The LVH Art Guide to Miami Art Week

Once a year, Miami’s art scene comes alive for a week as Art Basel and a host of major cultural events take over the city. Our December guide spotlights the key exhibitions, installations, and happenings to experience during this leading cultural moment, which draws artists, collectors, and art lovers from around the world.

Fairs

Art Basel Miami Beach
Taking place December 5 to 7, 2025, with VIP previews on December 3–4, Art Basel Miami Beach is the premier event of the city’s art calendar. Hosted at the Miami Beach Convention Centre, it features leading galleries from the Americas and beyond. The fair showcases art spanning promising emerging voices to established blue-chip names, creating an experience that appeals to collectors, enthusiasts, and art lovers alike.

NADA Miami
Running from December 3 to 6, 2025, with a VIP preview on December 2, NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) offers a fresh, experimental edge. It’s the go-to fair for cutting-edge independent galleries and emerging artists who push creative boundaries. NADA is a must-visit for collectors and art enthusiasts seeking fresh talent, innovative works, and underrepresented voices shaping the future of contemporary art.

Design Miami
Design Miami, which runs December 3 to 7, 2025, with an invite-only VIP day on December 2, celebrates collectable and contemporary design. Its selling point lies in its curated, high-end approach that blends craftsmanship, innovation, and collectible design, creating a destination for discerning enthusiasts.

Alcova Miami
Alcova Miami runs from December 2 to 7 at the picturesque Miami River Inn, the city’s oldest hotel, situated in the South River Drive Historic District of East Little Havana. Unlike a typical design fair, Alcova Miami leans toward the experimental, with installations and projects often responding to and interacting with the building itself. Originally founded in Milan, Italy, the platform focuses on design, craftsmanship, innovation, and material experimentation, prioritising conceptual, forward-thinking approaches to “living and making” over purely commercial products.

Untitled Art
Untitled Art takes place from December 3 to 7, with a VIP preview day on the 2nd, in a light-filled beachfront pavilion on Ocean Drive in South Beach. The fair brings together galleries, nonprofits, and emerging artists in a setting that emphasises experimentation and dialogue. Founded in 2012, it has become a key event during Miami Art Week, recognised for its inclusive vision and its support of underrepresented and emerging voices in contemporary art.

Museums and Institutional Shows

Institute of Contemporary Fine Art (ICA), Miami
Richard Hunt: Pressure
2 December 2025 – 29 March 2026
This exhibition is the first major posthumous survey in the United States of sculptor Richard Hunt. Spanning half a century, it reveals how central Hunt was to the development of American modern sculpture and how boldly he redefined the medium. The show presents the full scope of Hunt’s work, from imposing bronze and stainless-steel sculptures to intimate maquettes and smaller pieces, some of which directly engage with the Civil Rights movement.

Hunt was working as an artist during an important moment in modernist sculpture, developing a unique artistic voice by reshaping traditional sculptural conventions. His forms often appear stretched, twisted, or in motion. Drawing inspiration from nature, classical mythology, and his own cultural heritage, Hunt’s sculptures tell both personal and symbolic stories. Although Hunt achieved major recognition at just 35 years old with a landmark 1971 survey at the Museum of Modern Art, he has not been featured in a large-scale institutional exhibition for decades, making this a timely and important survey.

Institute of Contemporary Fine Art (ICA), Miami
Joyce Pensato
2 December 2025 – 15 March 2026
The ICA presents a major retrospective of American painter Joyce Pensato (1941–2019), featuring approximately 65 works spanning five decades. The exhibition includes rarely seen pieces from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, offering the most comprehensive museum survey of Pensato’s career to date. Pensato’s work combines the expressive gestures of abstraction with the bold immediacy of pop art, producing pieces that both reference and subvert these traditions and define her distinctive artistic voice.

The exhibition traces the evolution of recurring motifs and characters over five decades of Pensato’s career, from her 1976 Batman drawings and 1980s gestural abstractions to her first enamel paintings in the 1990s and works through 2019. It underscores her engagement with iconic figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, including Felix the Cat, early Disney animations, and South Park, revealing her acute awareness of contemporary culture. Pensato’s works do more than depict comic figures or superheroes; they possess wit, intensity, and layered meaning, capturing the energy of their cultural moment and revealing the depth and complexity of the characters she reimagined.

The Bass, Miami
Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan
20 August 2025 – 26 July 2026
This small and intimate exhibition brings together new works by contemporary artist Sarah Crowner alongside works by the late Etel Adnan. Sarah Crowner (b. 1974) is an American artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and design, exploring abstraction through bold shapes and geometric compositions. Etel Adnan (1925–2021), an American Lebanese poet and artist, is celebrated for her vibrant landscape paintings and abstract drawings filled with luminous fields of colour that evoke both nature and emotion. Crowner’s response to Adnan’s art builds a bridge across generations, weaving shared themes of abstraction, memory, and place into a compelling conversation.

For this exhibition, Crowner not only thoughtfully curated the show, she also created new site-specific works. Firstly, she designed a semicircular carpeted alcove that beautifully frames Adnan’s expansive mural, inviting viewers into an intimate space of reflection. The mural by Adnan that is included in the show is the only one of its kind in the United States, making it an exceptionally unique experience. Alongside this, Crowner presents new highly reflective bronze sculptures cast from enlarged beach stones, displayed next to photographs of the California coastline taken by Adnan in the 1960s. The sculptures’ shimmering yet imperfect surfaces gently distort their surroundings, subtly echoing and refracting the colours of Adnan’s mural, while also connecting to the photographs through their shared reference to beach shores.

The Bass, Miami
Lawrence Lek: NOX Pavilion
19 November 2025 – 26 April 2026
Lawrence Lek (b. 1982) is a London-based artist exploring possible futures through AI-driven works. His computer-generated films, installations, video games, and sound pieces combine into immersive worlds where intelligent machines, such as self-driving cars and robots, are portrayed as complex protagonists with their own desires and memories.

Since 2023, Lek has developed a fictional universe centred on NOX (short for Nonhuman Excellence), a therapy centre for sentient self-driving cars. At this centre, the cars are treated for issues such as mental breakdowns, distractions, or malfunctions that hinder their performance. These cars become patients, but the ultimate goal is to restore their productivity within a system that prioritises corporate efficiency over individual well-being. While Lek’s world is imagined and focused on AI machines, it reflects pressing issues relevant to today’s human society. For this exhibition, Lek presents a comprehensive installation, including long-format films, short videos, and interactive video games. There is also a physical installation of a grey-tiled pavilion that visitors can step on or sit upon. Featured both in the gallery and in Lek’s virtual city, this pavilion bridges the gap between fiction and reality, emphasising how closely the world of NOX is connected to our own. In this exhibition, visitors become witnesses, participants, or even inhabitants of Lek’s imagined worlds.

The Bass, Miami
Jack Pierson: The Miami Years
24 September 2025 – 16 August 2026
Also on view at The Bass is an exhibition that marks the first of its kind to explore the city’s transformative impact on Jack Pierson’s life and work. Born and raised in New England in the 1960s, Pierson is a distinctly American artist whose practice delves into universal themes of desire, memory, loss, and the passage of time. Pierson gained recognition in the early 1990s for his intimate depictions of everyday queer life and bohemian culture across New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Infused with the aesthetics of punk and advertising and drawing on a dizzying array of visual references, his work often incorporates weathered objects, found furniture, and repurposed commercial signage. Pierson’s commissioned projects for fashion and style magazines frequently mirror his gallery and exhibition work, with the two realms continuously informing each other.

Pierson’s first trip from New York City to Miami Beach in the winter of 1984 sparked a series of return visits that shaped his artistic trajectory. That initial six-month stay became a time of professional experimentation and personal growth. South Beach’s sun-soaked landscape and vibrant queer nightlife offered a reprieve from New York’s pressures, while affordable apartments and thrift-store finds fuelled the wanderlust and escapism evident in Pierson’s work. The exhibition also features ARRAY (MIAMI), a ten-by-fourteen-foot commissioned collage. Combining posters, poems, postcards, photographs and works on paper by the artist, the work explores themes of desire, nostalgia, and transience, reflecting Pierson’s experiences in Miami Beach and the city’s enduring impact on his art.

NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale
Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time
16 November 2025 – 16 April 2026
This exhibition at the NSU Art Museum highlights key moments in Robert Rauschenberg’s career. The show draws on the museum’s extensive holdings of his experimental prints from the 1970s. It will also highlight photographs from the early 1950s and films by Charles Atlas documenting Rauschenberg’s set and costume collaborations with choreographer Merce Cunningham. From the late 1970s until he died in 2008, Rauschenberg made Florida his home, where he continued to develop his art and maintain a significant presence in the national and international art world.

NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale
Permanent Collection Highlights
The Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Mysteries Part II
Opened November 16, 2025
This exhibition showcases NSU Art Museum’s recent acquisitions, featuring incredible new works by El Anatsui, Frida Orupabo, Lonnie Holley, and others. Don’t miss this presentation revealing some of the museum’s most significant additions to its collection.

Shared Dreams
Opened September 21, 2025
A major exhibition celebrating the extraordinary gift of 88 important 20th-century Latin American artworks from renowned collectors Stanley and Pearl Goodman. Highlights include one of Leonora Carrington’s earliest paintings, created after her relocation to Mexico City during World War II, a Frida Kahlo self-portrait drawn from her diary, and works by Remedios Varo, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and many more.

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami
Woody De Othello: coming forth by day
13 November 2025 – 28 June 2025
This exhibition presents an entirely new body of work by Miami born artist Woody De Othello. The show features ceramic and wood sculptures, tiled wall pieces, and a monumental bronze, all exploring the elemental connections between body, earth, and spirit. The gallery is transformed into an immersive environment with clay coated walls and subtle herbal scents that create a sensory dialogue with the materials.

Rooted in precolonial and diasporic African traditions, Othello draws on spiritual practices, esoteric philosophies, and cultural artifacts, from nkisi power figures and Dogon ritual objects to the monumental forms of Egyptian pyramids. At just 35 years old, Othello is a remarkably young and accomplished artist. This exhibition marks his first solo museum presentation in Miami and reflects his strong connection to the city as well as his ongoing exploration of ancestral heritage. Through inventive use of materials and expressive sculptural forms, the works explore how objects carry history, convey meaning, and serve as vessels for both spiritual and emotional experience.

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami
Language and Image: Conceptual and Performance-Based Photography from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection
15 May 2025 – 11 January 2026
The show brings together more than 100 works by over 50 international artists, spanning decades of innovative practice. Celebrated figures such as Marina Abramović, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, and Thomas Struth are featured alongside artists such as Jonathas de Andrade, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ana Mendieta, and Vik Muniz, many of whom have been shown at the museum in past exhibitions. This dynamic exhibition highlights the depth and ambition of PAMM’s photography collection, offering a broad survey of conceptual and performance-based approaches to the medium.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami
Italian Art, 1970 – 2024
12 November 2025 – 4 April 2026
This exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of works by Italian artists from 1970 to the present, revealing how artists from a single country have significantly shaped the course of contemporary art history. Featured artists include Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis, and Mimmo Paladino.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami
Pop Art: Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, Chamberlain, Segal
12 November 2025 – 4 April 2026
This major exhibition brings together iconic paintings and sculptures spanning four decades, from the early 1960s through the 1990s, to trace the development and lasting influence of Pop Art. Drawn from the renowned Margulies Collection, the show presents important works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, John Chamberlain, and George Segal.

Rubell Museum, Miami
Thomas Houseago: First Light
1 December 2025 – 27 September 2025
The museum launches its first single-artist survey with Thomas Houseago: First Light, a presentation of over thirty works spanning twenty years and installed throughout seven newly dedicated galleries. Featuring everything from the plaster sculptures made for the Rubells’ 2006 Red Eye exhibition to this fall’s monumental collaged paintings, the exhibition charts Houseago’s expressive range across multiple materials—wood, bronze, paper, found objects, plaster, and painted canvas.

Rubell Museum, Miami
Artist Commission and Solo Presentations
1 December 2025 – Fall 2026
Seung Ah Paik – The museum commissioned four large-scale paintings for Paik’s solo exhibition. Drawing on traditional landscape and self-portraiture, she uses her body as a symbol of transformation and self-discovery, creating works that intertwine personal narrative and symbolic imagery.
Solo Presentations – Featuring works by Lorenzo Amos, Joseph Geagan, Rita Letendre, Yu Nishimura, and Ser Serpas.