The Best Miami Art Exhibitions of 2025

From Alligator Alcatraz to tariff mania, 2025 has been a year of economic tumult and political chaos with South Florida at the reluctant center. But while everything else feels like it’s in a downward spiral, Miami’s art scene is still on the come-up. Underground spaces and upstart galleries are testing new narratives and changing the conversation about what art in South Florida can look like, while area museums continue to feature important contemporary artists, new and old. Private collections remain a critical facet of the region’s art scene in more ways than one: Museums turned to major collections for exhibitions, with one in Palm Beach making a case for South Florida as a destination for more than just contemporary art. And while Art Basel Miami Beach still serves as a stage for some of the cringiest confabulations the art world can throw at us (robot dogs, anyone?), the best of Miami’s art exhibitions proved once again the breadth and quality of its city’s art scene.

“Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time” at the Norton Museum

A blockbuster, a destination show, and a landmark in South Florida’s art history, the Norton’s exhibition of masterworks by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other painters of the Dutch Golden Age marks the first time these legendary artists have ever been shown in the State of Florida. But beyond providing further proof of the region’s growing importance in the art world, “Art in Life in Rembrandt’s Time” is an outstandingly curated show, revealing not simply the greatness of its name-brand painters but also providing deeper insight into their lesser-known peers like Gerrit Dou and Jan Steen, and the tumultuous time in which they lived. — Douglas Markowitz

“Black Mans Shadow Work” at Queue Gallery

Who says all Miami art has to be sunshiny and bright? Alongside alternative spaces such as Tunnel Projects, downtown upstart Queue Gallery and its owner/curator, Catherine Camargo, has become a locus point for a growing scene of Miami art irascibles, programming work that’s more sophisticated, complicated, and monochromatic than the usual South Florida fare, to our benefit. Its best show so far has been a duo exhibition pairing New York-based artists Torrance Hall and Karryl Eugene, combining the former’s shadowy self-portraits with the latter’s photo collages, combining and critiquing celeb-centric imagery. — Douglas Markowitz

“Dreams Without Riders: An Exploration of Control, Featuring No Control” at Homework Gallery

Brigette Hoffman’s “Dreams Without Riders” was as much an exercise in world-building as installation art. Centered on a carnival motif, the paintings along the Homework Gallery walls hung like kinetic, kaleidoscopic portals through which the sculptures of riderless bikes, tents and spires, mice, and other assorted circus ephemera traveled to serve as three-dimensional symbols and refractions of deeper subconscious truths atop a central island stage. And, indeed, in her artist statement, the German-Nicaraguan multimedia artist references Carl Jung’s theory of the Self, Dolores Cannon, and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. “Beneath the stage lights and the masks, there is the Self, the divine spark that watches, waits, and moves in its own rhythm,” the Homework one-pager adds. “Recognizing it is an act of resistance, a way of reclaiming authorship from the spectacle.” And, so, yes, “Dreams Without Riders” is magical and fanciful, but is clearly intended on a deeper level, to acknowledge and (hopefully!) facilitate the yearning for self-knowledge and higher actualization that can only come from transcending our limited corporeal POV — a beguiling new chapter in an ancient story. “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face,” Corinthians says. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” — Shawn Macomber

“Formas de Memoria y Reescritura (Forms of Memory and Rewriting)” at Mahara + Co.

Objects and images are not only an important way we encode, contextualize, and anchor our own individual memories, but they also make up our collective reality: A recent peer-reviewed study in the journal Science Advances found that when “a group of people encounter the same range of objects, individuals from that group tend to remember the same objects.” This is fertile ground for exploration — not to mention excavation and exhibition — and with “Formas de Memoria y Reescritura” Mahara + Co. dove fully into its implications, from the profound and thought-provoking to the droll and eclectic, tackling memory not “as a fixed archive,” but, rather, as “a territory in transformation”; “a space where materials, gestures, and words intertwine to rewrite what has been lived.” The resulting pieces from the show’s eight artists — wrought, alternately, from concrete, books, paint, dried flowers, rocks, paper, even repurposed tools and wood — is extremely powerful not only in its distillation and intra-exhibit conversation and juxtaposition, but also in the way its individual elemental tones create harmonies with our own personal and shared (obscured) histories. — Shawn Macomber

“In Dialogue with Color: Mid-20th Century to Now” at Opera Gallery

If all “In Dialogue with Color: Mid-20th Century to Now” offered was the opportunity to see a straight-up amazing lineup of heavy hitters in a relatively intimate setting, it would be worth the journey to Opera Gallery’s increasingly swanky corner of the Design District. The show features works by Pablo Picasso, Yayoi Kusama, Marc Chagall, Banksy, Keith Haring, Feng Xiao-Min, Claude Monet, Amoako Boafo, and Pierre Soulages. However, the work is not merely overhyped marginalia from icons — these pieces are all as wonderful and impressive as they are intriguing and substantive. Now, as to the theme promised in the title and press materials which promise “to explore the artists’ engagement with color as a way to symbolize meaning, convey identity, and provoke thought,” it’s a little difficult to tease out cohesion on that level, but the quotes interspersed on walls between the pieces — from, say, Chagall: “Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration”; or Picasso: “Color, like features, follow the changes of emotion” — do give some further weight to the stated purpose. As with so many things, however, a trip through the show is all about the (multi-artist) journey, not necessarily the (color) destination. — Shawn Macomber

“Olga de Amaral” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

It’s not what you might expect when you think “fabric imported from Paris,” but ICA Miami’s staging of the Fondation Cartier’s major retrospective of Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral was certainly cut from a different cloth. Rather than placing de Amaral’s works on standard white walls, the exhibition’s staging, designed by rising architecture star Lina Ghotmeh, suspended them from metal poles in the middle of the gallery space itself, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves in the brilliant colors, varied textures, and multidimensionality of the artworks. — Douglas Markowitz

“A World Far Away, Nearby, and Invisible” at El Espacio 23

Making sense out of a collection as massive as Jorge Pérez’s is always a challenge, but one that the curatorial team at El Espacio 23 has become quite adept at completing. Focusing this year on “Territory Narratives” as the show’s subtitle states, the space’s latest presentation once again takes a well-worn artistic theme (landscapes) and deconstructs it, discussing humanity’s fraught relationship with the lands we inhabit, venerate, and exploit. The roster of artists is massive and globe-spanning, with works from stars such as Leonora Carrington and Sean Scully cohabitating with locals like Nina Surel and Jennifer Basile, while immersive installations by Graciela Sacco and Tania Candiani steal the show. — Douglas Markowitz