The curator Omar Lopez-Chahoud knew that his first independent project after leaving his post as the longtime artistic director of Untitled Art Miami Beach had to be the right one. When Eduardo Lopez, the founder of Mexico’s FF Projects, approached him to curate a show featuring some of FF Projects’ artists and others, Lopez-Chahoud saw the partnership was a perfect fit for his first post-Untitled show at Miami Art Week.
Fragments of Displacement (until 1 March 2026)—a group exhibition featuring works by established artists like Jorge Méndez Blake, Helmut Lang and Andrea Geyer alongside emerging talent such as Chantal Peñalosa Fong—debuted on 2 December at an unconventional location: Miami Produce, an open-air courtyard market of fruit and vegetable vendors.
“Our motivation centres on activating unconventional spaces in Miami,” Lopez-Chahoud says, “creating a project accessible to the public while providing an alternative to the traditional fair model.”
Lopez says he approached Lopez-Chahoud with the opportunity precisely because they share the same vision: “Omar has a history of doing projects that are very similar to mine, which step out from the typical white cube and become part of the landscape, both physically and conceptually.”
Situating Fragments of Displacement in a produce market in Allapattah, Lopez-Chahoud and Lopez respond to a community in flux that continually faces displacement on multiple levels: from gentrification, political violence, socioeconomic upheaval. The well-being of the communities planting, harvesting and selling produce in South Florida—typically Central American immigrants—is deeply at risk. This is an appropriate point of departure from which to understand the transformation of Allapattah, which has evolved from centre of trade to industrial park to residential neighbourhood and, recently, cultural epicentre.
Allapattah sits on Seminole land and used to be a trading post for tribes moving in and around the region. In the 1950s, as Miami’s population began to boom, the area became a thriving textile market, eventually taking on a more industrial character. For years, Allapattah was considered a derelict community, but the arrival of the Rubell Museum in 2019 increased the price of local real estate. Today Allapattah is home to numerous galleries, including KDR and Mindy Solomon, and is a neighbourhood primed for yet another large-scale change.
Community concepts
This shift was Lopez-Chahoud’s primary motivation for the show, which brings together conceptual artists whose works expand on the industrial and materials-based narrative of the neighbourhood. The works integrate into the space, which features dozens of stalls connected by a long, winding corridor. The exhibition is meant to actively engage the people who work at and visit the market, with many accessible text-based works included in the exhibition—like John Giorno’s Life is a Killer and Stefan Brüggemann’s No Content.
Intended to engage and not disrupt, Fragments of Displacement presents a poetic interpretation of how we might view spaces in transition. “By assimilating the work into a neighbourhood space, we can see how everyday life transmutates into art, and watch what the art gives back to everyday life in a community like this,” Lopez says.
