That painting on your wall that you bought at a local gallery (at a steep price for such a young artist) is more than “beautiful.” Remove the Romantic veil. What you have is called an investment; something similar to a Chippendale armoire, an ancient coin, or a 1936 32-ounce cone-top…

Art can redeem the world,” writes Schiller in his Aesthetic Education of Man. I take his motto to mediate art and politics, as a means to show, not necessarily what is true or false, right or wrong, but other important shades in between. Art is powerful because it deals with…

The hoopla surrounding Art Basel is six months behind us now, which is why it’s as good a time as any to step back and assess our current art scene. When looking at the art being done in Miami, it doesn’t appear much different from what I saw three years…

“Shirin Neshat,” the latest show at the Miami Art Museum, with films and photographs of the exile Iranian artist, is a unique event, helping us to grasp the complexity of women’s struggle for social liberation under Islam. The exhibit brings a fresh perspective to difficult political and ethnic themes with…

Performance art is not for everyone. Even as symbolic movements, seeing the artist’s body intimate acts of self-inflicted violence, humiliation, or sex are always challenging — even for the willing observer. But one thing is certain: Since the 1960s the artist’s body has functioned as a physical resistance to power…

Architecture has become selfish and homogeneous — it lacks diversity and a genuine connection with nature.” — architect Lucien Kroll There’s so much wrong about Miami’s urban fabric: poor design, structural monotony, congestion. And a critical problem is our lack of green areas, for shade, for leisure. Perhaps our politicians…

“To Blink” is an exciting show by Argentinean Liliana Porter at Casas Riegner Gallery in the Design District. Porter’s work has a reflective quality about it, which reminds me of early Dutch painting. She adds windows and mirrors, to invade their apparently serene bourgeois interiors. Porter takes up aesthetic and…

SFCA (South Florida Composers Alliance) is one of the most underrated marvels of Miami. For more than a decade, this organization has presented its annual Subtropics Festival — at number fifteen this year. Artists like Sonny Rollins, John Cage, Don Pullen, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveiros, and other nonconformists, electronica mavericks,…

Anat Ebgi and Nina Arias are two young, independent Miami curators who have produced interesting shows in the last year. Most recently during Art Miami, Ebgi put on an all-female exhibit called “Manifest Destiny,” and Arias curated “Drawing Conclusions,” both in the Design District and both critically acclaimed. They have…

Standing inside Cesar Trasobares’s exhibit “Social Fabric: Old Pillows and Recent Money Works” at FIU’s main library feels like being swallowed by a cannibalistic capitalist ecosystem. There’s paper money, mostly one-dollar bills, some scribbled with stories, promises, and exhortations; some painted over; some defaced or stamped with terms such as…

What if you took the Swiss penchant for detail, seriousness, and thoroughness and mixed it up with Miami’s spirited, self-indulgent underdevelopedness. The result would be Art Basel 2002 in Miami Beach. First in its class, Art Basel did indeed deliver a proliferation of art, sending waves crashing around the county…

In the past three years Miami has experienced a remarkable development in the arts, which brings new challenges for art education. New Times decided to take the pulse of academia by sitting down with Michael Carlebach and Carol Damian, chairs from the art departments at the University of Miami and…

Under blue skies, gabled and pitched roofs top bright symmetric façades, shutter windows are protected by delicate canopies, and spacious verandas and plenty of light and space render the essential building details. Careful distribution of planes and volumes are bounded by nuances of shadows and sunlight. That’s Emilio Sanchez’s “Works…

There are some things that are worth seeing, or hearing, or tasting, and you are probably better for it. Then there are those few things that cannot be missed, and you are definitely better for it. One of those is Daniel Senise’s “Recent Works” at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts. Senise,…

At a time when painting seems to be metamorphosing into myriad subcategories, few of them include direct figurative images set out of the ordinary. Christian Curiel is an exception to this contemporary rule and his exhibit at Leonard Tachmes Gallery proves it. Curiel, who usually explores clannish young male scenarios…

Havana has lived many lives. One of the first cities founded by the Spanish, it became a great port city of the New World, then suffered through the vicissitudes of colonialism and independence to become an eclectically vibrant center by early last century. Then came the upheavals of another revolution,…

Out in Westchester in the dentist’s office of Arturo Mosquera, Elizabeth Cerejido has put on a very personal show called “Absence.” In photographs and video she deals with biographic and intimate material — her own experience going through the death of her father and her mother’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. A…

I have always resisted the cliché of the summer as an idle season. In Miami we are habituated to traveler-imposed absurdity: Summer and apathy are a tradition — and a curse. This year, for a nice change, a group of young artists/curators has decided to keep us awake. They’ve manufactured…

MAM’s “Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art,” the exhibit curated by Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor that landed here from San Diego, presents works by artists from Latin America who negotiate contemporary global trends within their own local traditions. But this is not a witty or humorous label. To categorize…

Artist Cesar Trasobares is the co-curator of “That Place,” an exhibit-installation involving paintings, photographs, and multimedia culled from prominent local collectors, and some site-specific works by local artists. Like a number of shows over the past few years, the art was picked and arranged to fit with a particular space,…

The sudden cancellation of Cesar Beltrán’s “The Centennial” exhibit at Maxoly Art Cuba gallery, two weeks before its closing date, is a sad and depressing reminder of how a mix of blatant ignorance, scare tactics, and inflated claims of patriotism can crush artistic freedom in Miami. This is a loose…

Combine sinuous DNA-like patterns, a mandala chart, geodesic marks, disco glitter, third-eye cut-ups, Arabic calligraphy, and kabbalah clues and you get a pretty disparate global vision. But if it’s Gean Moreno doing the combining, it seems to make sense. His “Nannies, Narcos, Suicide Girl Six, and Makbara’s Miraculous Ice Palace…