7 Shows to See During Miami Art Week 2025

Anastasia Samoylova | Dot Fiftyone Gallery | 30 November 2025 – 1 February 2026

Coinciding with the artist’s solo show at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Anastasia Samoylova’s solo exhibition ‘Now, Voyager’ features a body of work that is as hydra as it is hybrid. Since moving to Miami in 2016, Samoylova has documented the effects of rising sea levels on Florida’s communities, lingering on the sour reality of social media portrayals that paint a falsely paradisiacal picture for outsiders. The exhibition takes its title from Walt Whitman’s 1871 poem ‘The Untold Want’: ‘Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.’ Here, the photographer’s iconically Floridian images are met with the intervention of paint: a sinking armchair in Fuck (2025) and the dreamy entrails of Spanish Moss (2025) are now speckled with hues pulled from the photographic image beneath.

Masaomi Yasunaga & Richard Hunt | Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami | 2 December 2025 – 22 March 2026; 2 December 2025 – 29 March 2026

The ICA Miami is presenting the first major museum exhibition in the US devoted to Masaomi Yasunaga, an artist whose alternative ceramics style emerges from the Sōdeisha movement, which disrupted Japanese pottery traditions in the wake of World War II. Using tebineri, or hand-building, Yasunaga combines glaze – his primary material – with minerals, rocks and metals, burying his objects in sand or unrefined porcelain before firing them in experiments of chance. Upstairs, modernism meets found materials in a posthumous survey devoted to Richard Hunt, a sculptor known for turning to scrapyards for mangled car parts and sheet metal, which he hammered into amorphous forms to commemorate individuals dedicated to the civil rights movement. Chromed steel is shaped into a skeletal creature in Opposed Linear Forms (1961), evidence of a life that responded to the natural as much as to current events in Chicago’s South Side, where the artist-activist took part in sit-ins and demonstrations against segregation.

‘What’s in Your Container?’ | Monsignor William Barry Library, Barry University | 20 November 2025 – 17 April 2026

On and off the shores of the Caribbean are sundry vessels – suitcases, oil barrels, shipping containers – carrying all manner of coveted cargo. Featuring 19 artists, including Natou Fall, Sydney Rose Maubert and Shawna Moulton, ‘What’s in Your Container?’ asks what these vessels represent for the region. The show is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based curator Breeana Thorne with Rosie Gordon-Wallace, founder of Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, which has supported Caribbean artists for three decades. Site-specific installations stand alongside prints, photography and painting. In Amarachi Odimba’s Re-gaze (2025), a painted figure peers through the folds of a plaid laundry bag, of the kind frequently used by refugees to carry belongings when abruptly departing from home. Evoking the experience of exile, by force or by choice, the works on view are charged with the realities of displacement, colonialism and ports as conduits of memory.

Studio Lenca | David Castillo | 1 December 2025 – 31 January 2026

For his debut solo exhibition in Miami, Studio Lenca presents oil and acrylic paintings that combine symbology and history. Characterized by colourful patterning, the artist’s work features the recurring figures of Los Historiantes: Salvadoran folk-tellers who dance to tell of the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Donning wide-brimmed hats, these storytellers are often accompanied by a twin, as seen in Lejos (2025) and Paisaje (2025). The paintings also feature lively landscapes and vegetation that wraps around the figures’ bodies, signifying growth and the potential to adapt to new circumstances.

‘Borderline’ | Goodtime Hotel | 20 November 2025 – 15 December 2025

Keep on pushin’ me, baby / Don’t you know you drive me crazy? / You just keep on pushin’ my love / Over the borderline. So go the lyrics to Madonna’s 1984 single ‘Borderline’, which inspired the title of this group show, jointly presented by independent platforms and galleries Miami Art Society, QUEUE Gallery and Supermarket Gallery. The 11-artist exhibition, which includes Filio Gálvez, Alejandra Moros and Victor Saul Urroz Lanzas, toys with the aesthetics of the venue housing it, founded in 2021 by musician Pharrell Williams and businessman David Grutman. The artists intervene in the hotel’s social spaces and corridors to reflect on what it means to call this complicated city home today.

‘Suns & Shadows’ & Cornelius Tulloch | African Heritage Cultural Arts Center | 14 November 2025 – 28 February 2026; 29 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC), ‘Suns & Shadows’ marks the curatorial debut of lens-based artist Roscoè B. Thické III. Featuring Miami-based artists Mark Delmont, Mark Fleuridor, T. Eliott Mansa, Lance Minto-Strouse and Reginald O’Neal, the show takes up themes of legacy and the concept of sankofa, a Twi word that conveys the necessity of learning from predecessors. Also on view is Cornelius Tulloch’s ‘Porch Passages: Creole Collage’, featuring an architectural installation that treats the porch as a vehicle for everyday storytelling and a register of intergenerational memory for Black and Caribbean communities. For this iteration of the series, Tulloch, with poet Arsimmer McCoy, organized summer youth workshops with AHCAC and Fab Lab Miami; the students’ poems and collages are embedded in breeze blocks as part of a makeshift veranda for visitors to peruse.

Yu Nishimura & Ser Serpas | Rubell Museum | 1 December 2025 – Autumn 2026

On view amid the Rubell Museum’s permanent collection, solo presentations by Yu Nishimura and Ser Serpas provide an opportunity to absorb the artists’ signature brushwork styles. Working in his hometown of Kanagawa, Japan, Nishimura’s oil and tempera portraits and landscapes pull from the everyday to present blurred and hazy memories as recollected by the artist. In hex (2024), bright purples and oranges render a sketched figure who stares outwards, perhaps in contemplation or an emotional daze. Meanwhile, bodies painted in oil on canvas and jute by Ser Serpas – an interdisciplinary artist best known for her readymade sculptures – are faceless, with scrawled texts and scars that imbue them with tenderness.

^{Main image: Cornelius Tulloch, ‘Porch Passages: Creole Collage’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: the artist}