At first glance, the ICA Miami’s sunny, second-floor galleries offer some jarringly eclectic views: Unpainted found wood is paired with monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs butt up against unvarnished planks with industrial hinges. These are all the work of one artist, Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whose recent exhibitions have worked around her wide stylistic variance by focusing on a single period in her life, as in the memorable 2018 wood-focused show “Against the Grain” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This first comprehensive retrospective boldly links disparate styles and techniques across five decades.

Thompson’s identities were as complex as her oeuvre, and this exhibition, titled “Frequencies,” acknowledges her artistic evolution as she pursued education and audiences while moving back and forth between the United States and Germany. The eclecticism that risks being jarring turns out to be the show’s strength: It extends Thompson the courtesy to be complex, a courtesy not often afforded artists from marginalized groups. Indeed, though exhibition didactics address Thompson’s life as a queer Black woman, it is her artwork that drives the narrative, not her identities.

Across 49 pieces sourced from the artist’s estate in Atlanta and Galerie Lelong & Co.—the first gallery ever to represent her, starting 14 years after her death—the show expands her visibility following the 2017 “Magnetic Fields” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., that reevaluated several overlooked Black abstractionists.

“Frequencies” features five groupings that balance a chronological progression with formal relations. The earliest works are a pair of 1959 etchings Thompson made in Germany as the first Black female student at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 1963. The etchings avoid racializing their subjects, opting for fleshy forms, delicate eyelashes, and oversize hair, with stockings and high heels underlining the figures’ femininity. These are the only fully representational images in the show, highlighting Thompson’s strong proclivity for abstraction that grew in tandem with her interests in space, science, and spirituality.

Her formal affinities with the German Expressionists are evident, presumably inspired by her instructors and social circles from Hamburg; the didactics mention Emil Schumacher, Paul Wunderlich, and Horst Janssen in particular. The curator also points out that Thompson met Louise Nevelson in New York, ostensibly inspiring some of Thompson’s wood assemblages created from found materials in the 1960s and ’70s, when she resided in rural West Germany and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She steered clear of the US due to the tangible racism she faced there as a Black artist: One gallerist even suggested she find a white artist to front for her if she sought an audience and commercial success. Thompson’s expatriate period is largely represented in “Frequencies” by way of these sumptuous wood constructions in two and three dimensions, notably, the humble Stele (ca. 1963) with its stacked squares sporadically punctuated with orange, blue, and red. Another standout is the graceful Wooden Picture (ca. 1972) whose slats transition from vertical to chevron to reveal an inner skin of purple.

When Thompson moved back to the US in 1974 for an NEA-funded artist residency with the city of Tampa, she declared “America has changed. I am ready now for America and I am eager to see if America is really ready for me,” going on to describe her birth country as an on-again, off-again lover. Her “Window” series from 1977 is the first body of work she created after repatriating. Bold stripes and stacked blocks offer a view through parted curtains and raised blinds of the American landscape—physical and social—that Thompson was giving a second chance. The artist’s abstraction matured further in her intaglio print series “Death and Orgasm” (originally made in 1978, shown here as a 1991 edition reprinted with master printer Robert Blackburn). The works’ individual titles make gripping references to spiritual practices, mythical sites, and heavenly journeys: Ascension, Mandala, Montsolva, Mulbris I, Variation of Mulbris I, and Saturnalia. Representing experiences just beyond the visible world, these amorphous forms undulate and climb, almost composing a face or a countryside or a celestial body. Mulbris I especially is gorgeously composed: The top half of the image is free of ink, its tonality conveyed instead by a pillowy embossed form.

By the 1980s, Thompson was preoccupied with new research on Einstein and quantum physics during short teaching stints in Paris before relocating permanently to Atlanta. In Georgia, she taught at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Atlanta College of Art, and Atlanta University. Only a quartet of watercolors represents this period: While three are untitled, Pleiades III signals Thompson’s shift to exploring the universal—whether at the macro level of galaxies, or the micro level of molecules and quarks.

The final two galleries feature a suite of outsize paintings for which the artist is most well-known. In the larger gallery, two “String Theory” pieces evoke the staccato brushstrokes of Alma Thomas with compositions that are far more engaging than those in Thompson’s relatively subdued “Heliocentric” series from 1993. The second gallery features the show’s standout installation, Music of the Spheres (1996), which permits the viewer to stand at the center of Thompson’s universe. These impactful tableaux representing Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury are paired with the artist’s sonic vision for the planets, with sound emanating from speakers behind each painting, giving the impression of music pouring from each celestial body. Inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings, Thompson composed a soundscape for each painting, incredibly synthesizing early music software with musical instruments and even sounds from children’s toys. This is but a glimpse into her ability to work across media: She also published at least one children’s book and played in a blues band with her partner in Atlanta.

As Thompson’s first major retrospective, “Frequencies” succeeds in loosely threading together the abstraction in her distinct shifts across the decades, letting an expansive body of work feel complex and cohesive at the same time. While most of the larger paintings—specifically the “Heliocentric” series—are not particularly interesting individually for their simple compositions, the overwhelming scale and color repeated across the final two galleries are nevertheless compelling for the universe they create together. But Thompson’s universe was bigger than the show acknowledges: Though wall labels note her cosmopolitan life spent between Germany and the US, they neglect her time in Africa and the Middle East. The verticality and thin-limbed bodies in her “Vespers” series show clear references to West African popular sculpture, and key moments of Thompson’s life—like her romantic and professional relationship with Audre Lorde—trace back to her 1977 participation in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Should the ICA find future venues or develop a publication from the exhibition (which this critic would fully support), shoring up some of these biographic touchpoints would more honestly situate the particular and the personal notes of Thompson’s reach, as we reconsider the universal in our narratives of mid- to late 20th-century abstraction.

For the past five years, Lexus and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami have partnered for one of the showiest offerings during Art Basel: a vehicle that looks like either a car or an art installation, depending on the vantage point. This year’s, by solar designer Marjan van Aubel, is 8 Minutes and 20 Seconds, a sculptural interpretation of the Lexus Future Zero-emission Catalyst (LF-ZC) concept car.

Titled after the length of time it takes for sunlight to reach the earth, 8 Minutes and 20 Seconds employs solar cells known as Organic Photovoltaics arranged to form a version of the LF-ZC car. As a viewer moves around it, the sculpture appears to change, making it look as though the car is in motion.

The installation also plays an ambient melody, incorporating warm string instruments, soft piano notes, and subtle effects, and occasionally integrating sounds of the car’s interior materials at work.

Van Aubel spoke with ARTnews about the installation, how art and design can have an environmental impact, and the process behind her installation.

ARTnews: Tell me about the origins of this project.

Marjan van Aubel: It started because I served as mentor for winners of the Lexus Design Award winners last year. I helped them turn their concepts, their developed product. I think I was on Lexus’s radar after that, and then they invited me to do the installation at ICA.

What’s the relationship between the concept vehicle and the installation in the garden?

The installation is based on the new Lexus concept car, the Lexus LF-ZC. It hadn’t been released when we started working on it. The designers showed me how they developed the car, and we began working on the installation’s shape. Really, the two were developed simultaneously, before the car was released. I was very interested in the shape of the car and how it affects the future of automotive mobility.

What parts of the car inspired aspects of the installation?

When you’re inside the car, it’s very spacious, and the designers added lighting elements that activate during the evening. It really feels like the car has its own environment. That’s what I wanted to capture. The installation was created to look almost like a ghost car. From the side, the only discernible feature is the four wheels because the OPVs, the third-generation solar cells, can be transparent but [they’re] also very colorful and so thin. But when you look at it head-on, through the OPVs, the image of a car appears. There are also motion sensors that engage when someone approaches the installation, so it’s reacting to its environment the same way a driver would.

What would you like people to take away from their experience interacting with the work?

The best outcome would be for people to realize that solar energy can be beautiful. It’s not just these ugly panels that you see on the roof of a house. Those aren’t going to change the world. But there have been so many advances in solar technology that aren’t discussed. It’s more affordable than it’s ever been. That’s why we need the power of design.

Things are easy to accept and incorporate into daily life when they’re beautiful. Through design we can literally change the mentality and stigma surrounding solar cells about the future and be helpful, hopefully. Really, I feel my mission is to bring sustainability to a bigger audience, and for me, Art Basel and ICA Miami is a great platform because people are open to being inspired when they are surrounded by this much art.

One striking thing about this past year’s Super Bowl were the commercials—specifically, the ads for electric vehicles. Since then, there’s been an onslaught of news about the coming fleet of green energy cars. Seldom thought about, however, is the ways in which the design of those cars, termed EVs for short, has come about.

In an interesting collaboration with Lexus, and the ICA Miami, architect Suchi Reddy created an installation that attempts to map out the design principles that guided the form of the new Lexus Electrified Sport.

The result, installed in the ICA Miami’s courtyard, is a large sculpture, titled Shaped By Air. Green curving panels represent an abstracted tropical forest; a weaving, silver form slips in and out of it. It’s obviously a car, but it could also double as an abstract sculpture.

In a panel at the ICA, Reddy referred to her desire to represent the vehicle as being less solid and more essentially transient. She continuously experimented in her studio to get to this effect.

“Light and shadow is always in the back of my head,” Reddy said. “At the fabrication shop, I would take the metal forms I was working with, and play with different light intensity, throw their shadows up again the wall.”

Another part of the process was going to the studio where the Lexus Electrified Sport was designed, along with other Lexus models.

“It was like a secret lab. It was such an honor to see the concept cars, their process,” Reddy said. At the design studio, Alex Shen explained that their guiding design principle was to try to make a car shaped by air, totally in tune with aerodynamics.

When her design was completed, it came time to build. The sculpture was constructed using metal that was bent and shaped around the wooden forms that she originally fabricated. Beaten into shape using a double-sided mallet, with copper on one end for shaping, leather on the other for finishing, the sculpture slowly came to life.

Reddy was particularly attracted to this process because she felt it gave the sculpture a very handmade touch. In a bid to further respond to the “shaped by air” motto, the sculpture produces a vapor that gently coats the sculpture in a hazy mist.

Now that the work is out in the world, this is only the beginning of the sculpture’s life, Reddy noted.

“This sculpture will live for couple of weeks in Miami,” Reddy said. “But the thing we love about the fact that it’s fairly portable, so we can take it around the world. I’m so excited to see what it can inspire.”

These days, Nina Chanel Abney is everywhere. Whether she’s designing site specific works for Lincoln Center in New York or cooking up NFTs for the metaverse, Abney is working nonstop to bring her arresting works around the country and beyond.

Set to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami is presenting a new suite of works by Abney in a show titled “Big Butch Energy.” Meanwhile, it was just earlier in November that she opened a new show at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

“She’s somebody who just has a million ideas and a million issues she wants to tackle,” Alex Gartenfeld, the artistic director of the ICA Miami, told ARTnews. In the case of “Big Butch Energy,” the issue Abney was tackling involved a common misconception about her work: audiences kept confusing Abney’s female figures for males.

Gartenfeld said, “It led her into an inquiry of her own work: what attributes signified a masculine of center, female-identified person?”

As Abney was considering the nuances of representation, she had also been rewatching films like National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Porky’s (1981). Both comedies revel in the sex-obsessed culture that was associated with young men in America at the time. With these movies’ depictions of Greek life on college campuses in mind, she decided to make a new series of work illustrating a frat house full of butch Black ladies.

“Big Butch Energy” includes two paintings and a handful of large-scale collage works. Utilizing powder pink and baby blue, Abney depicts figures who attend parties, wear collegiate sweaters, and even hold babies, as in Mama Gotta Have A Life Too (2020). There are a wide range of references used, from archival photos of HBCUs and stills from Porky’s to Baroque still lifes.

“Abney has this incredibly wide palette she draws from, and that’s always exciting and thrilling to see,” said Gartenfeld.

This isn’t the first time Abney’s work has imaged utopian queer spaces. In a 2020 solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Abney depicted scenes of queer Black and Brown people enjoying themselves in nature, breast feeding, biking, canoeing, and flirting outside a cabin in the woods.

Unlike that exhibition, however, “Big Butch Energy” is composed mostly of collages. Abney’s work has often taken inspiration from graphic arts and graffiti, and she has often said that her earliest interest in art came from her love of cartoons. While this edge to her work makes her paintings quite accessible, there’s also another influence at work here.

For example, in her work Because I Am Somebody, Abney depicts two adaptations of a very famous graphic work, a protest poster that reads “I am a man.” The poster was originally designed for the Memphis sanitation workers strike of 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. was photographed with the sign in the protests in which he had participated. In Because I am Somebody, the poster is represented, but the word “man” is clipped off.

“In that work, Abney is opening up the meaning of that message,” said Gartenfeld. “But she’s also specifically referencing the tradition of posters and printmaking in political and aesthetic protest.”

In this way, the graphic arts are folded into her work as a piece of art history that often isn’t considered art history at all.

Yuga Labs, the parent company of the NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, announced Tuesday that it will be donating a CryptoPunk to the ICA Miami as part of its new initiative, the Punks Legacy Project.

CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 procedurally generated “punks” in a pixelated style, were initially created by software engineers at Larva Labs in 2017 (Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks collection in March of this year). CryptoPunks are considered a key precursor to the tidal wave of “profile pic” NFTs that exploded onto the market in 2021.

“This is really exciting for us,” Alex Gartenfeld, the founding director of the ICA Miami, told ARTnews. “We got involved in this space because our mission is to reflect upon the most important conversations that are happening today. And over the last couple of years, you can’t have a conversation about contemporary or visual art without talking about technology, and specifically NFTs.”

Gartenfeld said that the ICA Miami and Yuga Labs have a strong working relationship, so when Noah Davis, (who left Christie’s to head the CryptoPunks division) mentioned that Yuga Labs would be initiating the Punks Legacy Project, which aims to donate CryptoPunks to museums, it was natural that the ICA Miami would help kick off the program.

Yuga Labs donated CryptoPunk #305 to the ICA Miami, in a wink to Miami’s nickname “the 305” a reference to the city’s original area code. The punk is blonde, female, sporting bleach blonde hair, purple lipstick, and VR goggles. This will be the second Punk in the ICA Miami’s collection, which is the only major museum to hold an NFT from the collection. However, Yuga Labs said it is hoping to change that with their Punks Legacy Project.

“Yuga believes that CryptoPunks deserve to be on the walls of contemporary art and design institutions worldwide,” Davis said in a statement. “Our team will oversee the donation and installation of several CryptoPunks to leading contemporary art museums around the globe, providing these museums with resources regarding security, NFT display best practices, and Web3 education.”

Thus far, other participating museums have not been confirmed.

CryptoPunk #305 will be officially unveiled at the ICA Miami during a ceremony on December 2nd during Art Basel Miami Beach. Though the ICA Miami has another Punk in its collection, it is not yet on display. Museums, collectors, and gallerists have struggled with how best to physically present digital NFTs, but during the unveiling, Yuga Labs’ efforts to ameliorate the issue — by developing installation-quality display technology — will be on view.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

NEW DIRECTORS HAVE BEEN GETTING HIRED AT MAJOR ART MUSEUMS in the United States at a rapid pace recently. The latest: Ngaire Blankenberg has been tapped to lead the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Blankenberg, a veteran museum consultant, takes the place of Gus Casely-Hayford, who was picked for the job in 2017 and was named the inaugural director of the V&A East in London in 2019. Blankenberg, who was principal consultant from 2008 to 2016 at Lord Cultural Resources (an adviser to arts and cultural institutions), said in a statement, “Museums are institutions that carry a lot of systemic baggage from their colonial origins, but they are vital public spaces to reconsider how we connect and contend with one another and the planet, and where we can redefine, heal, and reconcile.”

THE ART MUSEUMS JUST KEEP COMING IN SOUTH KOREA. They have been opening at a rapid pace over the past decade, and now another is on the way. The nation’s culture ministry said today that it intends to build one for the more than 23,000 works donated to the state earlier this year by the family of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, the Korea Herald reports. Authorities have identified two possible sites in Seoul, in a blow to politicians throughout the country who had been lobbying to host the museum, a likely tourist draw. A database of the works will be unveiled in 2023.

The Digest

A legal complaint has been filed by the Association Henri Pézerat environmental group and Paris families, alleging that officials did not do enough to protect people from lead pollution when Notre-Dame burned in 2019. [AFP/France 24]

The Smithsonian’s Archives for American Art has acquired the archives of land artist Nancy Holt, which includes more than 50,000 items, including plans for unbuilt pieces. The Holt-Smithson Foundation, which will maintain joint ownership of the materials, hopes to realize those works. [The Art Newspaper]

Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology said that it is working to repatriate a tomahawk that once belonged to the Native American civil rights leader Chief Standing Bear to the Ponca Tribe in Nebraska and Oklahoma. [Associated Press]

Did the art historian Curt Glaser sell his art collection under duress, after being fired in 1933 as director of the Berlin State Art Library because he was Jewish? Various governments and institutions have provided different answers, highlighting the sometimes-diverging criteria that are used around the world to evaluate art sold in Nazi Germany. [The New York Times]

In Romania, Ambulance for Monuments workers “race around the Balkan country, giving critical care to as many historical buildings as possible that are in an advanced state of decay before it’s too late,” Stephen McGrath reports. Founded by architect Eugen Vaida in 2016, it has so far worked on more than 50 structures. [Associated Press]

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami has acquired CryptoPunk 5293 (2017)—one of 10,000 digital portraits made by Larva Labs—and will present it this summer. It was a donation from Eduardo Burillo, an ICA trustee. [Press Release/ArtDaily]

Looking a bit like a CryptoPunk, a blue-haired Damien Hirst unveiled his new “Cherry Blossom” paintings at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and whatever anyone thinks of the ebullient, thickly painted works, he said that one person is likely to be happy with them: his mother. Hirst told the Guardian, “When I was making the animals in formaldehyde, she said, ‘Oh, there’s enough horror in the world, can’t you do paintings of flowers?’ And I think, my God, it’s taken me until I’m 55 before I can please her.” [The Guardian]

The Kicker

AN AVANT-GARDE TREASURE HUNT IS UNDERWAY in Orkney, Scotland. The musician Erland Cooper has buried the only copy of his latest album (a tape reel) in the area, which inspired the work. Calling the project “kind of a collaboration with the landscape” in a BBC News interview , Cooper said he will release the record once it is discovered (or in three years) just as it is, decomposition and all. To dissuade people from disturbing the natural environment and archaeological sites, he said that he has marked the burial spot with a smooth rock carved by the artist Jo Sweeting. “Only if you find this stone, should you dig at all,” he said. [BBC News]

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami has named Damián Ortega as the first winner of its new annual Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, part of a $500,000 gift from the Miami-based Ezratti family. The award will go toward the fabrication of a new commission to be installed in the ICA’s Sculpture Garden and includes $15,000.

Ortega is best known for large-scale sculptural installations often made up of numerous component parts that are hung from the ceiling and, when seen from a distance, appear to defy gravity.

“We see this as a wonderful place to honor the achievement of an artist who has innovated with sculpture throughout their career,” ICA Miami artistic director Alex Gartenfeld told ARTnews. “Damián has been an artist who has consistently reinvented the form of sculpture, considered the role of the work in public, and experimented with materials and forms, perhaps like no one else of his generation.”

The ICA Miami, which was founded in 2014, has presented new major sculptural work by Thomas Bayrle, Abigail DeVille, Charles Gaines, and Chris Ofili since 2016, and commissioned pieces for its Sculpture Garden by Allora & Calzadilla, Pedro Reyes, and Mark Handforth. The new prize underwritten by Miami real-estate developer Itchko Ezratti and his family will be an extension of that programming, Gartenfeld said.

“We greatly admire ICA Miami’s dedication to commissioning and showcasing large-scale, ambitious sculpture by the most significant contemporary artists from around the world,” Ezratti, who is a trustee of the museum, said in a statement.

Ortega will install a new work, Replicant Stone, on the ICA grounds in November. The piece will make use of Pyrite stone, commonly known as fool’s gold, and will look at the relationship between nature and geometry.

“Damián has so consistently worked through the legacy of modernism, and specifically, the traditional of geometric abstraction in Latin America and reinvented and renewed it,” Gartenfeld said. “He’s recently become preoccupied by the form of Pyrite as a symbol that is both self-generating and intrinsically bound to the form of the square, which was the preoccupation of 20th-century modernists.”

Ellen Salpeter is leaving her post as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami after joining the institution in late 2015 and leading it into its first home, which opened in the city’s Design District last December. She had taken the directorship after working as deputy director of external affairs for the Jewish Museum in New York.

In a statement, Salpeter said, “With the new building launched, the museum’s program for the coming seasons set, and the institution on stable financial footing, the timing is right for me to pursue new projects.”

In concert with news of her departure, which will occur in June, the museum announced a change in its leadership structure through which deputy director and chief curator Alex Gartenfeld will now work as artistic director and associate director Tommy Ralph Pace will now be deputy director. Citing their shared status as members of ICA’s founding leadership team, the museum’s announcement said, “Gartenfeld has spearheaded the museum’s curatorial voice in particular and Pace has been responsible for special initiatives, daily operations, and public affairs.”

This past September, Hurricane Irma thrashed Miami with 100-mile-per-hour winds, biblical floods, and an accumulation of otherworldly force that leveled buildings far and wide. But the not-yet-opened Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami—the Magic City’s newest contemporary art hub and the first one ever built in the city proper—was spared.

“We were very blessed,” said Ellen Salpeter, the institute’s director. Like most of Miami’s more established arts institutions, the new glass-paneled citadel in the Design District proved fortunate in the face of a historic storm. In the case of the ICA, the stroke of luck allowed for the debut of a momentous addition to the city’s ascendant art scene.

The ICA’s inaugural offerings greet a visitor on the ground floor with Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s installation The Soup Course at the She-She Café (1982), a large work that evokes a cracked restaurant scene, re-created to scale, with a doll’s head floating ominously above. It was a gift from ICA board chair Irma Braman and her husband, Norman, who have also loaned a series of pictures by Robert Gober as well as one of his iconic drain works from 1993–94—all of which have rarely been exhibited. Elsewhere, the museum is showing commissioned large-scale paintings by Chris Ofili and an exhibition, “The Everywhere Studio,” that examines the societal implications of the act of art making.

Before the public could see the completed ICA in December, Miami engaged in one of its favorite pastimes: throwing parties in museums. One night in October, local collectors including Jorge Pérez, Martin Margulies, and Debra Scholl strolled through an accompanying sculpture garden and into the new building’s main atrium to attend a Cartier-sponsored gala in honor of the Bramans and Gober. Collectors Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz were in London for the Frieze art fair, but they bought a table anyway, which Salpeter filled with local artists.

Real estate developer Craig Robins was on hand to witness the latest addition to the neighborhood he helped envision and build from scratch. For the past three years, the ICA has operated out of temporary lodgings in the nearby Moore Building, which Robins owns.

“Going to the gala, honoring Irma and Norman, it was just amazing,” Robins said after the night was over. “Being in the space and realizing the impact it’s going to have on the Design District—and Miami—was mind-blowing.”

Alongside the ICA’s chief curator, Alex Gartenfeld, Salpeter is tasked with establishing not just an important addition to Miami’s cultural landscape but also a globally significant institution that can expect a spotlight on its programming once a year when the world’s foremost art collectors, curators, and dealers come to town for December’s Art Basel Miami Beach. From the Miami Beach Convention Center that houses the fair, it’s a 15-minute drive across a causeway to the ICA. But the origin story behind the institution is a four-year saga that traces back in a different direction, a half hour north on I-95, through Little Haiti, to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. In 2013 the publicly funded MOCA—then the only contemporary art museum in Greater Miami, a global destination populated by 6 million people—was staring down an existential crisis. The residents of North Miami, one city among many that make up the Miami metropolitan area, had voted a year earlier against a proposal for a $15 million expansion plan, and uncertainty about MOCA’s future began to set in.

In 2013, MOCA director Bonnie Clearwater departed for a rival institution in Fort Lauderdale. Her replacement as interim
director was the museum’s chief curator, the 26-year-old Gartenfeld, who had only recently been hired away from a job as a writer and editor at Art in America magazine. Shortly thereafter, MOCA initiated talks with the Bass Museum of Art, located in an expanded 1930s Art Deco building in Miami Beach, about the prospect of merging or at least hosting work. But the talks ceased when the MOCA board sued North Miami for breach of contract, with charges that the city had failed to maintain its building or pay Gartenfeld’s salary. (This past October, the Bass reopened after a two-year, $12 million renovation that added 50 percent more exhibition and public space.) In a twist, public officials issued an injunction claiming MOCA’s board was out of line and appointed its own choice of director: Babacar M’Bow, a Senegal-born coordinator at the Broward County Libraries Division who later, in an interview with the New York Times, compared his experience with MOCA’s embattled board to his time as a child soldier on a different continent, “when as young Africans we stood weapons in hand to finish once for all colonialism in Africa.”

Throughout the ordeal, some local collectors with ties to the museum began to demand that MOCA sever ties with a city that claimed to want the institution to stay but offered no monetary support. Others bristled with resentment over potential changes of course they had not signed up for.

“My husband and I donated those works to the MOCA. M-O-C-A. Miami’s contemporary art museum,” Rosa de la Cruz told the Miami New-Times in December 2013, when she had come to believe the collection of MOCA might be moving to the Bass. “Why is it that Miami museums are becoming places just for parties?” she asked. “It’s embarrassing that in our city these things are happening.”

In August 2014, MOCA closed for what would be two months, and the board absconded with Gartenfeld and about a dozen staffers to start a new institution, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. After a settlement was reached three months later, the departed board members were granted permission to open a new museum, while the city of North Miami retained most of MOCA’s collection, naming rights, and $1 million in grant funds. Artworks in the collection that the settlement allowed the newly formed ICA to take were those that their original donors claimed to have given the institution—not the city—and among them were pieces by Dan Flavin, Ed Ruscha, and James Turrell.

“Any time that contemporary art has to interface with the dynamics of city finances and planning, it can be tricky,” said Nina Johnson-Milewski, director of the Miami gallery Nina Johnson. “Look at what happened in Detroit”—where, in 2014, the Detroit Institute of Arts had to raise $800 million—“just to make sure their masterpieces weren’t auctioned off.”

When asked about the circumstances from which ICA Miami emerged, Salpeter, who joined the museum in December 2015, said, “I haven’t had to address it because it was so addressed by the time I got here.” She followed the story from New York, where she had worked as deputy director of external affairs for the Jewish Museum. Gartenfeld, who stayed on as deputy director and chief curator after Salpeter was hired, declined to speak to the past, saying he would “prefer to look forward.”

The establishment of the ICA in its new Design District home amid a sea of boutiques and flagships for ritzy brands has been privately funded by some of the city’s wealthiest collectors, making it what some might see as an outgrowth of Art Basel Miami Beach. Like all of the city’s institutions, the rise of the ICA has tracked the shifting landscape of contemporary Miami—secure in the knowledge that the art world’s attention will lock in when everyone comes to town for the fair in December.

Craig Robins, the real-estate developer largely responsible for the Design District’s development over the past decade, is a major collector who owns work by John Baldessari, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and others, and had followed the MOCA saga closely. In 2014, when the split was certain, he was more than happy to make his Moore Building a temporary host. He is friendly with the Bramans, and together, they began to hatch a plan for the ICA’s future.

“At first there was a little tension,” Robins said of the ICA–MOCA affair. “But one of the great things is that Norman Braman and I agreed we could go forward only if we could resolve any issues between the two.” After what qualified as legal resolution between the opposing institutions, Robins and Braman sat down for lunch, and by the end of it, Robins had persuaded Braman—who built a fortune through Miami–Dade car dealerships and is said by Forbes to be worth $2.5 billion—to fully fund the construction of a permanent home for ICA Miami. After calling on the board to assist in the effort, the embryonic museum had covered a $4 million annual budget for its first decade.

“When Norman and I have lunch together it can be dangerous, in a really good way,” Robins said. “What was most remarkable was that all the fund-raising took one lunch and one five-minute phone call. The board agreed to ten years of operating budget. I don’t know if there’s ever been an easier process to get a museum started.”

In tandem with the establishment of an operating budget, the board began to plan for a new building. With the intention of siting it on land donated by the Miami Design District Associates—which was founded in partnership with Robins’s real estate company, Dacra—the design firm Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos conceived a 37,500-square-foot rectangular structure with a jigsaw pattern of color-changing triangular glass panels on the main facade. A 15,000-square-foot sculpture garden was planned in front, and inside would be 20,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Miami’s Design District incorporates the surviving elements of the Buena Vista historic neighborhood, and in order for the plans to proceed, the ICA had to secure the approval of the Historic and Environmental Protection Board. Residents voiced concern that the museum would stand too close to their homes, so Braman offered to buy and demolish two town houses to establish a buffer between the ICA’s grounds and neighboring houses. Some activists then claimed the demolition would set a problematic precedent, but in June 2015 the plan passed on a 3–2 vote.

“We went from totally not supporting the project to being for it,” Buena Vista East President Jerome Schiller told the preservation board at the time. “We understand it is going to be a civic institute.”

On the opposite side of those demolished townhouses, the ICA’s neighbor is the de la Cruz Collection, which has presented public exhibitions and educational programs since 2009. Like several other similar institutions built by major collectors in Miami—Martin Margulies, the Rubell family, the Cisneroses—the de la Cruz shows privately held work in a fashion that both complements and, some would say, competes with conventional museums. Rosa de la Cruz declined to rehash the ICA/MOCA split. (“That was a decision that they made, I don’t know the details.”) But she readily gushed about the convenience of having the ICA and the de la Cruz in close proximity. “We’re thrilled that they’re next to us because, remember, people come to Miami to go to the beach, and they don’t have much time to see everything,” she said. “Now, people can . . . see both museums at the same time.” To that end, she added, “we even share a valet!”

ICA’s edgy programming is similar to that established by Gartenfeld when he first began putting together exhibitions alongside his day job as an editor. In the late 2000s, he established himself as an ambitious young curator best known for opening a fully functional gallery in his apartment, and transposed that approach to an institutional scale upon being hired by MOCA. The first show that Gartenfeld curated there, “Love of Technology,” in 2013, featured a commission by Ian Cheng and work by Anicka Yi, who was then still three years from winning the coveted Hugo Boss Prize.

“Since Alex has come to Miami, he’s brought a really important critical contemporary voice,” Johnson-Milewski said. “Giving that voice—the academically minded voice that he brings—a permanent space is really critical.”

For his part, Gartenfeld emphasized that “The curatorial team—and our community—benefit from the fact that our board and major donors respect the mission of this museum.” At the core of that mission, he said, is “the exchange of art ideas, and the autonomy and independence of our curators.”

The focus, he added, is on emerging artists who have yet to receive much institutional exposure or mid- to late career artists whose work is being discovered for the first time in America. “If we have succeeded, it is by championing these influential artists of merit who deserve renewed attention,” he concluded. Success has come by way of attention at home as well as from outside Miami: Gartenfeld was named a co-curator of the forthcoming 2018 New Museum Triennial in New York.

According to Salpeter, contemporary art has an important resonance in Miami. “It’s a relatively young city, and despite the ups and downs of the economy, it’s a city on the rise,” she said optimistically of the local art scene. “It’s a new city that is constantly reinventing itself, and many of the people who live here, their aesthetic vernacular is rooted in the contemporary.”

Before serving at the Jewish Museum, Salpeter was founding director of Heart of Brooklyn, a partnership among a wide variety of cultural institutions (the Brooklyn Museum plus a botanic garden, a library, a children’s museum, a park, and a small zoo). Prior to that, she ran Thread Waxing Space, an enterprise in SoHo that hosted artists in studio space and fostered the burgeoning riot grrrl and punk-rock scene through concerts by bands including Le Tigre and Guided by Voices. She has never lived in Miami.

“My family had lived here—it was a place I had visited for a long time—but seeing it as a resident is very different,” Salpeter said. “When people say, ‘Wow, do you like it?’ I say, ‘Ask me in 2018 when I actually get to do things like riding in boats or playing tennis.’ ”

Now that the ICA has a permanent home, it remains to be seen how the new institution will fit into Miami’s complex art ecosystem. “We think of ourselves as unique, but we look to the ICA London and the ICA Boston,” Salpeter said of fellow institutions of similar size that share the ethos of spotting emerging talent and spotlighting artists who are underappreciated. “But I don’t think there’s one institution where we say, ‘We want to be like them when we grow up.’ ”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 86 under the title “Design District Debut.”

John Miller (b. 1954) is a quintessential 1990s artist. The ’90s aesthetic might be described as cerebralism disguised as effortlessness—pastiche-riddled fashion, indie culture occupying a space between the mainstream and the avant-garde, hybridity that tried not to try too hard. Miller’s art, writing, and music share this quality. Like the ’90s—sandwiched between the glitzy ’80s and the gleefully consumerist early aughts—his punk-inspired practice snaps into focus in the context of that which it is not: in group exhibitions; in his writing about other artists, from Mike Kelley to Andrea Fraser; and in art scenes in Europe, where the American artist has had several surveys.

“I Stand, I Fall” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, is Miller’s first museum retrospective in the United States. The exhibition comprises nearly one hundred objects, tracing his career from the period immediately following his years at the California Institute of the Arts, from which he received an MFA in 1979, to the present. Miller and peers including Kelley and Jim Shaw attended CalArts around the same time as several Pictures Generation artists. It’s surprising but not impossible to imagine the Pictures artists, with their cool affect, and Miller’s crew as Valencia classmates. A selection of Miller’s works from the early ’80s purports to contextualize his development in relation to the appropriationists. But these early pieces—drawings of various architectural forms, and colorful paintings of social realist subjects (a hanging, a nun, civil rights protests)—are compelling only in relation to the direction Miller’s work would go as it took on American culture and class stratification.

With Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Miller shares a scatological obsession and devotion to psychoanalytic theory. His best-known sculptures are studies in textbook desublimation: accretive or phallic forms covered with gold, shit-colored material, or fake fruit. One of the earliest examples is Untitled (small totem), 1985, a turgid nineteen-inch-high plaster object whose length and base are covered with brown acrylic paint. First Place (1987) depicts a similar, twelve-inch-high form wrapped in gold leaf. From there, Miller expanded to wall-hung reliefs featuring objects covered with gold leaf or earthy pigment. When I Kissed the Teacher (1993) concerns a subject of forbidden love; against a background of sludgy brown paint, the assemblage displays school supplies and a romance novel. Still, for work about the most primal urges, Miller’s reliefs remain politely scaled, never spanning beyond the size of a large canvas.

Miller is a theorist of gold and shit; for him, their symbolic powers never lose their potency. Writing about Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (1961), he could have been penning his own artist’s statement: “Since Sigmund Freud understood art making as a sublimated anal drive, according to him, all artworks have an overdetermined relationship to faeces. In the infantile imagination, faeces, the first thing a child produces, also counts as a primordial gift. The obverse of this may be Karl Marx’s declaration that under capitalism even the greatest artwork is worth only so many tons of manure.” 

Miller’s ambivalence about the value of art in a consumer-capitalist society infuses many of his artworks. Echo and Narcissus (1990), a set of two brown-clothed mannequins posing in front of a mirror, is displayed to full effect in the show. The mirror reflects the windows that overlook the upscale Design District stores, situating the mythological figures in their ideal modern-day habitat. Miller’s series “Middle of the Day” (1994–) consists of banal photos taken each day around noon, while his sepia-toned “Reality TV” paintings (2009–) depict highly manufactured emotional moments on television. Ultimately, Miller seems to be interested in how art exists as one of many representational modes. 

And yet, Miller’s work is tied precisely to the mechanisms of art, the artists he surrounds himself with, and the artists whose work he discusses in his writing. Again, his thoughts on Manzoni’s canned shit are key to understanding his own work. “Merda d’artista enacts its greatest violence not on the art object, but instead on the discourse in which it is ensconced,” Miller wrote. “His gesture anticipates that criticality will become a recursive guarantor of value.” Miller’s conceptualism may take psychic depths, punk aesthetics, and gendered self-display as its themes, but it’s ultimately art about the rules of art, slyly subverting from within.