Beyond life balance lessons from Lindsay Lohan, yachts full of caviar, and deep dives on AI, let’s not lose sight Miami Art Week is all about artistic discovery, and they’re not all at the usual suspect of art fairs. This year’s standouts include an Afrofuturist prophet correcting history, a French guy turning Hermès bags into pop art canvases, and an artist building chess pieces straight out of fairy tales. Whether you’re in the pursuit of a luxury that looks dynamic on your walls, or just want to sound sophisticated at gallery openings, these are the names to casually drop and why they matter.
Miami Art Week Introduces Es Devlin: The Architect of Wonder
Es Devlin is the person creative directors call when they want to engineer atmospheres. Beyoncé’s revolving box during the Formation Worl Tour? Devlin. The London Olympics Opening Ceremony? Devlin. Stages mimicking lucid dreams? Also Devlin. Now she’s installing Library of Us on Faena Beach—a 50-foot rotating triangular bookshelf stocked with 2,500 books she annotated herself, complete with a reflecting pool and a 70-foot table where your seat rotates as you read. It’s equal parts sculpture, ritual, and artistic wonder. Devlin is making a stadium-scale concept feel intimate, using movement, light, and language to create environments responding to the people within. Your Chase Sapphire Reserve card will get you access to her Faena conversation introducing you to how she builds her worlds.
Where to find her: Faena Art Private Talk, 4pm on December 4 | 3201 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Miami Art Week Introduces Reyna Noriega: The Joyful Revolutionary
The Miami-born Afro-Latina Reyna Noriega builds whole worlds out of saturated color and faceless figures, creating scenes where joy, rest, and self-possession are their own form of quiet resistance. Her subjects reflect women of color in moments rarely centered—leisure, softness, and interiority – without the usual trauma backstory. She’s already proven her range with covers for The New Yorker and Science Magazine, and her 2023 multimedia installation at Nautilus Sonesta showed how seamlessly she moves from illustration to immersive space. This year, her appearance in PRAZZLE’s women’s exhibition is an essential stop for anyone who wants work rooted in warmth, dignity, and everyday beauty.
Where to find her: PRAZZLE exhibition, Arlo Wynwood, 3rd Floor Gallery, 2217 NW Miami Ct, Miami, FL 33127
Miami Art Week Introduces Marcel Dzama: Chess Master
Marcel Dzama has slipped something wonderfully strange into Miami Art Week via the Jean-Georges Miami Tropic Residences sales gallery. Known for his dreamlike, politically tinged drawings and films, Dzama is presenting three steel-and-enamel sculptures—The king moves like the knight, Blue bishop #1, and Red bishop #2—bringing a chess-infused imagination into sculptural form. These chess pieces may very well have wandered out of a Grimm Brothers fable, adopting industrial materials along the way.
Dzama’s long-standing fascination with power structures, folklore, and subconscious storytelling animates each piece, making for a cinematic experience from this small installation. The works will eventually be installed permanently inside Jean-Georges’ first residential building.
Where to find it: Jean-Georges Miami Tropic Residences Sales Gallery, 3600 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, Florida 33137 | November 28–December 12
Miami Art Week Introduces Hira Majeed: Machine Dreamer
Chicago-born Hira Majeed is bringing her hybrid practice of painting, sculpture, robotics, and emotional storytelling to the Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club. Her weeklong exhibition transitions the Riviera and Riviera Terrace galleries into textured landscapes with Shibui; sculptural meditations on resilience with Meltdown of the Heart and Mind, and a gold-lit humanoid robot blurring the line between emotional intelligence and machine logic with Protect Your Heart. The centerpiece arrives noon on December 2, when Majeed will live-paint Serenity, a full-scale Cadillac F1 car sculpture crafted from clay and resin, which will remain on property through Miami Race Week 2026.
Where to find her: Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club, Live F1 painting 12pm on December 2 | 3925 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Miami Art Week Introduces Pilar Zeta: Sculptural Alchemist
The Argentinian Pilar Zeta delivers The Observer Effect to The Shelborne, an installation featuring eight monumental metallic structures coated in iridescent finishes shifting color with the sun. Across the day, the chromatic surfaces morph in response to Miami’s light, turning the beach into an evolving field of color that rewards multiple visits during different times of the day. It’s a subtle reminder that nothing, not even your view, stays fixed for long. Zeta has never been interested in conventional formats, with her work planted within the hinge between metaphysics and visual seduction, creating “portals” bridging the material and the immaterial. This is the same artist who built limestone doorways near the Pyramids of Giza and hosted meditations with Deepak Chopra inside her Hall of Visions. Expect this to be one of the most photographed sites of Art Week.
Where to find her: The Shelborne By Proper Beach, sunrise–sunset, December 2–7 | 1801 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Miami Art Week Introduces Alex Prager: Hollywood Surrealist
Alex Prager is turning The Shelborne’s pool deck into the most delightfully disorienting set piece of Miami Art Week. Her Mirage Swim Club extends the aesthetic vocabulary she’s known for—Hollywood glamour, retro unease, and film-still theatricality—into a fully staged environment where synchronized swimmers, orange-striped cabanas, and sun-drenched color palettes become part of her cinematic world-building.
Prager made her name blurring the line between performance and reality. It’s this same energy she leans into with this activation, rerouting guests from observers into extras in a live, slow-motion tableau. The collaboration with The Cultivist and Capital One adds a layer of orchestration during “Golden Hour,” when the poolside scene crystallizes into choreographed spontaneity. This is easily one of the most narrative-rich installation to explore.
Where to find her: The Shelborne By Proper Pool Deck, December 3–5 | 1801 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Miami Art Week Introduces Philippe Carteau: The Circular Couture Creator
Philippe Carteau, better known as Philip Karto, is a French artist who built his following by transforming pre-owned luxury handbags into hand-painted pop art collectibles, starting with the Louis Vuitton bag he customized for his mother. Hermès, Goyard, and Vuitton pieces are his canvases, layering them with saturated colors, street art influences, and playful motifs to give each bag an entirely new identity. He reframes how luxury objects live their second lives, capturing everyone from Miley Cyrus to Bella Hadid to Mike Tyson into his orbit. Carteau’s collaboration with MILA Miami brings that energy into a multi-level installation, complete with a limited-edition collection created exclusively for Art Week.
Where to find him: MILA Miami, All Week | 800 Lincoln Rd, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Miami Art Week Introduces Jabari Jefferson: The Afrofuturist Prophet
As a descendant of Monticello’s enslaved community, Jabari Jefferson’s work is corrective, reimagining Black historical figures through an Afrofuturist lens grounded in indigenous hieroglyphics and speculative possibility. His new series, Back to the Future, builds on the momentum of his widely praised Sacred Spaces exhibition, where CBS Sunday Morning and The Washington Post both recognized how he turns generational trauma into forward-looking mythmaking. Jefferson’s mixed-media practice fuses oil painting with soil, textiles, and recycled materials, creating excavated dense surfaces with an archaeological presence. He calls his installations “sacred spaces,” designed for reflection, vulnerability, and community dialogue. His Miami schedule includes showings at Bishop Gallery and a SCOPE panel on grounding artistic practice with Queen Afua and Yusuf Bin Ismail.
Where to find him: Bishop Gallery at The Moore + SCOPE Miami Beach, December 3–5
Miami Art Week Introduces Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun: The Washi-World Builder
Nobu Hotel Miami Beach’s collaboration with The Morikami Museum brings to Miami Art Week the ethereal papercut world of Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun, an artist whose kirie practice turns washi paper and an X-Acto knife into living myth. Moneyhun’s hand-cut works depict women morphing into water, animals, or bonsai-human hybrids, merging folklore with a modern feminist intelligence. The pieces sit somewhere between sculpture and drawing, each silhouette layered so precisely light and shadow become part of the composition. A resident curator from the Morikami will be present to provide context beyond surface-level aesthetics
Where to find her: Nobu Hotel Miami Beach, 6–8 pm on December 4 | 4525 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Miami Art Week Introduces Rashad A Muhammad: The Meditative Storyteller
Rashad A Muhammad arrives at Art Week through FREE DC, a group exhibition curated by 1223 Potomac Gallery to reclaim Washington, D.C.’s creative narrative beyond politics. Muhammad’s mixed-media practice blends figurative collage with non-narrative video art, weaving floral motifs, symbolism, and layered textures into meditations on identity, liberation, and the human relationship with nature.
His ongoing series, Finding the Light and Explorations & Studies expand collage introspection, while video works like A World Within and Infinite Healing of Nature explore interiority through slow, contemplative movement. Muhammad’s work resists quick consumption, asking you to sit with it, breathe with it, and notice the small shifts happening inside the frame. Muhammad’s emphasis on healing and transformation will be especially grounding amid the week’s sensory overload.
Where to find him: Freehand Miami Hotel, December 4–7 | 2727 Indian Creek Dr, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Miami Art Week Introduces David LaChapelle: Technicolor Eschatologist
At VISU Contemporary, Vanishing Act brings together more than 30 major works from David LaChapelle’s four-decade career, including nine new pieces with his ethos that paradise always carries the seeds of its own collapse. The centerpiece, Will the World End in Fire, Will the World End in Ice, returns to the frozen cruise ship of Spree, now bathed in apocalyptic light, as LaChapelle continues weaving environmental prophecy with modern day negligence. The new Negative Currency works treat banknotes like radiant artifacts of a declining world order, expanding his critique of value, power, and illusion. Alongside these are the spiritually charged tableaux, Annunciation, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Sorrows, tracing LaChapelle’s evolution from Warhol protégé to contemporary mythmaker.
Where to find him: VISU Contemporary Gallery, Opening Reception December 5, from November 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, | 2160 Park Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Miami Art Week Introduces Melanie Delach: The Poet of Dissolution
Melanie Delach’s debut solo exhibition Altars at Feia Gallery lands at NADA Miami with the force of a quiet revelation. Her mixed-media practice is a devotional act, where pigment, sand, and ritualized erasure form “thin places” as figures flicker between memory, shadow, and botanical rebirth. Delach builds and destroys her surfaces in cycles, unearthing her vision instead of just painting. The results are objects touched by time and grief, a prayer that moves through ambiguity, a refusal to be fixed in a metaphysical act of presence and disappearance. Her background as an educator shows in how she guides viewers into finding their own interpretations inside the work’s emotional weather.
Where to find her: NADA Miami, Feia Gallery booth, Ice Palace Studios
Miami Art Week Introduces William Nelson: The Americana Auteur
William Nelson orchestrates full-blown cinematic collisions where Hollywood legends, comic-book heroes, and mid-century Americana all show up for the same scene, whether they belong together or not. A former illustrator with a storyboard artist’s precision, Nelson stages hyper-real oil paintings as alternate-universe movie stills. Imagine Marilyn Monroe leaning against a neon-lit diner while Batman broods in the background and sci-fi icons wandering through small-town streets straight out of a Norman Rockwell fever dream. Cavalier Ebanks Galleries will present his newest “curious collisions” at Art Miami.
Where to find him: Cavalier Ebanks Galleries, Art Miami Booth AM424.
Miami Art Week Introduces Lee Pivnik: The Eco-Futurist
If you haven’t encountered Lee Pivnik yet, his Wellspring installation at The Shelborne is an ideal entry point. Part of the City of Miami Beach’s No Vacancy program and running through December 20, it’s a panoramic homage to the Everglades watershed delivering climate urgency without slipping into didacticism. Pivnik works where queer ecology meets speculative fiction, territory he masterfully steers from academic to immediate and alive. Through video, ceramics, stained glass, and a functioning aquaponic fountain, Wellspring maps Florida’s water systems while modeling real-world bioremediation. His earlier exhibition, Chimeras, a Miami New Times 2024 standout, imagined queer rebels navigating a government-flooded Miami. Pivnik makes future dystopias both haunting and hopeful, asking what art can do in a climate-crisis era while prototyping a world that might come after.
Where to find him: The Shelborne By Proper Lobby Gallery, through December 20 | 1801 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Miami Art Week Introduces Katie Stout: Feminist Furniture Fantasist
Katie Stout’s 2025 Miami Design District Annual Design Commission is a maximalist fever dream the neighborhood deserves. Under the title Gargantua’s Thumb, she’s populating the District with sculpturally functional living artworks featuring whales, mermaids, alligators, and assorted fantasy creatures.
Stout is a feminist reclaimer, turning lamps, chairs, and ceramics into subversive celebrations of decorative arts. For example, her most recognizable piece, “Girl Lamps,” challenges beauty tropes to reframe historically marginalized craft traditions with humor and excess. This Art Week’s commissioned centerpiece is an interactive carousel and canopy of suspended orbs encouraging crowd participation. It’s a Trojan horse for cultural critique, grounded in the same feminist ethos earning her a place in museums from SFMOMA to Dallas.
Where to find her: Miami Design District, December 2025–Spring 2026
Taken together, these artists map a cross-section of environmental precarity, mythmaking, speculative futures, spiritual inquiry and material reinvention that makes Miami’s first week in December a creative platform for much needed critical thinking. If one of these Miami Art Week artists makes you feel seen, unsettled, reoriented, disoriented or even hopeful – perfect. That’s what good art is supposed to do.