“Strange Fruits'', curated by Yuneikys Villalonga, presents recent work by Marielle Plaisir, a Miami-based multimedia artist. Working in paint, drawing, sculpture, fashion and performance, Plaisir creates intense visual experiences exploring her French-Caribbean heritage against the backdrop of Postcolonialism. In April 2024, Plaisir will present new digital artworks and a multimedia piece that were commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora (Miami MoCAAD) as a recipient of a 2022 New Work Award from the Knight Foundation. Coral Gables Museum, 285 Aragon Avenue Coral Gables, FL. Runs through April 28, 2024.

"Calida Rawles envisions water as a space for Black healing and reimagines the African American community beyond the stories we already know as a part of the United States’ collective history. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and the cultural and historical symbolisms of water, Rawles creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright and mysterious bodies of water(...) Rawles delves into the particular experience of Black people in Overtown, a Miami neighborhood that went from a thriving cultural and commercial hub for Black people to a community dismantled by gentrification, systemic racism, and mass displacement."

Purvis Young: A Visionary of Miami’s Cultural Identity highlights the profound legacy of one of Miami’s most significant self-taught artists. Young’s work, painted on discarded wood, doors, and other salvaged materials, portrays the resilience of marginalized communities while drawing from historical struggles and contemporary social injustices. His signature imagery—migrating figures, angelic protectors, and urban landscapes—transforms everyday life into spiritual and political commentary. Deeply rooted in the cultural fabric of Overtown, Young’s paintings serve as both historical documentation and poetic reflections of the Black experience in America.

In A Tesseract, A Talisman, Sanford Biggers explores the intersection of past, present, and future through a striking new body of work. His handwoven wool tapestries, created in collaboration with Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos, extend his practice of painting on antique quilts—infusing them with fresh narratives and geometric patterns. Meanwhile, his ceramic sculptures, crafted at the renowned Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, evoke movement and fluidity, transforming rigid materials into dynamic, billowing forms. Drawing from his ongoing Codex series, Biggers continues his investigation of quilts as historical artifacts—once rumored to be coded guides on the Underground Railroad—by reshaping them into objects that blur time and space. This exhibition, marking twelve years of collaboration with David Castillo Gallery, highlights Biggers’s ability to craft “future ethnographies,” bridging ancestral wisdom with contemporary dialogue.

"poemas de sal y tierra" serves as an evolving space where sentiment, symbolism, and memorabilia converge to be celebrated and reimagined. The exhibition functions like a prose-written diary, with artworks acting as entries that preserve feelings and memories beyond physical artifacts. Artists weave new layers of meaning into inherited stories, places, and objects, transforming memory into an active, unfolding conversation. homework The exhibition explores the concept that individuals both come from and become the places they move through, with salt and soil symbolizing ancestral geographies. Through painting, drawing, sound, film, photography, and sculpture, artists translate ephemeral histories and shifting landscapes into tangible artworks, akin to how poetry reveals the invisible threads of existence.

Mildred Thompson’s artistic journey traversed continents and disciplines, resulting in a body of work that bridges science, music, and abstraction. Thompson's multifaceted practice draws from scientific research and a poetic pursuit of abstraction to explore the limits of perception, visualizing extremes of scale—from the human body and built environments to microscopic particles and the vastness of the cosmos. After relocating from the United States to Germany in the late 1950s, Thompson created surreal, figurative drawings and etchings, often depicting female figures. In the late 1960s and 1970s, her focus shifted to built environments, as seen in her “Wood Pictures” series—abstract minimalist compositions made from found wood, reminiscent of architectural features and facades. Her explorations continued with the “Window Paintings” (1977), where brightly colored, abstracted spaces appear framed by windows. Thompson's works on paper from the 1970s and ’80s highlight her inventive approach to printmaking and drawing, including the intricate intaglio prints of the “Death and Orgasm” series (1978) and expressive watercolors of celestial constellations like Pleiades III (1988). In the 1990s, she delved into invisible forces with paintings inspired by particle physics and quantum mechanics, such as “String Theory” (1999) and “Magnetic Fields” (1991). A significant selection of her “Heliocentric Series” (c. 1990–94) is on display for the first time in over three decades, presented alongside her monumental “Music of the Spheres” (1996) paintings, each depicting a different planet and accompanied by Thompson's original electronic music compositions titled Cosmos Calling.

The Mobile Interactive Mural Exhibition is part of Miami MoCAAD’s mission to merge art, history, and technology. The project transforms public spaces into cultural storytelling hubs where murals serve as interactive canvases. Each artwork layers historical memory with augmented reality, offering audiences immersive access to Overtown’s rich cultural legacy. "Telling Overtown Stories, Saying Their Names" uplifts communities by spotlighting the contributions and untold stories of Overtown’s people. Visitors can engage with the murals not only visually, but also digitally, experiencing recorded histories incorporated in QR Codes, curated narratives, and artist insights. This fusion of tradition and innovation reflects Miami MoCAAD’s vision for art that educates, connects, and inspires.

This exhibition positions fabric as both material and metaphor, connecting shared coastal histories between Nigeria and Miami through works that evoke the rhythms of the ocean and the complexities of displacement. Samuel Nnorom transforms African wax fabrics and pompom forms into layered sculptural compositions that weave together personal and collective histories. Drawing from his upbringing in a family of artisans in Jos, Nigeria, his practice is informed by sewing, shoemaking, and storytelling traditions. Through nearly thirty works, Ocean Rise engages with questions of globalization, postcolonial identity, and the politics of everyday life, offering a vibrant meditation on resilience and cultural exchange.

In coming forth by day, De Othello invites viewers into an immersive environment where clay-painted walls, subtle herbal scents, and sculptural works co-exist to explore the primordial relationship between body, earth, and spirit. He draws on materials and motifs like nkisi power figures, Dogon ritual objects and Egyptian pyramids to animate everyday domestic items—mirrors, clocks, vessels—transforming them into anthropomorphic figures rich with memory and emotion. As the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Miami, the show underscores his connection to the city and delves into how objects become vessels of history, spiritual resonance, and human feeling.

Suns & Shadows is a thought-provoking exhibition that centers the interplay of illumination and obscurity across Black life, cultural memory, and creative lineage. Curated by Roscoè B. Thické III, the exhibition showcases works by Mark Delmont, Reginald O’Neal, Lance Minto Strouse, T. Eliott Mansa, and Mark Fleuridor — artists whose practices navigate themes of legacy, grief, renewal, and spiritual grounding. Each artist contributes a distinct language of material and myth, from portraiture rooted in community to assemblages shaped by ritual, inheritance, and the weight of memory. Together, their works form a dialogue about what is carried forward, what is transformed, and what emerges in the space between suns and shadows.

The show features seminal pieces such as Opposed Linear Forms (1961) and Linear Peregrination (1962), which illustrate Hunt’s early explorations of line and spatial extension, as well as Hero’s Head (1956), a welded steel work reflecting on the murder of Emmett Till near the artist’s Chicago neighborhood. Other significant works include I Have Been to the Mountain (1977), a maquette referencing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, and models for ambitious public commissions like Freedmen’s Column (1989) and the unrealized Middle Passage Monument (1987), which speak to collective historical memory. Through these varied works, the exhibition underscores Hunt’s mastery of metal, his command of abstraction, and the enduring relevance of his artistic vision.

This Is America: Selections from PAMM’s Collection brings together works from the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami to reflect on the Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. Featuring artists including José Bedia, Judy Chicago, Alfredo Jaar, Rashid Johnson, Eddie Arroyo, Thomas Bils, Gonzalo Hernández, and Sandra Ramos, the exhibition spans photography, painting, collage, sculpture, video, and neon to present multiple perspectives on American history and identity. Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132. May 28, 2026 — Runs through May 23, 2027. The exhibition situates national narratives within the cultural dynamics of Miami and traces how artists have responded to moments of crisis and transformation, from the Civil War and World War II to 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, and contemporary social and political conditions. It also foregrounds artists and perspectives that have historically been underrepresented in American art, including women, immigrants, Black artists, Indigenous artists, and artists of color.

What’s In Your Container features work by Rimaj Barrientos, Jevon Alexander Brown, Patricia Cooke, Michael Elliott, Natou Fall, Jessica Freites, Rosa Naday Garmendia, Miguel Keerveld, Shayla Marshall, Sydney Rose Maubert, Lance Minto-Strouse, Shawna Moulton, Kurt Nahar, Amarachi Odimba, Evelyn Politzer, Leandro Vazouez, Asser St Val, Clara Toro, and L.A. Samuelson. Curated by Rosie Gordon-Wallace and Breeana Thorne, the exhibition uses the shipping container as a framework for thinking about migration, support, memory, and the ways Caribbean communities carry family, culture, and resilience across distance and time. The curatorial text describes containers and barrels as both physical and metaphorical structures that hold essentials, treasures, trauma, care, and joy. Across the exhibition, works are framed as sites of refuge and as vessels for grief, harmony, regeneration, and collective memory, asking viewers how histories are held, preserved, and transformed. DVCAI Studio, 164 NE 56 Street, Miami, FL 33137. — Runs November 20, 2025 through April 17, 2026.