The Palm Beach art scene is gearing up for a lively new season.
Kicking things off is Teresita Fernández, who gave a public art talk this week hosted by the ArtLife Committee of West Palm Beach. The new public art program hopes to capture the city’s diverse, contemporary beat and rich history. Fernández, a New York-based artist, has been commissioned for a large-scale permanent installation that will transform the great lawn. For those wanting an introduction to her style, her solo exhibition “Astral Sea” is on view through September 21 at Lehmann Maupin’s temporary London gallery in Mayfair.
Installation views of Teresita Fernández’s “Astral Sea” at Lehmann Maupin, London.
Installation views of Teresita Fernández, “Astral Sea” at Lehmann Maupin, London.
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This week, “Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years” opens at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, and will remain on view through August 17, 2025.
Rachel Feinstein, Little Man, 1999.
Spanning nearly three decades of work by the New York-based artist, it is her first major hometown exhibition. Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approach to sculpture has encompassed painting, video, performance, and installation over the course of her career. “The Miami Years” reflects on themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and abjection, while exploring societal factors that shape human behavior and female identity.
Rachel Feinstein, Ballerina, 2018.
Feinstein often creates enveloping environments that serve as exhibition scenography, at times incorporating wallpaper into her projects. This is showcased in the exhibition, specifically through the use of the theatrical flat, a form that both exposes and reinforces notions and structures of artifice and illusion.
Rachel Feinstein, Forest Flats.
“The Miami Years” includes a new site-specific commission Panorama of Miami (2024), a massive installation of painted mirrored wall panels spanning 30 feet, in which the artist prods the contradictory nature of Miami’s decadence and sophistication. Viewers step into a representation of Miami’s lush jungle landscape: a wallpaper design based on archival photographs and illustrations of iconic parks and foliage in Miami—including the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, and the Venetian Pool on the lush grounds of the Biltmore Hotel.
The artist wields a spectrum of cultural, social, aesthetic, and historical references, from 18th-century Rococo paintings by Fragonard, to fairytales and folklore, to fashion advertising and cultural traces of Los Angeles. Exaggerated, incongruent, cobbled-together, and sometimes monstrous, Feinstein assembles these disparate parts and pieces— be they human forms, architectural relics, or theatrical settings— into cohesive, compelling works.
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Also of note in Miami is the first solo US museum show of Calida Rawles, on view at the Pérez Art Museum through February 23, 2025.
“Away with the Tides” is a site-specific exhibition delving into the experience of Black people in Overtown, a neighborhood in Miami that went from a thriving cultural and commercial hub for Black people to a community dismantled by gentrification, systematic racism, and displacement. The figures in “Away with the Tides” are current residents of the Overtown community. The exhibition focuses on their stories and experiences.
Calida Rawles, Impact, 2024. Acrylic on canvas.
Calida Rawles, Away with the Tides, 2024. Acrylic on canvas.