Miami Beach
Black Practices
Pointing to the vitality of Black creative excellence is a way to celebrate artists and to grant financial and cultural resources to those who have been systematically barred from them. At the same time, such vitality is a constitutive feature of Black ingenuity in conditions of vulnerability to violence that white culture has used to empower itself for centuries. Crucial as it is to elevate Black artists and their work in the artworld, doing so also highlights the essential structure of anti-Black racism that persists in its own dynamic evolutions through the present. The anti-racist project demands aesthetic revolution as much as political change, and Black Practices make it possible.
Ecological Orientations
This tour spotlights artists whose content, materials, or presentation addresses Earth’s dynamic interrelations – of which human history is a limited but important part. Only some artists here use ecological vocabulary to describe their work, but their art allows viewers to consider their own positions in the planet’s unfolding realities , of which climate change is one. From differing perspectives and across mediums, these artists orient their practices in an ecology of the present that wills a more sustainable future.
Queer Strategies
‘Queer’ can be a verb as much as a noun or adjective. To queer an art practice is to make work that might disrupt comfortable presumptions of correctness and inevitability that empower the structures of the state, the family, and the self. Recent mainstreaming moves, like legalizations of ‘same-sex’ marriage and the increasing preponderance of LGBTQ+ figures in pop culture, have made invaluable changes to the everyday safety of many queer people. Still, a more radical concept of ‘queer’ continues to challenge the premises of art and culture as we know them. The artists on this tour are here not so much because of their identities, but because of their art’s capacity to reconfigure our everyday expectations for bodies and social situations.
20th-century Masterpieces
With an emphasis on painting, selected artworks in this virtual tour range from large-scale canvases to intimately sized photography. Some of the included artists—like Piero Manzoni—adamantly resisted representation, while others—like Alice Neel and Bob Thompson—embraced the breadth of its possibilities. Several works also show how art of the last century was influenced by the power of music, especially jazz.
