Observer’s Must-See Miami Art Week Exhibitions

Hiba Schahbaz’s “The Garden”

• The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
• Through March 16, 2026

Dragons, unicorns, mermaids and other fantastical creatures inhabit the whimsical garden imagined by Hiba Schahbaz for her first institutional solo exhibition. The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based artist transforms the galleries of MOCA in Miami with her richly symbolic repertoire of archetypal and mythic figures, using them to explore themes of transformation, joy and whimsy through a distinctly personal, feminist lens.

The exhibition, which features more than 80 multi-substrate paintings created over a fifteen-year period, including several new works and a site-specific installation, is framed around the concept of the jannat or “Paradise Garden”—an idyllic space rooted in Islamic tradition and Sufi poetry. Schahbaz’s Paradise Garden transcends cultures and spiritual practices, symbolizing refuge, abundance and transcendence. Drawing from Persian miniature traditions, Sufi mysticism, Islamic mythology and global folklore, she stages an expansive visual narrative of self-transformation in a series of dreamlike self-portraits.

Lawrence Lek’s “NOX PAVILION”

• The Bass Museum
• Through April 26, 2026

London-based Malaysian Chinese artist Lawrence Lek’s speculative sci-fi fictions often feel so scientifically precise they read less like fantasies than early warnings. His hyperreal, game-engine worlds sit a half-step ahead of the present—corporate dream-cities rendered with glassy exactitude where utopia and dystopia blur in a haunting state of anticipatory unease. In “Nox Pavilion,” Lek turns his lens on the emotional fallout of intelligent machines, imagining the psychological strain placed on the self-driving cars, A.I. programs and robotic agents we’ve built to make our lives easier. The show is centered around this speculative NOX (short for Nonhuman Excellence), a therapy center for sentient vehicles run by the all-powerful Farsight Corporation, where cars undergo treatment for breakdowns, distractions and malfunctions born of their own self-awareness—problems addressed not for their well-being but to return them to productivity.
 
The metaphor lands squarely on us, exposing a system that values output over any notion of individual need. Comprising a two-channel film, short videos, an interactive video game and a pavilion of gray tiles that resembles a shelter, monument or ruin—serving simultaneously as visitor seating and the physical echo of the NOX Pavilion in Lek’s virtual city—the exhibition brings his speculative architecture into the real world, folding site-specific installation into a playable yet ominous space where the speculative experience of the future becomes an occasion to reflect on where our society is leading.

“Yu Nishimura”
and other rising stars

• Rubell Museum
• Through Fall, 2026

The Rubells weren’t about to miss the chance to showcase the works they own by Nishimura with a solo presentation, part of the collectors’ annual showcase timed with Art Basel Miami Beach. Nishimura’s lyrical, often melancholic canvases appear suspended in a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere, mirroring similarly blurred emotional and psychological states. At once deeply personal and universally resonant, his paintings distill complex interiority into the essentiality of a few lines, an ability to synthesize and reach the pure essence of things that feels tied to his Japanese heritage. His characters also recall the visual language of manga and anime, aesthetic cues that may in part explain his strong pull among Millennial and Gen Z collectors, many of whom came of age during Japan’s cultural boom.
Alongside Nishimura, the Rubells have mounted solo presentations by Lorenzo Amos, Joseph Geagan, Rita Letendre and Ser Serpas. Also on view is a sweeping survey by L.A.-based artist Thomas Houseago, “First Light,” a commission by Seung Ah Paik and a showcase of new works by Joanna van Son, the museum’s 2025 artist-in-residence.

Mark Dion’s ‘The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit’

• Pérez Art Museum Miami
• Through February 1, 2026

Mark Dion has a reputation for adopting and appropriating archaeological and scientific methods of classification and display, continually blurring the lines between the “factual” and the fictional. Through ambitious installations and projects around the world, Dion examines how institutions and dominant ideologies shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. In a post-structuralist approach, the act of collecting and presenting objects, natural traces and artifacts becomes a way for the artist to build and expose a syntax of meaning—an entire cultural and value system that defines reality for those who adopt it or have it imposed upon them.

PAMM is showcasing Dion’s The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit, a large-scale installation originally commissioned by the institution in 2006. The piece presents a fictional mobile operation where uniformed mannequins, tools and artifacts stage an eerily plausible effort to save Everglades species. With meticulous research and biting irony, Dion critiques bureaucratic inefficiency while celebrating grassroots environmental activism and questioning how science, policy and myth shape our view of nature. The work reframes the Everglades’ complex history—from exploration and exploitation to ongoing restoration—bringing urgent environmental and social issues into focus and offering a thought-provoking look at Florida’s most fragile ecosystem.

Sarah Crowne in dialogue with Etel Adnan

• The Bass Museum
• Through July 26, 2026

On view for a full year at the Bass is a resonant dialogue between Sarah Crowner’s organic, reflective bronze sculptures and Etel Adnan’s monumental mural, the pieces arranged on pillar-like plinths as if resting on rocks and forming a choreographed ring of nature-inspired sinuous lines around the work. Cast from enlarged beach stones, Crowner’s sculptures pursue—with simplicity and instinct—the formal language of abstraction, echoing the same balance and harmony of repeating natural patterns that once guided Adnan as she collapsed light, color, energy and dimensional form into simplified yet deeply evocative planes. The title “Faire foyer” evokes the semicircular carpeted alcove her sculptures shape around the mural, creating a welcoming threshold space that feels like a gentle passage between the outdoors and the intimacy of a home’s interior.

Masaomi Yasunaga’s “Traces of Memory”

• ICA Miami
• Through March 22, 2026

Since its founding in 2014, this museum has become a cornerstone of Miami’s contemporary art landscape, with its bold commitment to both emerging artists and under-recognized figures who are long overdue for wider attention. It is presenting the first U.S. museum solo exhibition of Japanese artist Masaomi Yasunaga, whose tactile and remarkably malleable ceramics operate as both trace and embodiment of physical and psychological memory. Known for pushing the medium beyond its traditional limits, the artist began with the Tebineri hand-building technique but has evolved it into a highly experimental process that replaces clay with mixtures of glaze, feldspar and raw minerals, fired inside boxes of sand that act as temporary molds. 

A former student of avant-garde ceramicist Satoru Hoshino—a key force within the Sodeisha movement, which challenged convention and expanded ceramics into new sculptural languages—Yasunaga creates forms that resemble unearthed geological relics or organic growths captured in mid-emergence. As collapsed vessels, porous mounds and crystalline masses, his creations appear to embody the cyclical alternation between decay and renewal, life and death, embracing the relentless transformation inherent to all materials. Engaging the most alchemical dimension of ceramics—not only earth transformed by fire, but also detritus transformed in light and crystals—Yasunaga produces organic sedimentations and crystallizations of matter and energy that blur the boundary between artifact and organism, human gesture and natural formation.