Shows to See During Miami Art Week

This show takes its inspiration from the grimy, sensuous limbo of a bathhouse—a place that is defined by masculinity and anonymity, according to the exhibition’s curator, critic Jarrett Earnest. “In my experience,” Earnest writes in a text accompanying the show, “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.” His group show encapsulates all this. It features artists such as Steven Arnold, a protégé of Salvador Dalí; homoerotic cartoonist Belasco; and Japanese graphic artist Sadao Hasegawa.

In his first solo show in Miami, the El Salvadoran artist returns to the Historiantes, a Salvadoran dance tradition wherein performers assume the role of witness and storyteller in telling the history of colonization. Wide-brimmed hats move among vibrant landscapes, merging people with the places they inhabit. That notion is especially relevant amid mounting animosity toward immigrants, both in the United Kingdom, where Studio Lenca currently lives, and in the United States, where he grew up undocumented after fleeing El Salvador’s civil war.

While Jeffrey Deitch doesn’t operate a gallery in Miami year-round, he always mounts a show during Art Basel Miami Beach. His exhibition this year, organized by American Art Projects, is being billed as “a survey of the latest and most exciting trends in art making today.” It will feature artists such as Los Angeles-based artist Mario Ayala, who uses an airbrush reminiscent of Californian car culture, and Reginald Sylvester II, known for his large scale figuration of the Black experience.

A key figure of the Pictures Generation of the 1980s, Simmons is known for photographs that challenge the male-dominated field of formalism and raise questions about the construction of identity. This show of works from the ’80s and ’90s features works form the artist’s Water Ballet and Family Collision series, both of which offer liberating visions of underwater tableaus, and Simmons’ Underneath series, wherein mannequins and their clothing surreptitiously house quaint domestic scenes in place of flesh.

In this solo show, Alvarez explores the many myths of Floridian folklore, casting her own interiority as a site of its cultural awakening. At its center will be the two-paneled painting Mouth of Miami (2025), which envisions a monstrous inferno, with characters floating around the periphery. Amid the chaos, the orange-tinged city sits peacefully protected. In other paintings reconstructing and remaking her family lineage, Alvarez will also take up her own personal mythology.