Five Young Artists to Watch During Miami Art Week 2019

As an overwhelming number of artists, shows, and events flood into town for this year's Miami Art Week, figuring out what to do is no easy task. Though the best-known names are sure to be the biggest draw, don’t forget to look out for up-and-coming talent to get a glimpse of where the art world is heading. Here are five young artists to keep your eye on this year and in those to come.

Morel Doucet

Known for his fantastical and sometimes whimsical ceramics combining the human form with natural imagery, Morel Doucet has quickly become a name worth watching.

The Haiti-born artist has used his work to examine race and colorism in addition to interrogating the push and pull between cultural identity and assimilation he's experienced as a Haitian immigrant. Doucet has repeatedly drawn connections between environmental destruction and the experiences of the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

Doucet will be busy during Miami Art Week, and there will be plenty of places to explore his work and influences. "Archeology of Memory: The Site and Sound of Ceramics," the exhibition he’s curating at Bakehouse Art Complex, includes ten artists who work with clay, glass, metal, and cement. The show invites the viewer to see beyond the decorative properties of these materials and to engage with the deeper meanings behind each work. Doucet’s first solo exhibition, "White Noise," is on view at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center through December 7. Finally, he’ll be included in the group show "Haiti à La Mode: Contemporary" at the Haitian Heritage Museum.

"Archeology of Memory." Through March 31, 2020, at Bakehouse Art Complex, 561 NW 32nd St., Miami; 305-576-2828; bacfl.org.
"White Noise." Through Saturday, December 7, at African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, 6161 NW 22nd Ave., Miami; 305-683-6771; ahcacmiami.org.
"Haiti à La Mode: Contemporary." Wednesday, December 4, through April 25 at Haitian Heritage Museum, 4141 NE Second Ave., Miami; 305-371-5988; haitianheritagemuseum.org. Admission is free; RSVP for the opening reception via eventbrite.com.

Maya Freelon

Maya Freelon's playful and ephemeral experimentations with dyed tissue paper ask us to question our ideas about strength, fragility, and valuableness. What began as the discovery of a stack of stained, watermarked tissue paper under a leaky pipe at her grandmother’s house in 2005 became the basis for years of artistic exploration. Using a complicated dyeing process, Freelon has created quilts and recycled sculptures from the colorful tissue and even incorporated a pottery wheel into her process. The late poet Maya Angelou, Freelon’s godmother and namesake, described the artist's work as "visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being.”

This year, Freelon will show her work at Prizm Art Fair. December 4 from 10 a.m. to noon, she’ll also conduct an interactive quilt-making workshop for Prizm ticketholders. Quilting is part of her heritage, and through the performance piece, she hopes to give participants a safe space to share stories and build community as the quilt grows. After the event, the final product will be on display for the remainder of the fair.

Prizm Art Fair. Monday, December 2, through Sunday, December 8, at the Alfred I. duPont Building, 169 E. Flagler St., Miami; 305-358-4203; prizmartfair.com.

Angel Garcia

The work of interdisciplinary Cuban-American artist Angel Garcia has spanned mediums, including painting, tattooing, wallpaper art, and video and performance pieces. Her work often explores power, identity, sexuality, and the ways people formulate their beliefs around these concepts. In her films, she has challenged the male gaze, reclaimed reductive stereotypes of Latina bodies, and questioned the heteronormativity of the narratives and labels surrounding traditional marriage. She also codirects the microresidency Overnight, which aims to challenge the professionalized structure of artists’ residencies by curating an atmosphere akin to a slumber party.

During Miami Art Week, she’ll show her short film, Psychic Dick, a 2019 commission by Fringe Projects, in the window display of a downtown electronics store. In the 12-minute film, which initially looks like a commercial, Garcia grapples with ideas of capitalism, advertising, and repetitive images used as subliminal triggers to attract customers. She uses bananas to point out the widespread phallic symbolism in American society and to critique its creep into our subconscious.

“The bananas represent an innocent and playful introduction to sexuality in a Caribbean context,” reads a statement on Fringe's website. “The film ultimately reclaims the banana's perverted image by overwhelming the viewer with repetition and farce.”

Fringe Projects Presents: Psychic Dick. Saturday, December 7, through January 18 at Metro Digital Computers, 144 E. Flagler St., Miami; 305-377-2145; angellauren.com. Admission is free. Opening reception and walking tour from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday, December 7; admission is free with RSVP via eventbrite.com.

Jamilah Sabur

Jamaican multidisciplinary artist Jamilah Sabur concerns herself with ritual and performance. Her videos deploy images of ceremony, symbolic gestures, and idolized figures as a means of exploring memory and spatial relationships. For instance, her 2012 work Playing Possums reexamined the moon landing as the performance of a ritual dance between two worlds or realms. In other work, she has used a diamond or rhombus shape as a symbol to represent Jamaica and evoke memories of her homeland (she moved to Miami at the age of 4). Sabur is an artist-in-residence at Oolite Arts, and earlier this year she presented a solo exhibition at L.A.’s Hammer Museum and participated in a group exhibit at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Sabur's work will be shown at the second-annual Faena Festival during Miami Art Week. She'll present Obra, a video installation that invokes Jamaica. Images of a former plantation and mid-20-century mosque on the island are combined with fluttering tapestries — beekeeping suits, white tunics, the Ethiopian flag — all homing in on the theme of memory and how it can spread across geography and time.

Faena Festival. Monday, December 2, through Sunday, December 8, at Faena Forum, 3300-3398 Collins Ave., Miami Beach; 305-534-8800; faenaart.org. Admission is free.

Kira Tippenhauer

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Kira Tippenhauer takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to her work as both an artist and a teacher. Her design line, Kiramade, includes handcrafted ceramics inspired by her Afro-Caribbean roots and her birthplace of Haiti and sometimes incorporates additional materials such as rope. Tippenhauer uses the slab building technique, in which smooth clay slabs are either shaped by hand or formed around a mold rather than with a pottery wheel. As a teacher, she offers beginner and intermediate-level pottery workshops at her Little Haiti studio and also works with PAMM’s program Brick x Brick, which aims to reach teens in underserved Miami-Dade communities and engage them through art.

Tippenhauer’s work is on view in Morel Doucet’s "Archeology of Memory" exhibit at the Bakehouse.

"Archeology of Memory." Through March 31, 2020, at Bakehouse Art Complex, 561 NW 32nd St., Miami; 305-576-2828; bacfl.org.