10 Best Miami Art Exhibitions of 2023

Earlier this month, as Art Basel and Miami Art Week once again assaulted the city with traffic, a headline in the New York Times declared, "Miami has matured into a cultural capital." Took 'em long enough, but even the Grey Lady has to admit: Two decades on from the fair's debut, the city has evolved beyond cliché jokes about cocaine cowboys, café Cubano, and Brazilian butt lifts, at least when it comes to the fine arts.

However, I don't really see it as a maturing. "Mature" implies one is over the hill, unable to change or innovate. Rather, in 2023, Miami's art scene has come of age. The city's gallery scene has become robust, museums and curators are generating challenging and thoughtful exhibitions, and local artists are gaining international stature. Miami didn't need a Mona Lisa or Starry Night to become a major art world destination — it did it by embracing the new and encouraging artistic freedom. The Mona Lisa of tomorrow is being created here, today.

You'll see evidence of that below, as New Times looks back at the ten best art exhibitions that adorned museum and gallery walls in Miami in 2023.

"Alejandro Piñeiro Bello" at Rubell Museum

Perhaps no locally based artist has risen as meteorically as the Cuban-born Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. His intensely hued, tropical Fauvist canvases, all bright colors and wet, melty forms, have dazzled in a museum show at NSU Art Museum and a great solo presentation at KDR in Allapattah. But the two massive paintings he created for the Rubell Museum, where he worked as artist-in-residence this year, must be seen to be believed. Hung parallel to each other in the museum's massive central gallery, the twin canvases — Tormenta Solar, depicting an overwhelming tempest of light, and Claro de Luna, a surreal moonlit dreamscape — exude a spiritual duality. The work remains on view through October 20, 2024.

"Denzil Forrester: We Culture" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

It took decades for Grenada-born Black British painter Denzil Forrester's evocative depictions of Caribbean immigrants'  joys and struggles to find recognition, which has come in the form of a marvelous ICA Miami retrospective. Forrester sketched and painted scenes of intense excitement in now-legendary dancehalls like Phebes, focusing on capturing the movement of dancers at the moment the DJ dropped a massive tune. His use of color is also notable, from the deep blues, blacks, and purples of London — especially moving in canvases showing police violence and its victims – to the brightness in the paintings he made while at a fellowship in Rome.

"Gimme Shelter" at Historic Hampton House

Housed in the one-time Green Book hotel that hosted the likes of Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr. during their stays in Miami, "Gimme Shelter" announced the Hampton House museum's debut in the Miami art scene in a big way with a starry opening party during Miami Art Week. There's good reason for the hype: the show is great, featuring works from major and emerging artists, including Nick Cave, Charles Gaines, Terry Adkins, Henry Taylor, Rashid Johnson, George Clinton, Howardena Pindell, and others. Locals get quite a bit of shine as well, with local galleries Jupiter Contemporary, Mindy Solomon, and Spinello Projects all curating rooms. Jared McGriff's plaintive paintings get an entire space to themselves, and work from Reginald O'Neal, Kandy G. Lopez, Natalia Arbelaez, and others is also included. "Gimme Shelter" is on view through January 26, 2024.

"Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983)" at NSU Art Museum

NSU Art Museum's extraordinary survey of the generation of painters that came after the New York School of Abstract Expressionists aims to dispel certain myths about 20th-century abstract painting. Chiefly, that it was dominated by white artists — Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, and the artists of the De Luxe show in Houston would beg to differ. That there were few female members of the movement — not so, for Helen Frankenthaler is rightly credited with kicking off the Color Field wave. That a "color field" has to be one color or one shape — take a look at Frank Stella's geometric pattern paintings or Larry Poons' goopy, paint-thrown canvases. The exhibition is on view through June 30, 2024.

"Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists" at the Bass

Out of all the shows in a 60th anniversary season that included art world stars like Nam June Paik and Etel Adnan, it was local Hernan Bas' amusing, absurdist rogues' gallery of conceptual artists that I found the most engaging. From a sand sculptor who only makes beached whales to the prankster who makes blood-colored "snow devils," Bas' weirdo artist guys skewer the self-seriousness of the art world and even himself. The final painting, a wall-sized grand finale combining details from every other painting in the series, shows an artist who paints nonexistent conceptual artists. The exhibition is on view through May 5, 2024.

"Jason Seife: Coming to Fruition" at Pérez Art Museum Miami

New Times voted Miami-raised Seife Best Visual Artist in Miami earlier this year, and looking at his excellent PAMM show, his first solo museum presentation in North America, it's easy to see why. Nobody in Miami makes art quite like Seife, whose carpet-pattern paintings are the result of painstaking research trips to Syria and Iran, where the artist, whose father's family came from Syria, explored his heritage. Inspired by the eroded walls of mosques in the Middle East, his concrete-panel paintings appear as if they've been weathered by time, but the artworks themselves feel timeless. The exhibition is on view through March 17, 2024.

"Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

Even if Lonnie Holley hadn't bared his soul to me in an extraordinary interview earlier this year, this solo show at MOCA would still be one of my favorites of the year. "If You Really New" spans the self-taught artist's entire career, from his early sandstone carvings made from salvaged industrial slag and assemblages of found materials to recent paintings featuring faces in silhouette, all commenting on the oft-destructive impacts humankind has had on our home planet. Holley also found space to include some of his fellow Southern artists, such as Purvis Young and Thornton Dial. The show also ran aside the annual South Florida Cultural Consortium exhibition, which featured interesting new work from local artists like Francesco Lo Castro and Ema Ri.

"Melissa Wallen: Worlds Behind You" at Laundromat Art Space

Wallen has been a figure in Miami's art scene for a while — she's director of the de la Cruz Collection — but she ought to be known mainly for her painting practice, as her show at Laundromat Art Space in Little Haiti showed earlier this year. Her densely foliated "portal" paintings are as beguiling as they are ominous, depicting mysterious realms straight out of a Jeff VanderMeer novel. With surrealism tending to focus on figures and objects, Wallen's unmoored, abstracted, sometimes sinister landscapes offer an engrossing argument toward a less prescribed take on the genre.

"Reginald O'Neal: And I Think To Myself" at Spinello Projects

"Less is more" may not be popular in maximalist Miami, but Overtown-born O'Neal has once again proven it true with a quietly majestic show of still lifes at Spinello Projects. O'Neal applies his plaintive neo-impressionist painting technique to a collection of stunningly rendered flowers juxtaposed with portraits of Louis Armstrong and a series of souvenir figures depicting jazz musicians the artist acquired in New Orleans. Exploring the ways in which Black expressions of joy are commodified, the show was complemented by a presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach in which O'Neal created a monumental statue of one of his figurines. "And I Think To Myself" is on view by appointment through January 13, 2024.

"To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection" at El Espacio 23

I'm always hesitant to praise any show where "from the collection of" is part of the title. Artists have always been at the whims of wealthy patrons — formerly feudal lords, now billionaire collectors — and exhibitions and spaces that give them undue credit for spending ungodly amounts of money on art put a bad taste in my mouth. But on rare occasions, such as El Espacio 23's latest show, the credit is due. The curators of developer Jorge Pérez's Allapattah art space have put together a deeply impressive show spanning abstract-expressionist canvases, indigenous-American weaving, and other works that go beyond fabric, divided into themes such as politics, spirituality, and the body. Highlights include a monumental triptych by Joan Mitchell, Argentinian Karina Peisajovich's color-changing light painting, and a splendid geometric painting by Tucson-born Eamon Ore-Giron inspired by Peruvian and Navajo patterns. Works by Tomie Ohtake, Lee Krasner, Elizabet Cerviño, and Olga de Amaral also impress. "To Weave the Sky" is on view through late 2024.