giving overlooked artists their due at Art Basel Miami Beach

Amy Smith-Stewart is the chief curator at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum—one of the oldest contemporary art museums in the US and the only one in Connecticut solely dedicated to contemporary art. Previously, she was a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a faculty member at both the School of Visual Arts and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. Her curatorial practice focuses on marginalised artists as well as those with a feminist approach. She regularly aims to organise emerging artists’ first solo museum exhibitions.

Roksana Pirouzmand, The Past Seeps Through the Present (2022), Dastan

This piece features clay casts of the bodies of the artist’s mother and grandmother. They were made in her native Iran, before the artist left to study in the US in full knowledge that she might not be able to return. “This clay actually has water in it, and the water is slowly dropping and leaving an impression or wound on her mother’s body,” Smith-Stewart says. “It’s about the transmission of trauma over time.”

Bonnie Lucas, Spoiled (1986), ILY2

Lucas has been practicing for more than 40 years, and by her own admission remained something of an outlier for quite some time—the 1980s were perhaps not ready for her brand of hyperfemininity. Now, however, this is exactly what draws Smith-Stewart to her work. “I’m interested in artists who come from a feminist perspective, but especially those who are weaponising femininity and the colour pink,” the curator says.

Kim Dacres and Melissa Joseph, The Hardest Love We Carry (2023-24), Charles Moffett

Dacres and Joseph, who share both a friendship and a background as educators, are presenting their works in tandem. Dacres, who is of Jamaican descent, braids and screws tyres together to create portraits that “celebrate Black female power and Black beauty”, Smith-Stewart says, while Joseph works in needle felting to explore her “bicultural, diasporic identity” and family history.

Uman, Eedo Kafia’s Turkana (2024), Nicola Vassell Gallery

Born in 1980 in Somalia, Uman and her family fled the civil war when she was nine years old. The artist arrived in New York around the year 2000, when she began showing work on friend’s rooftops. “She’s very inspired by East African textiles, and also 19th-century French painting, which you can see especially in the bright colours,” Smith-Stewart says. “It’s a form of visionary abstraction. They’re just so radiant.”

Teresa Baker, Denote (2024), Stephen Friedman Gallery

“Teresa Baker is a Native American artist whose father was in the National Park Service, and she spent a lot of time in the Northern Plains,” Smith-Stewart says. “Her work deals with landscape and memories of landscape. She juxtaposes artificial and natural materials, with the natural materials referencing her Hidatsa and Mandan heritage.”

Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Notebook of No Return: Alice and Goliath (2019), James Cohan

“This artist is from Guadeloupe, and she has created this character she calls Sanbras, who is a schoolgirl. These stories, this world-building is used to communicate marginalised histories and forgotten stories of her heritage,” Smith-Stewart says. “I was excited to see that this is a tapestry, so there’s also a feminist lens, this idea of domesticity.”

Loie Hollowell, Red-orange nipple over blue underpainting (2024), Jessica Silverman

“This work is about Hollowell’s experience as a mother, but also as a pregnant woman in a body that’s changing, a sexualised body,” Smith-Stewart says. “She has done a lot of mapping of her body going through changes by using the language of abstraction, primarily, and a palette that is very emotional. I like to call these ‘sentient’ or ‘sensuous’ abstractions.”