trafficking routes, layering their stereotypes with references to Brian De Palma’s acclaimed mob film Scarface (1983) or to Will Smith’s upbeat hit ‘Miami’ (1997), which claimed: ‘Everyday like a Mardi Gras / Everybody party all day / No work, all play, okay?’ Music videos – with their garish visual grammar – have led to the perception that the city is saturated with flashy rappers, R&B singers and reggaeton stars lip-syncing on yachts floating on the city’s Biscayne Bay, glorifying the nouveau riche. Naturally, such misguided assumptions come nowhere close to representing the rich diversity of my hometown.

Miami is a tacky city: not the mild tawdry of Scarface but tattered, disparate. Yet, despite ever-increasing levels of tourism (the Greater Miami and Miami Beach regions welcomed 27 million visitors in 2023), the city can still provide a quiet domicile for those able to cope with the thick humidity of midsummer afternoons. Miami is not just a playground for the rich and powerful. Some of us who grew up in and around the city waved to stray chickens roaming the neighbourhood, or wondered at the rituals of Santeria – a Cuban religion connected to Nigerian Yoruba traditions – being held along the Miami River. As the city became a haven for Latin Americans fleeing dictators, it changed not just for newcomers but for locals, too.

One distinguishing feature of Miami is how graffiti has served as a marker of the collisions between communities whose ancestors were impelled to immigrate to the Americas, decades or even centuries ago. Long before I was fully aware of the history of graffiti art, the works themselves were burned into my retinas. As a child in the 1990s, I would see the city’s run-down concrete towers converted into contemporary frescos by anonymous artists attracted to these areas of de-industrialization. During the 1980s, Miami was tagged by Cuban American artists such as Abstrk, whose works centre on cavernous eyes, or Ahol Sniffs Glue (David Anasagasti), who produces monochrome cartoons. Crook & Crome (Anwar Michael Kahn and Michael David) made their mark in central Miami, often tagging their names along the derelict factories of Wynwood. Graffiti art appeared in places that many car-bound Floridians passed on their daily commute: billboards and semi-abandoned buildings along the I-95 highway. These images, permanently lodged within the hearts of the city’s immigrant communities, served as a reminder that anyone could reshape Miami. Yet, as iconic as 1980s and ’90s street culture has been in informing public aesthetics, it has also acted as the unwitting death knell for art in the city.

When Art Basel moved to Miami in 2002, local artists, curators and residents alike were enthusiastic about connecting to a prestigious European art fair, aware of the perceived sophistication of such events. Certainly, the fair helped create a new image for Miami – a city that could, and probably should, be synonymous with contemporary art because of how public artwork is integrated into its cement, palm trees and convention centres. In 2013, a little more than a decade after Art Basel’s arrival, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) relocated to a vast new Herzog & de Meuron-designed space in Biscayne Bay. As noted on the museum’s website, PAMM started acquiring art in 1994, a decade after it was founded with the intention of ‘fill[ing] a void in a young city where no contemporary art museum existed’. Initiatives at PAMM include the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI), a research programme designed to foster links between the Miami city region, the Caribbean and its diasporas. The CCI has been supported by the Mellon Foundation since 2019, and has developed key exhibitions and research, including screenings of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s film, Too Bright to See (Part I) (2023), based on the life of the Martinican feminist writer and scholar Suzanne Césaire, and Miami-born artist Teresita Fernández’s 2020 retrospective ‘Elemental’. Both within the cultural sphere and more broadly, these two institutions have completely changed the face of the city.

While Art Basel’s presence has turned Miami into a place of art market pilgrimage, many of the works on display within the fairs draw attention to the potential fissures that occur in the commercialization of art, including the conformity of artworks. Devoid of ambiguity and sophistication, pieces such as Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), priced at US$120,000, serve as ironic comments on the fickle nature of art-world success. Replete with street art, political slogans and feminist artworks, last year’s iteration of Art Basel Miami Beach also featured Jean-Michel Basquiat’s hand-coloured screenprint Back of the Neck (1983), whose graffiti-like tags serve as a reminder of street art’s intention to challenge social conventions. Other artists in the fair have turned their attention to the environment. Caracas-born, Miami-based Loriel Beltrán, for instance, exhibited Anachronistic Landscape (2023) – a textured metallic archway made from discarded shipping crates, intended as a comment on the ecological destruction of Earth. In a 2023 interview with Miami New Times about the piece, the artist observed: ‘Our world is contaminated by microplastics, so our paintings should be contaminated as well.’ Such instances of political engagement notwithstanding, however, the primary intention of any art fair is, of course, to sell. And last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach was no exception, with Philip Guston’s Painter at Night (1979) being purchased for US$20 million.

Caribbean and Latin American migrants in Miami dreamed up versions of their homelands.

The art fair’s annual presence informs the city’s contemporary art landscape not only due to the money it brings and the topics it raises, but because of who it includes and who it excludes due to the cost of access and the cost of the works on display. This is not exclusive to Art Basel Miami, but to the majority of art fairs: entry, for the most part, is predicated on having access to capital. The art fair doesn’t exist in isolation from the local communities that breathe life all year round into Miami – a city where history, as the murals and tagged walls make clear, is inextricably bound up with migration.

Long before I had a name for segregation, I experienced it in my neighbourhood. When I was growing up, Little Haiti was all Black. The schools were all Black; the churches were all Black; the children I played with and the neighbours who watched over us were all Black. This was not by accident, but a product of decades-long racial segregation that was further rendered along ethnic and class lines. However, as well as appealing to snowbirds from New York, Miami – particularly Wynwood, Little Haiti and Miami Beach – drew attention from real estate developers and Art Basel, becoming an artistic playground for the rich, with the city now home to 75 percent more billionaires than a decade ago (Florida has many tax-related benefits for the rich, including no state income tax or estate tax). Today, as someone born and raised in Miami – someone who noticed the stylized altars of the ancestors and who regularly dealt with the musty smells that rose from the sewers after a hurricane – I must say that the city doesn’t quite sit in the same way it did in the 1990s, when it was on the cusp of mutating into a global metropolis.

Caribbean and Latin American migrants in Miami dreamed up versions of their homelands, creating multi-ethnic enclaves where people gathered, debated and caroused. This was especially visible in Little Havana, home to the Cuban diaspora, and Little Haiti, where Haitians settled. Migrants found comfort in their communities, not just for linguistic ease but as a way to assuage the significant political tensions that were constantly surfacing between anti-communists and leftists, between those who benefitted from authoritarian regimes and those who were targeted. Many in these communities had attempted to escape the political ghosts of their home countries, only to find themselves in a heterogeneous amalgam of people on multiple sides of the Cold War. Beyond that, however, Miami had a further discord: racial apartheid.

The city’s early history and overt disenfranchisement of Black people throughout the 20th century led to the racial segregation I experienced growing up, the diminishment of mental-health services and the pronounced presence of the prison-industrial complex. Miami has been a site of brutal inequalities, of ongoing violence to Black life in the US. At the same time, the city’s origins were grounded in the (short-lived) premise of racial equity between Black and white people, often at the exclusion of the Indigenous Miccosukee and Seminole groups.

Haitian parties in Miami were ample in summer, when the fronds of palm trees provided shelter from the sun. During these outdoor festivities, children would climb banyan trees, exercising independence while the adults were nearby. The men could be found playing dominoes or strumming a guitar, with most leaving clouds of cigar smoke hovering over their tables. The women, some finding reprieve from childcare, gathered on porches to catch up on the latest gossip, while others laboured in the kitchen frying plantains or marinating fish in fresh cilantro and limes. The people set the stage, but what made the party unique was the music, which was invariably dotted with an international assemblage of Blackness. We listened to Bob Marley and Celia Cruz: whether we understood the words or not, all that mattered were the familiar rhythms connecting Black Miami to the Caribbean.

In Miami – as in so many working-class Black neighbourhoods – residents were gradually pushed out into less central areas of the county. By the time I was in high school, my parents had moved from Little Haiti, 11 miles away, to Miami Gardens, another majority-Black community. When we moved from Little Haiti, I lost a rich visual tapestry of murals that flooded the local shops two blocks from our former home. Artist Eddie Arroyo depicts the disappearance of Haitian-run storefronts in Little Haiti in many of his works, including the series, ‘5901 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL 33127 (Botanica)’ (2016–18): the loss of these storefronts is tied to the problem of real estate speculation, which Arroyo is actively resisting alongside local community activists. The aesthetic impact wrought by gentrification is made tangible in Arroyo’s paintings by picturing how residential and commercial spaces were changing through paint colours, for sale signs and, eventually, boarded-up doors.

Beneath the art world glamour are stories of place and belonging interlaced with tragedy.

Miami is the city where I learned to love the glistening ocean; the city where I watched the sun ascending from the horizon; the city where I ate fresh mangoes from my backyard; the city where everyone bargained in some version of Kreyinglish (Haitian Creole and English) or Spanglish. The Miami of my childhood was more than a party city: it was a beautiful paradise, nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and a swamp. Throughout childhood, my siblings and I constantly aspired to find inspiration in the books we read and the movies we watched to create stories for ourselves. As young Black children who moved between Haitian Creole, English and Spanish, our linguistic journey allowed us to travel to other worlds. Our dreams felt attainable. For my brother, however, they were deferred, wilted by the ways that Black boys are perceived as criminals from birth.

A year after its release, I watched Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight (2016) – an adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue – which depicts a young gay Black man’s coming-of-age story at the height of the city’s crack epidemic in the 1980s. The movie framed a familiar version of Black Miami life, focusing on the Black-majority neighbourhood of Liberty City. However, it also showed the euphoria of Black youth learning to swim, quiet humour among old friends and surrogate motherly love. Jenkins’s film reads like a particular form of history; it is a chronicle that is moving and speaks to the state’s abandonment of working-class Black people and internalized homophobia. This is an austere cinematic depiction of African American life and, by extension, the more significant economic and demographic shifts happening in Miami.

The last time I was in Miami, in early April 2024, I was five months pregnant. Passing through the consciously redesigned neighbourhoods of Little Haiti and Wynwood, I recognized traces of the place where I grew up, including the delicately seasoned cuisine. Chef Creole, a Haitian restaurant once anointed by Anthony Bourdain, now has its own mural. Depicting the coastline of Haiti, a Marlin chef and a traditional fishing boat, it was a new addition to the city’s mural landscape which was painted by the Haitian artist Serge Toussaint in 2022. I relished my insider status, knowing that this once-rugged yet iconic city was mine. Scrape the surface of art world glamour and commercial success and lying just beneath are contested stories of place and belonging interlaced with tragedy.

Miami is a bold, provocative city, but its success as an artistic centre is being hampered by its current political direction. In 2024, Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed more than US$30 million in state grants for arts and culture organizations, impacting visual artists and public radio programming. Conveying how far he has gone to undermine art and culture in the state, his decision to cut funding flummoxed artists and progressives. The future of contemporary art for those living and working in Miami appears to be uncertain. To me, the grit of the city is crucial to establishing Miami’s artistic landscape beyond large-scale contemporary art fairs. Being from this city means that I make a point to gaze into its crevices with intention and consider what has crumbled, what has disappeared, what lies ahead.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 247 with the headline ‘The World As Miami’

^{Main image: Image commissioned for frieze (detail). Photograph: Josh Aronson}