Nostalgias & Utopias, Miami
Last year during Miami Art Week, I visited dozens of spaces outside of the art fair circuit: KDR gallery, homework gallery, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Rubell Museum, Andrew Reed Gallery, The Margulies Collection, MOCA North Miami, Nina Johnson Gallery, Bakehouse Art Complex, and The Bass, amongst others. This list highlights four exhibitions from those visits that are intentionally distinct. They present multiple facets of Miami, showing artists and institutions in conversation with the city’s history, heritage, subcultures, and nature.
Diana Eusebio: Field of Dreams
MOCA North Miami | 770 NE 125th St, North Miami
November 5, 2025 – March 15, 2026
Installation view of Field of Dreams. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, 2025
For Diana Eusebio, home grows from the tender caresses of nature and ordinary life, flowering from the clashes of ancestral heritage and the earth’s memory. Home is ripe for readaptation and migration. It has this capacity to rewrite itself across environments and generations while carrying its spirit and wisdom. Eusebio materializes home not as an object, but as a process—eternally evolving, expanding, searching.
Organized at MOCA North Miami and curated by Kimari Jackson, Diana Eusebio: Field of Dreams aptly unfolds as an ecosystem. Family snapshots and botanical portraits of natural elements digitally printed on dyed cotton fabric anchor the space, cradled by preserved natural remnants—tree branches, dried moss, and living grass that reframe Eusebio’s archival souvenirs as nature-bound. To this effect, the walls are dyed to mirror the tapestries they hold. The red, blue, and yellow dyes tie the galleries together, lending a vibrancy to it all, offset by nature’s green. The presentation of the work is charmingly unstructured, presenting each work on the same pedestal: a photo album curated around affect rather than subject. The result is a garden activating the power of all things past.
Beyond the family photos, every particle of Field of Dreams is crafted from a place of ancestral reverence. The artist’s Afro-Dominican and Quechua Peruvian heritages guide her traditional dying techniques and the materials she harvests. Due to colonization, genocide, and diasporic displacement, home finds its roots in tradition rather than nationhood. Cultural practices are the soil from which home re-materializes, which ties one back to their land. It’s impressive that, despite the personal specificity of her work and process, Eusebio’s ancestral garden is sure to strike a chord with anyone who’s felt the ghostly melancholia of immigration—either directly or inter-generationally. That migrant melancholia, as Alicia Schmidt Camacho might call it, never consumes the work. Hope always prevails with Eusebio.
Referring back to the age-old capitalist trap, American Dream (2025) is an homage to diasporic homemaking. Youth enjoying the bliss of belonging, wearing the same Miami Marlins baseball blue shirt. It’s not an inversion of the American dream, but a re-assertion of its potential idealism. Belonging is a social rapport, not a legal process.
Most ’90s kids will remember the 1989 sports fantasy film Field of Dreams, from which the exhibition takes its title. Here, baseball rekindles lost dreams and faith, mends generational trauma, and reincarnates legends of the past—the sport becomes a magical channel for individual and communal identity formation. Sports are tied to the migrant experience. Hubs of social connection where affect overthrows the trivialities of subjective difference and often serve as gateways for immigrants to blossom into national icons. The Miami Marlins belong to anyone willing to identify with them.
If immigration is to be understood as a process of disintegration, Eusebio looks at the fragments of life that allow for the remaking of the self—for reintegration, if you will. For her, the American dream is not assimilation nor capitalist propaganda, but rather the fragile right to self-discovery, ancestral worship, and belonging.
Jack Pierson: The Miami Years
The Bass | 2100 Collins Ave, Miami Beach
September 24, 2025 – August 16, 2026
Installation view of Jack Pierson: The Miami Years. Courtesy of The Bass, 2025
In December 1984, Jack Pierson gathered all of his money, a car, and a camera, and drove from New York to Florida with his partner Andre LaRoche. Broke and adrift, they carved out a haven in a $55-a-night room in Miami Beach, if only for a while. “Seven years later,” he professed in an interview with Eileen Myles, “I was like, ‘Christ, where would I go if I could go anywhere?’ And it was that room in Miami Beach.” [1] During the ravage of the Reagan years and HIV/AIDS for the gay community, Miami Beach in the 1980s—with its punk underbelly, decadent nightclubs, and bohemian spirit—offered everything Pierson yearned for: sun-drenched, black-leathered, everlasting euphoria.
Jack Pierson: The Miami Years at The Bass, curated by James Voorhies, is an ode to love and heartbreak. It’s Pierson’s own time capsule with a sense of behind-the-scenes specificity. Yet it also manages to capture what Miami Beach represents to its visitors—American or otherwise: a site of idyll, debauchery, and transformation. In other words, it is an inescapable queer pilgrimage site. Showcasing the breadth of Pierson’s practice, the show features photo-based mosaic assemblages dedicated to Andre, friends, and other lovers, design-based installations evoking ’90s advertising, as well as conceptual sculptural works.
Those familiar with Pierson won’t be surprised by the experimental edge. Most impressive is the exhibition design harmonizing with the work so well that the entire space comes together as what feels like a site-specific installation by Pierson himself. It’s filled with archives and found objects from those years, relics and reveries carried over. It’s evident why Pierson resists calling himself a photographer with a capital P. His work here feels closer to a poetry anthology, a diary where photography, installation, design, and drawing become grammar over plain speak. It’s his way of oversharing.
Take the first gallery of the exhibition. You enter through yellow bead-curtains—a ritual evoking Felix Gonzales-Torres’s bead-curtain sculptures—which leads to a small room: a blue carpet, purple lights, a blown-out vinyl black-and-white portrait of a young man on one wall, a kitschy, silvery, glittery corner stage, a neon light piece, and some photo-based installation totems.
The space opens onto an area punctuated by theater-like background stages, worldmaking devices for various facets of Pierson’s Miami life: thirteen 1989 watercolor seascapes painted from Bob Miller’s apartment appear together, as do minimalist drawings from 1991, connected by vernacular photographs. The corner of the space hides an installation recreating that Miami Beach bedroom, dirty and rugged as if drenched in body fluids, with two single beds stuck together and various decorations of found objects: a few leather belts, a mirror, a vase, and a painting by Siobhan Liddell. The four walls feature huge, overlapping photographic mosaics, setting standard C-prints and polaroids against blown-out images marked by plastic letterings. One reads: “DINNER FEAR BREAKFAST HOPE,” perhaps the usual cycle during those years. Throughout, you also find material remnants, such as Bed Springs (2023), a wall-high conceptual sculpture composed of stacked bedsprings, or KEYS (1982), an installation of keys commonly found in motels.
There’s something uniquely transcendent about Pierson’s work. A sense that no word or attempt at contextualizing could sufficiently convey a form of expression that seems to continuously evolve, search, and escape. That affect is what brings him closer to poetry than anything else.
[1] Jack Pierson in “Interview: Jack Pierson and Eileen Myles,” Interview Magazine, February 6, 2017.
Acid Bath House
Nina Johnson | 6315 NW 2nd Ave, Miami
December 1, 2025 – February 7, 2026
Installation view of Acid Bath House. Courtesy of Nina Johnson Gallery, 2025
Curated by Jarrett Earnest, Acid Bath House brings together some twenty-six contemporary queer artists, an eclectic constellation of media, styles, and feelings tracing the multiplicity of queerness. Haphazardly hung, the works co-exist ostensibly without concern for aesthetic, stylistic, or historical coherence. The curatorial style is literary, leaning into Earnest’s curatorial statement. It expresses itself through quiet echoes and harsh tensions, incessantly questioning itself and inviting viewers to join in on its reflection.
Bathhouses have always been de facto queer hubs—sensual, vulgar, awkward, yet anonymous, liberated from the outside’s repressive sexual regime. Gay desire germinates from the concoction of steam and sweat contained within. The exhibition title takes its cue from an acid trip Earnest recalls in the press release. It was a gross bathhouse, porn playing on a TV, where the sauna induced an episode of psychedelic euphoria, marked both by fear and pleasure. He compares the experience to the Tibetan concept of the passage from life to death. A form of atemporal transcendence where the material self dissolves and perception deceives. A psychedelic realization ensues: all is transient all the time. Then, what is queerness without time, without identity, and without the body? What is pleasure if not a biological mechanism?
Before his untimely suicide in 2017, theorist Mark Fisher was working on a new book titled Acid Communism. Envisioning the potential of post-capitalist desire, he argued that a revival of the psychedelia of the 1960s counterculture would open a pathway for the left-wing accelerationist project. Fisher saw psychedelia as a radical force, a channel for unbound political imaginary and consciousness raising. Yet his skepticism of identity politics frequently led him to disregard the specificities of minority struggle. Acid Bath House almost seems a direct response to Fisher, asserting that queerness is (and has always been) more than identity politics: it is, in fact, a psychedelic force.
Queerness manifests in the erotica drawings of Belasco and Sadao Hasegawa, or the hazy sex scenes by Chris Martin or Nicole Wittenberg. Keith Lafuente’s Time Traveller (2025) queers the past while Steven Arnold’s Untitled (1976) envisions queerness’ origin myth in the form of a tree. Yuvil Pudik’s light-based (Kaiser)Panorama Bar (2024–25) nods to the generative anonymity of queer spaces, and Anna Betbeze’s silk and velvet installation Untitled (Stack) #8 (2025) incarnates their camp aesthetic. The unearthly appear in the sober multimedia works by Carrie Yamaoka, the kaleidoscopic paintings of Jesse Genepi, and two Constellation Pavo works by Reuben Paterson.
Earnest is not interested in defining queerness through these multiplicities. He instead honors the many shapes queerness adopts when it materializes, and posits that queer spaces are necessary for that cultivation. “In my experience,” he writes, “in places where queer people come together—a sex club, dance floor, an art gallery, a camp out—and in the things queer people make with and for each other, there is a specific energy that everyone needs if we are to survive on this planet together. The possibility of queer life is psychedelic erotica.” Acid Bath House forces you to bask in the waters of psychedelic erotica, suggesting that queerness is inherent to the genealogy of the counterculture.
Present
Bakehouse Art Complex | 561 Northwest 32nd Street, Miami
November 8, 2025 – April 17, 2026
Installation view of Present, Bakehouse Art Complex. Photography by Silvia Ros, 2025
Bakehouse Art Complex marked their 40th birthday with three exhibitions in tribute to their history and time ahead: Past, Present, and Future. As told through archives in Past, Bakehouse emerged in 1986 inside an abandoned industrial bakery in Wynwood, Miami. Founded by artists and for artists, it’s been a community hub for the Miami art scene ever since. While Future centers ongoing projects happening on the Bakehouse campus, Present offers a comprehensive glimpse of the work of twenty-eight current residents and associate artists.
Curated by Krys Ortega, Present offers a wide-ranging scope of the Miami art scene, an assortment of works meditating on space, place, and home. The aesthetic diversity here is astounding, trivializing any attempt to categorize the work thematically or stylistically. Rather than medium or subject, Present sees echoes in the shared communal spirit of the work—a sensibility proper to the Complex. “Against the backdrop of great precarity for cultural producers everywhere,” Ortega writes, “Bakehouse artists have forged their own systems of support—not only through shared resources, but through daily acts of showing up for one another.”
These past few years, words like “care,” “community,” and “kinship” have saturated press releases and curatorial texts, which leads one to suspect whether or not they are submitting to what artist Cem A. calls the climate of “Consensus Aesthetics”: a market-driven appeal to soft “progressive” politics veiling the conservative, capitalist infrastructure of the art world and protecting it from horizontal, socially conscious, artist-centric configurations for it. In Present, care is the soil: the doctrine from which these works grow. Many of the artists address pressing and long-standing concerns faced by South Florida communities, including gentrification, climate change, online radicalization, urban decay, racism, labor exploitation, and digital obsolescence.
All occupying a shared wall, two photos from Maritza Caneca’s pool series, Azulejos (2016) and Mundo Novo (2015), Maria-Alejandra Icaza Paredes’s post-apocalyptic-like sculpture What Lies Beneath Eventually Emerges (2025), and Adler Guerrier’s Untitled (On Florida’s Black Heritage Trail; Fifth Avenue, Gainesville) (2022) analyze the ruins and fossils concealed under Miami’s opulent façade. Markers of modern development—the concrete block-like mixed media installation by Troy Simmons, SOCIAL CONTRACT (2020), or Amanda Linares’s graphite rendering of a fossilized concrete slab in Los Mil Pies (2023)—are directly implicated in this violence. Digital technology that serves as channels of information and disinformation also appears in Thomas Bils’s FM 5-31 Booby Traps (2025) and Gabriela Gamboa’s computer installation, fragment_f [a,b, and c] (2025), implicating the apparatuses that perpetuate new cycles of violence.
This existential anxiety is counterbalanced with numerous works marked by a sense of adoration for Floridian nature and culture—Diana Eusebio’s photo-based odes to alligators and anhingas, Martina Tuaty’s street portrait of an iguana titled Por La Cola (2020), a drawn flora study by Christina Pettersson, or odes to water life by Andrea Spiridonakos and T. Eliott Mansa. Other artists gaze towards tender visions of home, intergenerational care, and utopia, such as in Amanda Linares’s Umbral (2023), Susan Kim Alvarez’s Bigger Smooch (2024), Shawna Moulton’s Space for Us (2023-2025), Tom Virgin’s Dining Room, Tower View (2018-2025), and Noah Cribb’s Arrangement of Momentum, toward home (2025). Nicole Combeau’s archives-based assemblage of women’s hands, Untitled (from When I See You, I See Myself Clearer) (2024), is the show’s standout, weaving an intimate cross-generational story of repression and resistance: a synecdoche of familial devotion.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of Present is Ortega’s curatorial balancing act. Every artist here asserts their own vision. The works on view are not restrained by imposed categorical themes and yet retain a sense of thematic cohesion. Present celebrates Bakehouse’s current residents as unique talents, but most importantly, as a united collective.
