At MOCA North Miami, a Battle Over Race

No one better exemplifies the chaos at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) than local artist Pablo Cano. The conceptual puppeteer, who has for 16 years staged wildly popular marionette shows for the museum, received a call from Alex Gartenfeld, the museum’s current interim director. He told Cano this…

You Must Be Trippin’

Opium’s mind-bending effects have led some scholars to connect the poppy with the legendary soma plant, widely mentioned in the ancient texts of the Rig-Veda. For the British East India Company, the drug was also a vast source of wealth and an ongoing cause of conflict between the English imperialists…

Ada Balcacer: One-Armed Genius at PAMM

Ada Balcacer’s decades-long journey to Pérez Art Museum Miami has been fraught with challenges and inspired by the twisted social, political, and economic currents that have shaped Caribbean history. On a recent weekday at PAMM, the youthful-looking and energetic 83-year-old, dressed in a black pantsuit and a white shirt, trots…

He’s A Magic Man

Michael Jones McKean is the rare talent who makes the impossible seem tangible. The artist, who was born in Micronesia, is best known for his sprawling installations that stretch the limits of an object and its representation. For instance, he once used towering chutes of water to manifest a rainbow…

Art is Life

Our environment, life, and art take on a symbiotic relationship in the hands of Ernesto Kunde, who wants you to experience his work as a mirror of nature. The Brazilian-born painter, who has made the 305 and its lush tropical surroundings his conceptual playground, typically employs a mixed bag of…

Art Mirrors Life in Wangechi Mutu’s MOCA Show

On a recent weekday morning, Wangechi Mutu balances precariously atop a towering scissor ladder while affixing handfuls of flaxen sheep’s wool to a colossal mural collage. As the clack-clack-clack of her staple gun echoes like a tinny drumbeat near the entrance of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami,…

SOS Art

Venezuela is rich in oil, but President Nicol’s Maduro and his ham-fisted socialist government are destitute. They’ve got nothing to solve the economic and social problems that have sharply divided the nation, and the issue has mounted to political bedlam, soaring inflation, and widespread unrest. Since mid-February, dozens of antigovernment…

Art Mirrors Life in Wangechi Mutu’s MOCA Show

On a recent weekday morning, Wangechi Mutu balances precariously atop a towering scissor ladder while affixing handfuls of flaxen sheep’s wool to a colossal mural collage. As the clack-clack-clack of her staple gun echoes like a tinny drumbeat near the entrance of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami,…

Glam, Bam, Thank You Ma’am

If those toxic chemicals closing local parks, invasive species of slithering reptiles swallowing the Everglades, or fears of a nuclear meltdown at Turkey Point are giving you the blues, stop fretting. The folks at the Miami Light Project (MLP) have the perfect cure. Friday at 8 p.m., MLP will present…

Wynwood Art Walk Guide: April’s Best Gallery Shows

Since 2005 David Castillo has ruled the roost at his eponymous Wynwood gallery steering it to the forefront of Miami’s booming art scene. But starting next fall, Castillo will relocate his stable of local and national talent to South Beach, marking a notable changing of the guard as more and…

O, Miami Aims to Inspire Verse, From Symphonies to Barstools

Travel across the Magic City from Little Havana to Lemon City, Hialeah to Homestead, or South Beach to Surfside and you’ll be serenaded by a sonorous canto of contrasting voices. For interdisciplinary artists Juana Meneses and Leila Leder Kremer, that multicultural heart is the inspiration for “Home: Beyond Geography,” their…

O, Miami Aims to Inspire Verse, From Symphonies to Barstools

Travel across the Magic City from Little Havana to Lemon City, Hialeah to Homestead, or South Beach to Surfside and you’ll be serenaded by a sonorous canto of contrasting voices. For interdisciplinary artists Juana Meneses and Leila Leder Kremer, that multicultural heart is the inspiration for “Home: Beyond Geography,” their…

All Together Now

Critics often bristle when they encounter identity-based museum shows in our increasingly global society. Meanwhile, artists regularly feel slighted by the ugly veneer of tokenism when they’re invited to group shows with ethnic themes that focus on so-called African-American art, Asian art, or Latino art, placing those artists outside the…

Antonia Wright Leaves Spinello Buzzing

Antonia Wright shows no fear when it comes to her art. In videos on display in her new show at Spinello Projects, “You Make Me Sick: I Love You,” she practices tai chi while covered in a swarm of 15,000 honey bees, smashes through panes of glass in the nude…

Antonia Wright Leaves Spinello Buzzing

Antonia Wright shows no fear when it comes to her art. In videos on display in her new show at Spinello Projects, “You Make Me Sick: I Love You,” she practices tai chi while covered in a swarm of 15,000 honey bees, smashes through panes of glass in the nude…

Edouard Duval-Carrié Goes Local at PAMM

Haitian-American artist Edouard Duval-Carrié has a message for Maximo Caminero, the local painter who deliberately shattered a million-dollar Chinese vase last month to protest the new Pérez Art Museum Miami’s “lack of support for South Florida talent.” Paris, where Duval-Carrié once lived and worked, is a much tougher town. “If…