Following a lost year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Miami Art Week and Art Basel return to Miami to light-up the city and kick off the 2021 holiday season. Starting November 30th and running through the first week of December, Miami Art Week attracts millions of visitors from across the globe to Miami’s sunny beach’s and luxurious enclaves for a celebration of art, design, fashion, style and culture. Miami Art week brings together some of the world’s best artists, galleries, art collectors, designers and cultural icons for a week of art shows, installations, events and lavish parties. PROFILEmiami is bringing our readers and in-depth Insiders Guide to Miami Art Week and Art Basel with a curated list of must-attend art shows, installations and events throughout the week.

PROFILEmiami kicks off our Insiders Guide series with a look at some of the art, culture, and fashion initiatives set to debut in the Miami Design District in celebration of Miami Art Week. Miami Design District is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the world, home to a number of luxury fashion houses, art galleries, fine dining experiences, and cafés. The open-air, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, known for its many distinct and artistic façades, notably boasts a highly energy-efficient infrastructure and became the first neighborhood in the world to achieve the Gold level (LEED ND: Built v4 Gold). Miami Design District is the brainchild of Miami real estate development icon Craig Robins. The neighborhood was inspired by the worlds leading shopping districts including Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive and visitors can enjoy mature canopy-covered streets and walkways, sculptural specimen trees, and extensive rooftop gardens.

For Miami Art Week 2021 the Miami Design District will unveil its highly-anticipated annual Design Commission, a physical and virtual site-specific installation coined Tomorrow Land designed by creative studios Studio Proba and Enjoy The Weather. In addition to an array of public and site-specific installations, the Miami Design District will debut exhibitions including, but not limited to, ‘Shattered Glass’ presented by Jeffrey Deitch, the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibit, Goodman Gallery and Galerie Lelong, among others. Additionally, luxury powerhouse, Louis Vuitton will be unveiling new Objets Nomades with several other moments taking place in the Miami Design District.

As Miami Art Week kicks off make sure to make your way over to Miami Design District to check the following installations PROFILEmiami has identified as must-see for 2021:

2021 MIAMI DESIGN DISTRICT DESIGN COMMISSION: TOMORROW LAND 

The Miami Design District is pleased to unveil Tomorrow Land, a physical and virtual site-specific installation created by Studio Proba and Enjoy the Weather for the neighborhood’s Annual Design Commission 2021. Tomorrow Land features a series of playfully designed sculptures, seating, and ornamentation, created by Studio Proba in her signature, popular style. In addition to the physical components woven throughout the Miami Design District, the installation boasts an interactive, virtual game created by Enjoy the Weather. A dedicated app built around AR technology and proximity beacons which allow visitors to “collect” and digitally customize Studio Proba’s shapes and place their own custom totems throughout the neighborhood—and beyond—for other participants to discover and play with. Tomorrow Land will also enliven the entrance of Design Miami/ in Pride Park. 

Dates: November 2021 - May 2022

Location: Miami Design District as well as the entrance of Design Miami/ in Pride Park 

CRAIG ROBINS COLLECTION

The Craig Robins Collection, exhibited within the Miami Design District headquarter offices of DACRA, is a private collection of contemporary art and design. Based on the belief that art should be shared, highlights from the collection are constantly rotated and put on view within the workspaces at DACRA, the innovative development company founded by Craig Robins in 1987. The annual re-hanging of Craig Robins’ contemporary art collection highlights 45 artworks by celebrated American conceptual artist John Baldessari (1931-2020), including highlights John Baldessari Clement Greenberg 1966-1968 and John Baldessari Kissing series: Simone Palm Trees (Near), 1975, The collection also features recent acquisitions including work by Kenturah Davis, Sayre Gomez, Urs Fisher, and more. Encompassing the disciplines of design, art, and architecture, the multifaceted collection also features pieces by established favorites such as Zaha Hadid, Jean Prouvé, Richard Tuttle, and Marlene Dumas.

Dates: December 2 - December 3 | 9AM-12PM

Location: DACRA Headquarters: 3841 NE  2nd Avenue

LOUIS VUITTON OBJETS NOMADES COLLECTION

Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades Collection celebrates the Maison’s long-tradition of exceptional craftsmanship and heritage through travel-inspired objects that reflect the collaborative, contemporary visions of a diverse group of internationally-renowned designers. From a hammock to a foldable stool, an armchair to a room screen, each limited-edition object transcends the creative boundaries of design, showcasing the Maison’s profound attention to complex craftsmanship and artistic innovation. This December, Louis Vuitton will be expanding its Objets Nomades collection by transforming its Miami Design District stores into an immersive Objets Nomades installation, highlighting new pieces for 2021, including Merengue and Aguacate by the Campana Brothers, Cosmic Table by Raw Edges and a Petal Chair by Marcel Wanders. The men’s store façade will be based on the Marcel Wanders Studio Objets Nomades Diamond Screen, where Marcel reinterprets Louis Vuitton’s historic Monogram motif and the canework that once adorned LV trunks. The color and sensationalism of the pattern adapted to the new men’s store façade screen pays homage to Miami Modernist architectural style. The Women's store’s façade will be temporarily wrapped in a jubilant burst of woven colors, patterned after a new Objet Nomade by the Campana Brothers. Inside, Patricia Urquiola has curated an enveloping exhibition of the universe of Objets Nomades, an inspiring journey through the remarkable artistic perspectives of all the Objets Nomades collaborators and an exceptional survey of the Maison’s heritage and savoir-faire.

SHOES + ART BY MATTHEW CHEVALLARD 

Footwear Entrepreneur, Matthew Chevallard, is debuting an innovative modern-retail experience in the Miami Design District, coined: Shoes + Art. Merging Chevallard’s passion for footwear with his passion for art collecting, this multifaceted speakeasy retail concept, invites the public into a forward thinking and design-driven oasis in the middle of the most popular neighborhood in Miami. Chevallard’s new Avant Garde boutique, is situated in front of luxury houses Fendi and Louboutin, and features his two Italian hand-made footwear brands, Blu Scarpa and Concetto Limone all within Chevallard’s art gallery, THE OFFICE. The unique boutique concept will open to the public in time for Miami Art Basel 2021, on November 28th, 2021, with a solo exhibition by the coveted Mexican American artist, Eduardo Sarabia. The exhibition will feature a full range of works from Eduardo’s practice. For the first time, Eduardo will be displaying 10 limited edition lithographs, with several of them hand embellished by Eduardo Sarabia himself. Tying in the brands, Eduardo will be painting a set of Blu Scarpa products, and will be displaying a large selection of unique hand-painted ceramic plates. The remainder of the works will be revealed during the opening.

Dates:  November 28 - ongoing

Location: 160 NE 40th Street; 2nd floor of OTL

JEFFREY DEITCH PRESENTS: ‘SHATTERED GLASS’ 

Shattered Glass, the acclaimed exhibition of new art by emerging artists of color, which was shown at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles last spring, will be presented in an expanded version in the Moore Building in the Miami Design District. The Los Angeles version of Shattered Glass, curated by Melahn Frierson and A.J. Girard, was more than an exhibition, it was a phenomenon, attracting 1,000 visitors per day in its final weeks on showcase. Shattered Glass connected with a diverse art audience, giving visitors a rare opportunity to see art that reflected their own life experience. The expanded Miami version of Shattered Glass will include fifteen new artists. The painting, sculpture, and photographic works in the exhibition are all figurative. The subject matter is often the artists’ family and friends. Their primary subject is their own life and their community. The participating artists are all strongly socially engaged; many of whom incorporate powerful social messages into their work. The exhibition represents a remarkable new generation that connects with a new art audience. Jeffrey Deitch has been presenting exhibitions and public art projects in the Miami Design District since 2002.

Dates: November 29 - December 5

Location: Miami Design District The Moore Building

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce its return to the Miami Design District with a winter exhibition space opening on Wednesday, November 24th. The first exhibition will be a group show featuring early works by Eddie Martinez alongside works by seven outsider, self-taught and American art brut artists that Martinez collects or is otherwise inspired by: Hawkins Bolden(1914-2005), Freddie Brice (1920-1998), David Butler (1898-1997), Willie Jinks (1921-2012), Ike Morgan (b. 1958), Mary T Smith (1904-1995) and Billy White (b. 1962). Taken together, the exhibition emphasizes a set of shared formal mannerisms between the artists: flatness rather than a sense of perspective, a graphic outline rather than finely wrought draughtsmanship.  The work contains a sense of speed, immediacy and improvisation.  Repeated figures assume a symbolic, spiritual or totemic quality.   

Dates: November 29 - December 4 from noon to 8pm, Sunday, December 5 from noon to 6 pm - Winter Exhibition

Location: 151 NE 41st Street, Suite 125

GOODMAN GALLERY

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new and existing bronze sculptures from William Kentridge's ongoing series of bronze glyphs, alongside a drawing from his most recent animated film, City Deep. Kentridge’s glyphs are a visual dictionary of sorts made up of a series of sculptures that form a vocabulary of symbols, representing a collection of everyday objects, suggested words, or icons that are ubiquitous in the artist's practice. The glyphs started as ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page from a dictionary. The drawings were transformed into bronzes, to embody the weight and character their shapes on paper suggested.

In their smaller formation, the glyphs can be arranged in order to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning. An example of this can be found in Drawing for City Deep (A Fault to be Discovered Later). City Deep is Kentridge's most recent film from his Drawings for Projection series. The film, grounded within Kentridge’s home city of Johannesburg, can be viewed as a counterpoint to the 1990 film, Mine, which depicts images of the deep-level mining industry. City Deep extends this depiction to the informal, surface-level “zama zama” miners who illegally work decommissioned mines on the edges of the formal mining economy.

Dates: November 24, 2021 - End of January 2022

Location: 151 NE 41st Street, Suite 123

GALERIE LELONG

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is launching a new temporary exhibition space at Paradise Plaza in the Miami Design District from November 28, 2021 to February 28, 2022. The opening will coincide with Miami Art Week and Art Basel: Miami Beach 2021, where the gallery has participated since its first edition in 2002. Galerie Lelong & Co. looks forward to furthering a deeper conversation with the vibrant and growing community in Miami by presenting pieces of historical and timely content from artists in the program, showing works that encompass a diverse range of media including painting, work on paper, sculpture, and photography.

Since 1991, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, has championed a diverse roster of contemporary artists from throughout the world. Led by Mary Sabbatino, Vice President and Partner, the gallery has pioneered the community both in presenting a balanced roster of male and female artists, and artists from the Global South. The gallery’s programming is noted for its political acuity and museum-quality exhibitions, as well as its work with artists to help develop large-scale public art commissions beyond the gallery’s walls. In tandem with the gallery’s artists who present work that examine the human condition and collective consciousness, Galerie Lelong demonstrates its commitment to social justice and good citizenship through charitable initiatives and collaborations. Galerie Lelong is a member of the Art Dealers’ Association of America, the most esteemed organization of art galleries in the United States.

Dates: November 28 - February 28, 2022

Location: 151 Northeast 41st Street, Suite 121

UNCOOL ARTISTS

An independent art exhibition that speaks to our time by interrogating wholeness, remoteness, isolation, and the use of technology to maintain human connection; while reviving the Mail Art network that was extremely important during the 60s and 70s in Latin America.

Dates: November 30 - December 5 | 10:00 am - 4:00 pm

Location: 3930 NE 2nd Ave Suite 202

JUAN CARLOS MALDONADO ART COLLECTION: THE POETICS OF EXACTNESS

Beyond minimal art –the historic movement– The Poetics of Exactness exhibit aims to explore the manifestations of a typically modern expressive desire that still remains present in the works of many contemporary artists: how can that order be accomplished –that minimum gesture whose materialization can cause a maximum effect in the psyche of its beholders? Drawing the boundary that separates an everyday object (one manufactured by industry, for example) from that special object that, for the lack of a more accurate descriptor, we still call a 'work of art'. Establishing this trait that separates a work of art from other objects of the world is, therefore, the job of many contemporary artists who, like many of their modern predecessors, produce what we could call a calculated, precise aesthetic –the poetics of exactness.

Dates: November 30 - December 5 | 10am - 6pm 

Location: 3841 NE 2nd Avenue,  Suite 201

CLIMAX BY JEAN THIERRY BESINS

Designed by Jean Thierry Besins, CLIMAX is a 13-foot sculpture made of 1 ton of recycled stainless steel. The radiator inspires viewers to stop shielding themselves from the existential threat of death when facing climate change. CLIMAX is the first version of a 100-foot tall heater that Jean Thierry Besins plans to install in Iceland in September 2024. The sculpture is situated in Jungle Plaza and will be on view through February 2022. 

Dates: November 2021 - February 2022

Location: Miami Design District Jungle Plaza 

ABOUT MIAMI DESIGN DISTRICT

The Miami Design District is a one-of-a-kind neighborhood that combines luxury shopping, galleries, museums, design stores, restaurants and major art and design installations all within an architecturally significant context. The Miami Design District is owned and operated by Miami Design District Associates, a partnership between Dacra, founded and owned by visionary entrepreneur Craig Robins, and L Catterton Real Estate, a global real estate development and investment fund, specializing in creating luxury shopping destinations. As Miami becomes increasingly known for its own rich culture, the growth of the Miami Design District further reflects how the city is deserving of its place on the global stage. For more information, visit http://www.miamidesigndistrict.net / Facebook: MiamiDesignDistrict / Instagram: @miamidesigndistrict / Twitter: @designdistrict