Jared McGriff On What To See During Miami Art Week
Jared McGriff On What To See During Miami Art Week
There's no way to take a simple stroll around Miami: this is a sprawling city built for cars, its fingers fanning out across the bay. If you're an art lover visiting the city during Miami Art Week, be aware that you can't easily hop from one gallery to another. This week, the city grinds to a halt, with punishing traffic ruining plans and delaying activities. If you want to check out the best of the city's art outside of the Miami Beach Art Basel fair, then plan ahead.
Local artist Jared McGriff has put together a curation of recommended shows, exhibitions and spaces during Art Week to help you prepare. Presented both in Spinello Projects and at NSU, his paintings feature dreamlike brushwork that shies from bold lines, with a hazy focus on movement. His figures engage in a range of subjects engaged in activity: from dealing cards, boxing or dancing. Yet it is the inner mediative state of his subjects - and how their thoughts shape their physicality - at the core of his work.
Jared quit a life in tech and moved from the Bay Area to Miami in 2017 to become an artist and insert himself in the Black art-making community shaping the city's creative soul. Find his recommendations below.
In this Guide
Untitled Art Fair
1200 Ocean DriveMiami Beach, FL 33139United States of America
“The New World School of the Arts booth will showcase a variety of artworks, including individual pieces, collaborative projects, and limited editions like prints and artist books, all created by NWSA students, faculty, and alumni. These works will be available for purchase, with a revenue-sharing model that allocates half of the proceeds to the artists and the other half to support NWSA’s visual arts program. This initiative supported by Miami art education and collecting program, Commissioner, is aimed at enriching the experience of fair goers while promoting community involvement.”
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Spinello Projects
2930 Northwest 7th AvenueMiami, FL 33127United States of America
“The exhibition Changes: Reflections on Time & Space draws from founder Anthony Spinello’s personal art collection. The exhibition stages a dialogue between seminal works collected over the past two decades and new or recent works by the same artists—many of whom share deep ties to Miami. This constellation of artworks maps not only Spinello’s own trajectory, but also a chapter in the city’s evolving cultural landscape, reflecting the intertwined histories of place, practice, and community. Here, time is both a subject and a medium. The works span years, even decades, and carry with them the histories of their making—the social, political, and personal contexts that shaped them. Changes: Reflections on Time & Space is more than an exhibition—it is a time capsule, a love letter, and a testament to two decades of belief, growth, and transformation.”
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MOCA North Miami
770 Northeast 125th StreetNorth Miami, FL 33161United States of America
+1 305 893 6211
“MOCA is showing Field of Dreams by Diana Eusebio, a Peruvian-Dominican textile artist based in Miami, which takes the viewer on a historical journey. Eusebio creates a variation of vibrant colours found in the natural world throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, with a palette that incorporates seven dyes: avocados and cochineal (cochinilla) for red and pinks; annatto (bija), Spanish moss (itla-okla), and marigolds for yellows and oranges; Palo de Campeche (logwood) for purple; and indigo for blue. These seven core dyes are central to her practice, connecting her work to centuries-old dyeing traditions, from harvesting to boiling the plants and immersing the fabric within the dyes. This exhibition transforms the gallery into an ethnobotanical garden of art, filled with suspended Spanish moss and soft muhly grass, family portraits communicatively representing layered memories. Visitors are invited to move through this living environment that celebrates heritage, community, and the enduring bond between people and the natural world. Field of Dreams is curated by Kimari Jackson. ”
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The Marshall L. Davis Sr. African Heritage Cultural Arts Center
6161 Northwest 22nd AvenueMiami, FL 33142United States of America
+1 305 638 6771
“Suns and Shadows is curated by Miami artist Roscoè B Thické III which features Miami artists Mark Delmont , Reginald O’Neal, Lance Minto Strouse, T. Eliott Mansa, and Mark Fleuridor. This exhibition explores Miami’s contradictions, capturing the tension between its vibrant allure and the complexities beneath—displacement, resilience, and preservation. Through various mediums, this group of artists illuminate the layered histories of Miami, highlighting the distinct edges of its potential as a city continually shaped by forces of change.”
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NSU Art Museum
1 East Las Olas BoulevardFort Lauderdale, FL 33301United States of America
+1 954 525 5500
“NSU is showing 'The Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Mysteries' - The Greek Sphinx was a creature who posed riddles, most famously in Sophocles’ 5th century BCE tragedy Oedipus Rex, where solving a puzzle became a matter of life and death. In this way, the Sphinx became a symbol of games, mystery, and interpretation. Like the Sphinx, this exhibition invites viewers to engage with art as a series of puzzles to be decoded, and to apply their experiences to form their own interpretations. Works are drawn primarily from the museum’s collection and grouped by themes including Myth and Ritual, Hybrid Creatures, Abstraction, Figuration, and the Americas. It includes works by Ed Clark, Frida Kahlo, Jeff Koons, Lee Miller, Diego Rivera, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and recent acquisitions including vanessa german, Lonnie Holley, Emilio Martinez, and Cici McMonigle.”
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Prizm
71 Northwest 14th StreetMiami, FL 33136United States of America
+1 954 372 6241
“Prizm is one of my favorite art fairs to visit during Miami Art Week. For their 12th Edition, Prizm will present The Architecture of Liberation examining the profound role of visual art, architecture, and spatial aesthetics in the context of political resistance and social justice. From the 1970s onward, Africa and its diaspora have engaged in a series of liberation movements that redefine the relationship between built environments and the quest for freedom, autonomy, and equality. This exhibition delves into how spaces—both physical and symbolic—have been constructed, reclaimed, and reimagined to serve as catalysts for liberation, resistance, and solidarity.”
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DVCAI Space at Barry University
11300 Northeast 2nd AvenueMiami Shores, FL 33161United States of America
+1 305 899 3000
“Curated by DVCAI Founder, Curator Rosie Gordon-Wallace, based in Miami, and independent curator Breeana Thorne, the trans-coastal, transcontinental, and Caribbean diasporic project poses the question, “What’s in Your Container?” The shipping container - a vessel of movement, transportation, and memory -serves as a lens through which we explore the personal and collective histories of containment. The works on view serve as sites of refuge - both physical and emotional. In response, artists, turn inward, using their creative practice as containers for memory, grief, harmony, and regeneration. Students and visitors are invited to consider their own vessels of memory.”
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