On a December morning in Miami Beach, before the doors of the convention center swing open, the vast halls of Art Basel Miami Beach hold a quiet that will not last. Crates are unsealed, canvases lifted into place, digital screens flicker to life. Within hours, this temporary city of galleries will become one of the most concentrated assemblies of modern and contemporary art in the Western Hemisphere. In 2025, that city takes on a new role: not only as a marketplace, but as a laboratory where the histories and futures of the Americas meet a global stage.
From December 4 to 7, 2025, with Preview Days on December 3 and 4, the 23rd edition of Art Basel Miami Beach brings together 283 galleries from 43 countries, including 49 first time participants. UBS returns as Global Lead Partner. The numbers are striking, but they tell only part of the story. This year’s fair situates the art of the Americas within a larger conversation about how cultures remember, innovate and imagine themselves.
“Art Basel Miami Beach stands at the intersection of culture and the market, a place where artistic vision and economic energy meet to define what comes next,” says Bridget Finn, Director of Art Basel Miami Beach. “Each edition responds to the urgency of its moment while laying groundwork for the future.”
The future, here, is not singular. It is a constellation of voices: Latinx and Indigenous artists, diasporic communities, digital innovators, modernist rediscoveries and new institutions learning how to recognize artistic achievement in ways that are more communal than top down.
A New Kind of Distinction: The Art Basel Awards
In February 2025, Art Basel quietly changed the architecture of recognition in the contemporary art world. With the launch of the Art Basel Awards, created in partnership with BOSS, the organization introduced what it calls the first global distinction of its kind: an awards program that seeks not only to honor artists and institutions, but to materially support their work in enduring ways.
Selected annually by an international jury, Art Basel Awards Medalists are recognized for vision, skill, community engagement and global impact. The initiative provides flexible support, including honorariums, collaborations and high profile commissions, designed to move artistic practice onto new international platforms rather than to simply crown winners.
Miami Beach marks a turning point in this experiment. During the fair, Art Basel unveils the inaugural class of Art Basel Awards Gold Awardees: eleven practitioners and institutions spanning visual art and adjacent creative fields. In a deliberate departure from traditional prize structures, the Gold Awards are decided through a peer driven process in which the year’s Medalists vote among themselves. Recognition becomes a conversation inside the community itself.
The first Art Basel Awards Night takes place on December 4 at the Frank Gehry designed New World Center in Miami Beach, supported by the City of Miami Beach and the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. Guests arrive on a black carpet, attend a live performance and witness the formal presentation of the Gold Awards. The ceremony is designed less as a spectacle and more as a public affirmation of the roles that artists and cultural institutions play across generations.
Each Gold Awardee receives a handcrafted glass object, conceived by Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron and realized in collaboration with Glassworks Matteo Gonet, both based in Basel. The piece, made in the city where the Art Basel story began, serves as a reminder of the fair’s roots in European craft traditions and its current reach across continents.
The evening also debuts the BOSS Award for Outstanding Achievement. Conceived by BOSS and Art Basel, this distinction honors a figure whose recent work has had profound cultural impact, both within and beyond the art ecosystem.
The artist focused tiers Emerging Artist, Established Artist and Icon Artist come with significant financial support. Emerging Artist Gold Awardees receive 50,000 United States dollars in unrestricted funding. Established Artists receive 50,000 dollars plus a major public commission to be unveiled at Art Basel in Basel 2026. Icon Artists are honored with a 50,000 dollar donation, made by Art Basel in their name, to a cultural or educational institution of their choosing.
The Miami ceremony follows the debut of the Art Basel Awards in Basel earlier in 2025, where 36 Medalists were celebrated during the Swiss edition of the fair. Among them were Cecilia Vicuña, Nairy Baghramian, Grace Wales Bonner and Formafantasma. Conceived as a year long series of acknowledgements rather than a single night, the Awards treat creative excellence and cultural impact as extended phenomena, unfolding across geographies and generations.
Many Americas, Many Stories
If the Awards reconsider how the art world confers prestige, the 2025 fair itself reexamines what it means to speak of “American” art at all.
“The 2025 edition foregrounds the multiplicity of American art, not as one narrative but as a constellation of perspectives,” notes Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Fairs at Art Basel. “From Indigenous modernisms to diasporic practices and digital forms, the fair traces how artists throughout the Americas continue to reshape global imagination.”
Art Basel Miami Beach’s core sectors Galleries, Positions, Nova and Survey function as a kind of cartography. In these zones, visitors encounter work that stretches from mid twentieth century abstraction to digital experiments born in the last three years. The fair highlights Latinx, Indigenous and diasporic practices and revisits modernism through a trans hemispheric lens, placing mid century masters alongside contemporary artists who are actively remapping the canon.
Meridians, the fair’s platform for large scale, museum grade works, returns as the curatorial centerpiece under Yasmil Raymond. The 2025 edition carries the title “The Shape of Time,” an explicit reference to art historian George Kubler’s 1962 study of how artistic forms evolve through sequences, not isolated moments. A revitalized Conversations program, meanwhile, brings artists, collectors and thinkers into three days of public dialogue, including a full opening day devoted to the intersection of art and sport, as well as a daily series of Digital Dialogues.
Zero 10 and the Question of Digital Heritage
Among the most consequential additions to this year’s fair is a new initiative focused on art of the digital era. Zero 10, curated by Eli Scheinman and supported by OpenSea, an Official Partner of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, debuts in Miami Beach and will travel to select fairs in 2026, including Art Basel Hong Kong.
Zero 10 brings together twelve international exhibitors, including AOTM, Art Blocks, Asprey Studio, Beeple Studios, bitforms gallery, Fellowship, Heft, Visualize Value, Nguyen Wahed, Onkaos, Pace Gallery and SOLOS. It also presents work by Lu Yang from the UBS Art Collection, in collaboration with UBS, Art Basel’s Global Lead Partner.
The title reaches back to 0,10, Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 exhibition in Petrograd, often cited as a turning point for the European avant garde. In a similar spirit, Zero 10 seeks to redefine how digital art is shown, interpreted and collected in a market that has only recently begun to grapple with blockchain technologies, generative systems and extended reality.
Scheinman describes the initiative as a bridge between digital culture and institutional frameworks. “Zero 10 brings together key forces in the digital art ecosystem, artists, studios and galleries whose practices are reshaping how art is made, seen and collected,” he explains. “From generative and algorithmic systems to robotics, sculpture, painting, light and sound, the presentations highlight the diversity and conceptual sophistication of a field that is now integral to contemporary art.”
Zero 10 builds on several years of Art Basel programming that has experimented with digital formats. The organization has created a Digital Art Council, launched Digital Dialogues and supported curated digital showcases across its fairs, including Bright Moments’ DREAM 0 by Huemin at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 and the digital section of Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. The AI powered Art Basel App and expanded digital editions in the Art Basel Shop further embed digital art within the institution’s infrastructure.
The timing is not accidental. According to The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, 51 percent of 3,100 respondents had purchased a digital artwork in 2024 and 2025, making digital art the third largest category by total spending. Zero 10 responds to that shift, while also shaping how such work will be understood in the future, as part of a broader history of media, rather than as a brief speculative episode.
Modernism Reconsidered: A Global Canon
One of the most compelling threads at the 2025 fair is its reconsideration of modernism as a global, rather than primarily European and North American, project. The galleries’ booths read almost like annotated case studies in how artists across continents have reimagined perception and form over the last century.
Berry Campbell of New York revisits the contributions of women to Abstract Expressionism. The booth includes works by Alice Baber, Bernice Bing, Elaine de Kooning, Lynne Drexler, Helen Frankenthaler, Judith Godwin and Ethel Schwabacher, anchored by a large Drexler painting from the 1960s, often cited as the artist’s most important period. The gallery also introduces the estates of sculptor Mary Ann Unger and painter Louisa Chase, expanding the story of postwar American abstraction.
Johyun Gallery from Busan and Seoul makes its Miami Beach debut with “Matter and Time, Coincidence and Intervention,” a theme that could describe much of modern art. Works by Park Seo Bo, Lee Bae, Kishio Suga, Lee Kwang Ho and Bosco Sodi trace five decades of process based abstraction, from Park’s repetitive Écriture surfaces to Suga’s interventions with raw materials and Sodi’s clay works with dense pigment. Together, they ask what it means to record time and gesture in matter.
Sicardi Ayers Bacino of Houston builds a booth around Lygia Clark’s metal construction O dentro é o fora (The Inside is the Outside) from 1963, a pivotal work from her Bichos series. The piece anchors a presentation that includes Carlos Cruz Diez’s late kinetic work Physichromie Panam (2015) and pieces by León Ferrari, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Mercedes Pardo, Fanny Sanín and Xul Solar, each illustrating Latin America’s foundational role in postwar optical and conceptual practices.
Tornabuoni Art, with spaces in Florence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Forte dei Marmi and Crans Montana, turns to Italian postwar breakthroughs. Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered Mappa series, created between 1971 and 1994, offers an embroidered atlas of geopolitical change. Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese from 1967, Alberto Burri’s rare burnt plastic painting Combustione Plastica from 1960, Giorgio de Chirico’s dreamlike Piazza d’Italia from around 1950 to 1951 and Dadamaino’s optical work Oggetto ottico dinamico indeterminato from the mid 1960s together show how Italian artists treated the surface of the artwork as a site of rupture and experiment.
Locks Gallery of Philadelphia surveys seven decades of American modernism with works by Louise Bourgeois, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Motherwell and Lynda Benglis, as well as paintings by Willem de Kooning, Pat Steir, Mary Corse, Jennifer Bartlett and Edna Andrade. Seen together, these works trace a line from Noguchi’s biomorphic forms and Benglis’s poured materials to Corse’s luminous minimalism.
Van de Weghe in New York presents Andy Warhol’s Grevy’s Zebra from 1983, part of his Endangered Species series, alongside two Alexander Calder sculptures, one a painted metal piece from about 1938, the other a sheet metal and wire construction from about 1949. The pairing quietly reminds viewers that pop art and kinetic sculpture were never entirely separate worlds.
Alisan Fine Arts, with galleries in Hong Kong and New York, joins Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time with a historical showcase of Chinyee, Walasse Ting and Ming Fay, three Chinese American artists whose pioneering but underrecognized work bridges Eastern and Western abstraction through color, gesture and philosophical inquiry.
Mayoral, based in Paris and Barcelona, stages a transatlantic encounter between Spain’s postwar avant garde and its Caribbean echoes. Joan Miró’s Femme, Oiseaux from 1975, painted shortly after the death of Francisco Franco and acquired directly from the artist’s family, is shown with works by Antoni Tàpies, Manolo Millares, Eduardo Chillida and Wifredo Lam, who is currently the subject of a major United States retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Contemporary painters Marria Pratts and Rachel Valdés extend these legacies into the present.
Seen together, these booths suggest that modernism was never a single movement centered in a few capitals, but a series of intertwined conversations that stretched across oceans.
Latin America and the Caribbean: Intergenerational Dialogues
Given Miami’s position at the gateway between North and South America, it is fitting that Art Basel Miami Beach has become a vital platform for Latin American and Caribbean art. In 2025, several galleries explicitly frame their presentations as intergenerational dialogues.
Leon Tovar Gallery, with locations in New York and Bogotá, focuses on three women whose work reveals the political and personal stakes of Latin American modernism: Feliza Bursztyn, Tecla Tofano and Emma Reyes. Bursztyn’s welded assemblages, Tofano’s satirical figurative ceramics and Reyes’s recollections of daily life, rendered in vivid paint, each function as a form of feminist resistance within an established canon.
São Paulo and Salvador based Galatea and Buenos Aires based Isla Flotante collaborate for the first time in a booth that bridges postwar masters such as Adario dos Santos, Lygia Clark, Rubem Valentim, Mira Schendel and Antonio Dias with younger artists including Mariela Scafati, Pablo Accinelli and Rosario Zorraquín. The result is a compact history of Latin American experimentation that crosses generations.
El Apartamento, with bases in Havana, Madrid and Miami, is the first Cuban gallery founded on the island to participate in Art Basel Miami Beach. Its presentation addresses “otherness” as both a condition of exclusion and an instrument of cultural affirmation. Works by Diana Fonseca, Ariamna Contino, Roberto Diago, Orestes Hernández and Miki Leal explore themes ranging from Afro Cuban identity to urban fragmentation and intricate paper cutting.
Rio de Janeiro gallery A Gentil Carioca brings together artists examining migration, belonging and collective agency across the Afro Atlantic and Indigenous Americas. Arjan Martins’s paintings chart diasporic movement; Agrade Camíz’s textiles and Denilson Baniwa’s multimedia reinterpretations of Amazonian cosmology offer alternative narratives of place and cosmology. Works by OPAVIVARÁ and Renata Lucas invite viewers to physically participate, translating civic imagination into shared spatial experiences.
Almeida & Dale of São Paulo presents a rich gathering of Brazilian artists including Maxwell Alexandre, Tunga, José Leonilson, Jaider Esbell, Alex Červený, Ivan Campos, Rebeca Carapiá, Lidia Lisbôa and Alice Shintani, along with Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa and Georgian born Nino Kapanadze. Takadiwa’s intricate wall sculptures made from discarded materials and Kapanadze’s light driven paintings reveal shared sensibilities around transformation and memory, extending the conversation beyond Brazil.
Mendes Wood DM, with spaces in São Paulo, Brussels, Paris and New York, unites works by Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Gomes, Rosana Paulino, Pol Taburet and Mimi Lauter. The group spans painting, sculpture and textile, yet the works share an interest in how material and memory intertwine in the making of place.
Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco appears in a focused presentation at kurimanzutto, which has branches in Mexico City and New York. Recent paintings, including The Eye of Go (Blue) from 2024, extend his long engagement with geometry, chance and perception. Developed in parallel with his Samurai Tree series, these works use circular systems and measured chromatic variations to explore movement and play.
Contemporary Concerns: Bodies, Ecologies, Material Worlds
Many of the contemporary presentations at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 turn their attention to the body, the environment and the afterlives of materials.
Paris and Bogotá based mor charpentier offers a reflection on the body as both memory and resistance. The gallery presents works by Kader Attia, Teresa Margolles, Oscar Muñoz, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Bouchra Khalili, Hajra Waheed, Liliana Porter, Nohemí Pérez and Manjot Kaur. Issues of migration, gendered violence and environmental crisis emerge through acts of witnessing and repair, connecting artists from Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East.
Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles presents Beatriz Cortez, Carolina Caycedo, Clarissa Tossin and Fidencio Fifield Pérez. Cortez’s hand forged steel structures recall pre Columbian metallurgic traditions. Caycedo’s suspended fabrics chart river systems and struggles around water. Fifield Pérez’s cut paper maps reconstruct personal and collective journeys as layered topographies.
DOCUMENT, with spaces in Chicago and Lisbon, spotlights Julien Creuzet, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Erin Jane Nelson, Alexandra Barth, Anneke Euseen and Faheem Majeed. Creuzet’s floor sculpture Attila cataracte (…) Shékéré, clefs, perles du Ghana from 2024, shown in the French Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, appears alongside Nelson’s four part ceramic wall work Underbush from 2025, which maps the ecologies of the American Southwest and Southeast.
New York gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. stages a cross media conversation. Sheila Hicks and Teresa Lanceta present woven works rooted in craft and abstraction. Jeffrey Gibson and William Cordova extend Indigenous and diasporic vocabularies into contemporary cultural systems. Kara Walker’s paper cut silhouette challenges symbols of American national mythology. Erin Shirreff and Vik Muniz explore perception and value through various image making techniques.
James Cohan Gallery in New York brings together Jordan Nassar, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Naudline Pierre, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Kennedy Yanko and Yinka Shonibare CBE. Nguyen uses metal from unexploded bombs to create sculptures concerned with transformation and memory. Nassar’s embroidered geometries draw on Palestinian craft traditions. Pierre’s visionary figures, Yanko’s paint skin and metal sculptures and Shonibare’s bronze monument cast from Dutch wax fabric all reconsider how materials carry history.
von Bartha, with galleries in Basel and Copenhagen, shows new works from Francisco Sierra’s O Sole Mio series, begun in 2016. These paintings turn the familiar image of a sunset into a field of conceptual and painterly inquiry. Sierra’s luminous, precisely rendered works are shown alongside a 1946 neon sculpture by Gyula Kosice, a pioneer of kinetic and luminescent art and co founder of the Arte Madí movement. New bronze casts by Erin Shirreff, based on provisional forms from her photographic practice, complete the presentation.
Casa Triângulo of São Paulo presents Brazilian painter and printmaker Antonio Henrique Amaral with the São Paulo based collective assume vivid astro focus (avaf). Amaral’s expressive works from the 1960s and 1970s confront political violence and desire. avaf’s immersive canvas installation echoes their project at the Bass Museum in Miami, originally installed in the home of collectors Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, and appears alongside works by Joana Vasconcelos, Eduardo Berliner and Matias Duville, who will represent Argentina at the sixty first Venice Biennale.
Discovery and First Time Participants
Forty nine galleries join Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time in 2025. Nineteen enter the main Galleries sector directly, while eleven return after earlier participation in Nova, Positions or Survey. Their presence underlines the fair’s role as a platform for emerging programs as well as established institutions.
Cristin Tierney Gallery of New York unveils new works by Dread Scott, Jorge Tacla and Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), along with recent pieces by Malia Jensen, Roger Shimomura and Julian V. L. Gaines. A daily durational performance by Tim Youd, who retypes novels in real time, addresses the concept of American identity in the lead up to the United States Semiquincentennial.
Miami’s own Nina Johnson participates for the first time with new paintings by Patrick Dean Hubbell. These works weave Diné cosmology, language and textile traditions into abstract compositions that bridge Indigenous epistemologies and contemporary form.
Dastan Gallery, with bases in Tehran and Toronto, introduces a new generation of Iranian artists engaging with the geometric and narrative traditions of Persian miniature painting, including Maryam Ayeen and Abbas Shashasvar, Farah Ossouli, Homa Delvaray and Hoda Kashiha.
Richard Saltoun Gallery, which operates in London, Rome and New York, presents four pioneering Latin American artists: Cossette Zeno, Elizam Escobar, Marcelo Benítez and Olga de Amaral. The booth marks the first art fair presentations for Zeno, a 95 year old postwar Surrealist whose erotic, psychological paintings gained attention in 1950s Paris, and for Escobar, whose paintings and drawings, produced while he was imprisoned in the United States, confront colonialism and power. Benítez, an Argentinian psychologist and LGBTQ+ activist, uses drawing and text to explore identity and resistance. De Amaral’s tactile, gold and fiber based sculptures evoke cultural memory and sacred space.
Vadehra Art Gallery of New Delhi brings paintings by Nalini Malani and photographs by Sunil Gupta, including Gupta’s 1983 series Towards an Indian Gay Image, a groundbreaking exploration of queer identity in South Asia.
PKM Gallery in Seoul presents works by Benjamin Hyunjin, Chung Hyun, SAMBYPEN and Cody Choi, tracing the relationship between modern Korean aesthetics and global experimentation across painting, sculpture and digital installation.
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery of Sydney, which returns to the fair and debuts in the main Galleries sector, features Sir Isaac Julien’s Diasporic Dream Space Diptych from his series Statues Never Die; new works by Daniel Boyd and Dhambit Mununggurr on Aboriginal and Yolŋu histories; a large scale portrait by Del Kathryn Barton; resin paintings by Dale Frank; and photographs by Bill Henson, with Jim Lambie and James Angus exploring rhythm, space and perception.
SMAC Art Gallery from Cape Town and Stellenbosch and Weinstein Gallery from San Francisco also make their Galleries sector debut this year. They are joined by ACA Galleries, Aicon Gallery, Galerie Judin, MARCH, Olney Gleason, Galeria Marília Razuk and Southern Guild, which enter the main sector directly.
Kabinett: Focused Vignettes Inside the Fair
Within the bustle of the fair, Kabinett offers quieter spaces for concentrated looking. The program allows galleries to mount small, curated displays that deepen engagement with particular artists or themes.
Gray, with locations in Chicago and New York, presents Virtual Still Lifes, a focused installation of Roger Brown’s late career series from 1995 to 1997. Brown, a central figure of the Chicago Imagists, combined painting and assemblage to create vignettes that blur the lines between landscape and still life, satire and spiritual allegory. Here, oil paintings and small objects form chamber like scenes that reflect on collecting and domestic life.
Canada, a New York gallery, devotes its Kabinett to Marc Hundley’s decades long practice of turning personal memory into public language. Marc Hundley T Shirts: 1997 to Now displays a wall of hand stenciled and screen printed shirts, each inscribed with fragments of song lyrics, literature or queer memory. A handmade bench and take away posters extend Hundley’s ethos of intimacy and generosity, recalling his early zines and street flyers.
Mazzoleni, with spaces in London, Turin and Milan, shows a concise selection of works from the 1950s and 1960s by Wifredo Lam. Painted during the Cuban artist’s years in Italy, these pieces bring together Surrealism, Afro Cuban spiritual iconography and postwar abstraction, building a bridge between the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas.
Galerie Lelong, based in Paris and New York, presents seldom seen drawings from the 1960s by Etel Adnan. Created amid the countercultural currents of Northern California, these watercolors and ink works show Adnan’s turn from language to visual form, yet retain the lyricism that characterizes her writing.
London’s Edel Assanti offers a compact survey of Lonnie Holley’s assemblages, sandstone works and painted sculptures. Holley’s practice, which began in the late twentieth century and continues today, transforms discarded materials into meditations on resilience, spirituality and the Black experience. The presentation precedes exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands and Castello di Rivoli in Italy in 2026.
Roberts Projects of Los Angeles honors Betye Saar’s forthcoming centennial in 2026 and her recognition in the Icon Artist category of this year’s Art Basel Awards. The gallery debuts Lost and Found, a new site specific installation that transforms an upright vintage boat into a shrine like structure filled with found objects. The work is at once a memorial and a vessel, filled with references to ancestry, spirituality and personal history.
Garth Greenan Gallery in New York dedicates its Kabinett to Sadao Hasegawa, who lived from 1945 to 1999. Four major works from the 1970s and early 1980s, including Untitled from 1976, Toucan from 1978 and In Compensation for Darkness from 1980, appear within a low lit violet environment. Drawing on the erotic illustrations of Tom of Finland and Go Mishima, Southeast Asian mysticism, Japanese folklore and classical myth, Hasegawa’s paintings propose eroticism as both ecstatic and metaphysical.
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, with locations in New York and San Francisco, marks the centennial of Robert Colescott’s birth by revisiting early paintings from the 1960s, created during his years in Egypt and France. These vivid compositions anticipate the satirical, politically charged figuration that would become his signature, and enter into conversation with institutional retrospectives that are reasserting his position in art history.
Sies plus Höke of Düsseldorf presents Allegories of Resistance and Hope by Marcel Dzama. New large scale works in gouache and ink depict hybrid characters in dreamlike rituals, linking myth and politics, protest and play.
Meridians: Art and the Shape of Time
Now in its sixth year, Meridians serves as Art Basel Miami Beach’s curatorial laboratory for large scale projects that might otherwise be difficult to present in a conventional booth. The 2025 edition, curated by Yasmil Raymond, takes its title and guiding idea from George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time, which argued that artistic forms evolve in sequences and relationships rather than abrupt stylistic breaks.
Raymond’s approach treats each work in Meridians as a kind of temporal device. Some pieces focus on formal and symbolic notions of time, others on technological and documentary aspects.
Tang Contemporary Art, which has locations in Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Seoul and Singapore, presents Double Wing from 2016 by Huang Yong Ping, a key figure of the Chinese avant garde and founder of the Xiamen Dada movement. The monumental sculpture intertwines organic and mechanical elements and reflects on cycles of destruction and renewal as well as questions of belief and cultural identity.
Maruani Mercier in Brussels shows Lyle Ashton Harris’s The Watering Hole from 1996, a work made up of nine photographic panels. Harris combines archival imagery from ACT UP activism, the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings and other pivotal moments to explore intimacy, survival and violence at the “watering hole,” a metaphorical gathering place.
Peter Blum Gallery of New York contributes a new painting by Luisa Rabbia that revisits Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il quarto stato (The Fourth Estate) from 1901. Rabbia translates the march of workers into a metaphysical field of layered pigments that suggest skin, land and atmosphere, turning collective presence into a shared breath.
Freight plus Volume, also of New York, presents Ward Shelley’s The Last Library IV: Written in Water, created between 2020 and 2025. The walk in installation is made of paper and wood and filled with invented banned books and fabricated archival documents. It transforms the library into a theater of contested truth, raising questions about knowledge and fiction in an age of misinformation.
Rolf Art of Buenos Aires shows Buzzing from 2009, a mural scale video installation by Argentine artist Silvia Rivas. Through layered projection and sound, Rivas visualizes time as a tension between stasis and transformation, with humor that borders on the absurd.
Galería RGR of Mexico City offers a rare presentation of Jesús Rafael Soto’s Pénétrable from 1992, a sixteen foot high cube composed of thousands of hanging filaments. The work invites viewers to walk through its vibrating field, continuing Soto’s life long exploration of kinetic perception and suggesting that time may be experienced as movement and vibration as much as chronological sequence.
Leila Heller Gallery, with spaces in New York and Dubai, presents Kevork Mourad’s Memory Gates from 2021, a walk in textile installation where layered drawings form a labyrinth of suspended panels. As visitors navigate the structure, they pass through a moving architecture of memory.
Catharine Clark Gallery from San Francisco and Ryan Lee from New York jointly present Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament plus Crime) from 2016 by Stephanie Syjuco. Drawing on Susan Sontag’s idea of an “ecology of images,” Syjuco uses photographic setups and sculptural displays to examine how visual culture encodes race, authenticity and power.
Library Street Collective of Detroit contributes Intimacy of Throes from 2024 by Kennedy Yanko. Starting with metal salvaged from scrapyards, Yanko cuts and reshapes steel, then coats it with fluid surfaces of paint skins. The resulting sculpture feels both heavy and unusually light, blurring distinctions between industrial materials and bodily presence.
Together, these works suggest that time is not a neutral backdrop but something artists can bend, compress and reveal.
Nova, Positions and Survey: New Work, Emerging Voices, Historic Rediscoveries
Art Basel’s proposal based sectors form a triptych of sorts. Nova focuses on work made in the last three years. Positions presents solo exhibitions by emerging artists. Survey revisits historically significant practices, often those that have been overlooked.
Nova, established in 2003, hosts 23 galleries in 2025, presenting 22 thematically focused booths, many of them solo presentations, with eight newcomers. Berlin based Heidi, participating in Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time, shows new scratch off paintings by Akeem Smith, drawn from his archive of Caribbean Dancehall ephemera. The works mark Smith’s first United States solo showing since his exhibition No Gyal Can Test at Red Bull Arts in 2020 and 2021.
Pequod Co. of Mexico City presents Villa Purificación, a new body of work by Renata Petersen that considers faith, gender and power. Hand painted ceramic murals, vases and a central blown glass installation evoke cult architecture and vernacular shrines. Drawing on her mother’s fieldwork on spirituality across Latin America, Petersen fuses personal and collective mythologies.
Candice Madey of New York debuts at the fair with a solo presentation by Liz Collins, whose practice moves between art, fashion and design. Collins shows intricate needlepoints and new woven reliefs that blur boundaries between surface and structure, handcraft and abstraction, continuing her inquiry into queerness, tactility and the politics of making.
Silverlens, with spaces in Manila and New York, presents Between Ports, pairing Bernardo Pacquing and Nicole Coson. Pacquing’s assemblages made from urban detritus in Manila emphasize improvisation and resilience. Coson’s monochrome “print paintings” and three dimensional Vanitas sculptures made from packaging materials reflect on trade, migration and the unseen infrastructures of contemporary life.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents Hugo Crosthwaite’s Ex Voto series. Each work, rendered in acrylic and colored pencil, reimagines devotional painting in the context of the United States–Mexico border, chronicling acts of survival and grace drawn from decades of observation at the Tijuana crossing.
Positions, which highlights rising artists through solo booths, hosts sixteen galleries this year, ten of them newcomers. London gallery Nicoletti shows French artist Josèfa Ntjam’s new freestanding triptych of photomontages in a movable pine larch structure. The work merges archival imagery, speculative fiction and biomorphic forms to explore colonial legacies, mythology and Afro diasporic cosmologies. It was produced in tandem with Ntjam’s participation in the thirty sixth Bienal de São Paulo.
Margot Samel of New York presents Inmortalistas by Carolina Fusilier, an Argentine born artist based in Mexico. Fusilier uses industrial debris, biological remnants and mechatronic elements to create interconnected sculpture paintings, imagining time after the human, when machines and materials remember earlier lives.
Theta in New York exhibits Kelsey Isaacs’s Cinemaworld reboot (Deluxe). Isaacs photographs arrangements of plastic objects in a disused movie studio, then translates those images into large scale still life paintings. Embedded LCD screens loop endoscopic videos of the painted objects, creating a layered exchange between surface and interior, illusion and revelation.
Lomex presents a solo installation by Yoshitaka Amano, the Japanese artist and animation designer known for his work on G Force, Battle of the Planets and Final Fantasy. Large paintings and works on paper expand Amano’s visual world into gestural abstraction and dreamlike figuration, locating his practice within a broader history of postwar visual culture.
Zielinsky, which operates in Barcelona and São Paulo, invites Chinese Afro Panamanian artist Cisco Merel to transform the booth into a living architecture. The installation is activated by Junta de Embarra, a communal stepping ritual drawn from Panamanian quincha construction, turning ancestral building techniques into acts of cultural resistance and collective creation.
Galeria Dawid Radziszewski, with spaces in Warsaw and Vienna, presents new paintings by Aleksandra Waliszewska. Her dreamlike compositions, populated by spectral figures, animals and allegorical hybrids, draw on Gothic and Symbolist traditions while addressing psychological tensions that feel uncannily contemporary.
Survey, devoted to historically resonant practices, brings together eighteen galleries, twelve of them new participants. David Peter Francis of New York presents Pat Oleszko’s inflatable installation Big Foots from 1995, a rare glimpse into her five decade exploration of humor, protest and performance. The towering air powered figures, part prop and part persona, embody Oleszko’s concept of “pedestrian art,” in which costumes and public interventions become tools of feminist commentary. The display anticipates a 2026 survey at SculptureCenter in New York.
Ryan Lee of New York focuses on Emma Amos’s Athletes series from the 1980s. Large portraits of track and field stars Carl Lewis and Evelyn Ashford and football player Emmitt Smith combine bold color, dynamic figuration and handwoven elements. The series links Amos’s painterly virtuosity to her lifelong commitment to racial and gender equity, reaffirming her place in American modernism and the feminist avant garde.
Voloshyn Gallery, with locations in Kyiv and Miami, revisits wartime portraits from the 1940s by Ukrainian American artist Janet Sobel. Created after her emigration to the United States, these depictions of women and children draw on memories of Ukraine and the displacement of World War II. The presentation highlights Sobel’s influence on gestural abstraction and her underacknowledged position within its history.
Pavec of Paris, making its Art Basel Miami Beach debut, presents early works from 1911 to 1940 by Juliette Roche, a member of the Dada and Section d’Or circles. Her paintings and works on paper chart an engagement with Cubism, abstraction and feminist ideas at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Paci contemporary, based in Brescia and Porto Cervo, presents Leslie Krims: A Rake’s Revisionist Regress, a group of rare vintage photographs by Leslie Krims, a central figure in the rise of staged photography in the 1970s. His constructed scenes, often satirical and provocative, critique political correctness and media manipulation and place him within a lineage of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Sandy Skoglund who used photography as a vehicle for performance and social commentary.
Conversations: Art, Sport, Technology and the Future of Patronage
Beyond the galleries, Art Basel Miami Beach’s Conversations program functions as an open seminar on art, culture and ideas. The 2025 edition takes place from December 4 to 6 in the Auditorium in the Grand Ballroom on Level 2 North of the Miami Beach Convention Center and is free to the public.
The program begins on Thursday, December 4, with a full day devoted to the relationship between art and sport. Across four sessions, artists and athletes explore questions of performance, discipline, endurance and representation. Two time Super Bowl champion and collector Malcolm Jenkins speaks with artist Tavares Strachan about what each can learn from the other’s field. Former NBA player and collector Elliot Perry appears with art advisor Gardy St. Fleur to discuss building legacy beyond the court. Los Angeles based artist and educator Suzanne Lacy joins Ali Riley, captain of Angel City Football Club and the New Zealand Women’s National Team, to examine gender and leadership in sport. The panel, moderated by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, expands on Lacy’s film What Do Women (Footballers) Want, created for Obrist’s exhibition Football: City. Art United in Manchester in 2024. A fourth session, developed with the media platform Offball, looks at how sport is represented in art and in museums, from SFMOMA’s exhibition Get in the Game, now touring to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, to newer curatorial frameworks that consider sport as image, object and cultural arena.
On Friday, December 5, the program turns toward the future of art’s own institutions and narratives. A session titled Building the Future of the Art World, with an introduction by Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, brings together András Szántó, Larissa Buchholz, Pablo León de la Barra and Mia Locks to consider how museums and markets might evolve with resilience and imagination. Their discussion draws on Szántó’s book The Future of the Art World: 38 Dialogues. Another panel, Writing History Now: Artists, Memory and the Shaping of the Present, features artist Hank Willis Thomas and Anne Helmreich, Director of the Archives of American Art, in conversation with former Lucas Museum director Sandra Jackson Dumont on how artists and archivists are reframing collective memory. A session on Visionary Giving: How Black Collectors Are Reshaping Philanthropy, with Victoria Rogers, co founder of the Black Trustee Alliance, and Dr. Joy Simmons, moderated by collector Thomas Moore, explores how Black collectors are influencing institutional priorities and expanding ideas of representation and legacy.
Throughout the program, daily Digital Dialogues, aligned with the Zero 10 initiative, bring together artists, curators and technologists to discuss AI, on chain practices, extended reality and emerging models of exhibition and ownership. Full details on speakers and topics will be announced closer to the show, but the emphasis is clear: technology is treated not as a novelty, but as a significant chapter in the ongoing history of art.
Tribeca Festival and the Soundtrack of the Week
The cultural activity around Art Basel Miami Beach is not confined to visual art. The Tribeca Festival returns for its fourth year with two nights of live performances at the Miami Beach Bandshell, presented by Google Gemini.
On Friday, December 5, the Bogotá based, Latin Grammy nominated ensemble Monsieur Periné performs its blend of Latin swing and pop. On Saturday, December 6, the instrumental duo Hermanos Gutiérrez brings its cinematic sound to the stage. Tickets are available to the public and additional performances will be announced.
Tribeca and ESPN also co host an invitation only preview of two new short films that explore stories at the intersection of sports and the Latino community. The screening is followed by a discussion with the directors, moderated by Emmy Award winning filmmaker Rudy Valdez, further linking athletic performance, narrative and identity.
Design, Fashion and the Fair’s Expanded Landscape
Art Basel Miami Beach’s partners extend the fair beyond its halls into a broader environment of design, fashion and hospitality.
Ray Ban, an Official Show Partner, introduces Ray Ban House at the historic Carl Fisher Clubhouse, an immersive installation that blends art, music and style, treating eyewear as an everyday artifact of visual culture.
In the realm of design, Salone del Mobile.Milano joins Art Basel as an Official Partner for the first time and curates the Collectors Lounge in collaboration with Lissoni & Partners. Leading Italian design brands furnish the space, emphasizing the links between material innovation, artisanal knowledge and contemporary living.
Official Partners Design Within Reach and Moooi collaborate to transform the fair’s East Salon through signature pieces such as Moooi’s Knitty Chair and Raimond II light, illustrating how furniture and lighting can function as both utilitarian objects and sculptural forms.
Fashion houses also leave a visible imprint. Host Partner Marc Jacobs presents JOY, a limited edition capsule collection created with artists David Shrigley, Derrick Adams and Hattie Stewart. An interactive private lounge, curated pop ups across the fair and a VIP event at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden on December 2, which debuts a new fragrance collection created with artists, extend the collaboration beyond garments.
Pucci reprises its visual takeover of the Miami Beach Convention Center, conceived by Artistic Director Camille Miceli, transforming all entrances into a “Pucci fied” experience. Zegna produces co branded tote bags for VIP guests, distributed across partner hotels, and underscores its long standing support of art and craftsmanship across all Art Basel shows.
The list of partners is extensive and points to the fair’s position within a larger cultural economy. Show Partners include Airbnb and Sotheby’s International Realty. For the third consecutive year, Sotheby’s International Realty presents a “global gallery” in the Collectors Lounge, highlighting architecturally significant homes in more than eighty countries and territories.
Host Partners are Ruinart, Four Seasons, Chubb, Marc Jacobs and Ray Ban. Chubb collaborates with Miami based studio Moniomi Design and the Chubb Fellows at the New York Academy of Art to create an immersive lounge that examines the aesthetics of collecting and the relationship between art and interior space. Ruinart, the official Champagne of Art Basel globally, hosts a bar and presents a solo exhibition by Sam Falls as part of its Conversations with Nature series, which reflects the Maison’s commitment to environmental restoration and artistic dialogue.
Official Partners include Samsung, BMW, Zegna, the Tribeca Festival, Dorsia, Casa Dragones, Lavazza, Salone del Mobile.Milano, Muuto, Design Within Reach, Moooi, Quintessentially, Louis M. Martini, Neaū Water and Cerveceria La Tropical. Samsung presents the Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 Art Store Collection and builds an immersive booth in the Grand Ballroom to showcase its Art TV lineup, transforming the space into a domestic setting filled with digital artworks. BMW continues its role as Global Automotive Partner, providing VIP car service for First Choice guests and collaborating with artist Kennedy Yanko and The Cultivist on a private event that features a special iteration of the BMW XM Label and a new work by Yanko.
Dorsia, as partner under a multi year agreement, offers Art Basel VIPs access to its global dining network through the Art Basel App and curates sought after experiences for its members. Its new Afters program brings together “the art of night” through curated late night gatherings in Miami Beach. Casa Dragones returns with its Art Tender Series, an immersive cocktail experience inspired by contemporary art and the craft of tequila, extending a tradition of collaborations with artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Danh Vo, Pedro Reyes and Petrit Halilaj.
Lavazza hosts the Lavazza Lounge in the Grand Ballroom and celebrates the United States launch of the 2026 Lavazza Calendar, titled Pleasure Makes Us Human. On Wednesday, December 3, at 4:30 in the afternoon, the calendar is presented in the Auditorium by Francesca Lavazza, photographer Alex Webb and Vincenzo de Bellis. Muuto furnishes VIP and hospitality spaces at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden with Scandinavian design.
Quintessentially serves as Concierge Partner, offering tailored itineraries, private access to events and on demand services for VIP guests. Louis M. Martini, the official red wine partner, provides wine service in the East Salon and introduces The Gryphon, a new release. Through an art program curated by Georgia Horn, the winery commissions site specific works that address time, environment, heritage and sensory experience. Neaū Water, the Official Hydration Partner, highlights its H.A.R.T. technology, which aims to restore water’s molecular harmony and produce clean, balanced hydration.
Official Hotel Partners include the Ritz Carlton South Beach, Grand Beach Hotel Miami Beach, W South Beach and The Shelborne by Proper. These hotels host Art Basel guests and partners and provide various exclusive experiences.
The City as Open Museum
Art Basel Miami Beach does not stand apart from its surroundings. During the fair week, museums, private collections and university galleries across Greater Miami and South Florida mount exhibitions that together create a portrait of the region as a nexus of the Americas.
The Bass Museum in Miami Beach offers a trio of exhibitions that explore architecture, perception and place: Lawrence Lek: NOX Pavilion, a site specific digital environment that blends speculative design and virtual simulation; Jack Pierson: The Miami Years, revisiting the artist’s engagement with the city’s queer and visual culture; Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan, a two person study of modernist color; and Isaac Julien: Vagabondia, an early film installation that examines representation, class and museum space.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presents a “powerhouse” lineup that includes a survey of Joyce Pensato’s anarchic reworkings of cartoon characters; Richard Hunt: Pressure, focused on the pioneering African American sculptor’s metal works; Igshaan Adams: Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah, which uses tapestry to explore kinship and migration; Masaomi Yasunaga: Traces of Memory, a series of unglazed ceramics that investigate material memory; and Andreas Schulz: Special, a conceptual project that bridges photography and object making.
The Pérez Art Museum Miami anchors the city’s institutional program with exhibitions such as Woody De Othello: coming forth by day, focused on ceramics and bronze sculptures around transformation and ritual; Language and Image: Conceptual and Performance based Photography from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection; Mark Dion: The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit, a site specific installation about ecology; Elliot and Erick Jiménez: El Monte, a photographic homage to Afro Cuban spirituality; and the group exhibitions Worlds Apart and One Becomes Many, which address global interconnectivity and collective experience.
Private collections open their doors as well. The Rubell Museum presents a new thematic installation combining recent acquisitions with modern classics. El Espacio 23 shows A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible: Territory Narratives in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, examining geopolitics, landscape and belonging. The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse presents Pop Art: Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, Chamberlain, Segal; Records of the Past: Lewis Hine Child Labor Photographs; and Italian Art 1970–2024. The Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection offers a focused installation on postwar Latin American abstraction, reaffirming its reputation as a destination for geometric and kinetic art.
University and regional museums add further layers. The Frost Art Museum at Florida International University presents Mosaico: Italian Code of a Timeless Art; Augustín Fernández: The Alluring Power of Ambiguity; and Eduardo Nacarro: Cloud Museum. The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami presents El Pasado Mío / My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art, along with The Haas Brothers: S. Car, Go! and Petah Coyne: How Much a Heart Can Hold. NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale shows Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time; Shared Dreams, which celebrates the Stanley and Pearl Goodman Latin American Art Collection; and Christo and Jeanne Claude: “Surrounded Islands”, revisiting the artists’ 1983 project in Biscayne Bay. The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach presents Shara Hughes: Inside Outside; Leslie Hewitt: Achromatic Scales; Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection; and The Virtue of Vice: The Art of Social Commentary. The Wolfsonian–FIU in Miami Beach presents Marco Brambilla: After Utopia; Modern Design Across Borders; La Superba: Genoa and The Wolfsoniana; and World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow, tracing how design has been used to project national narratives and technological dreams.
An Edition of Renewal
Taken together, Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 and the citywide programming that surrounds it present a layered portrait of the Americas and their place in global culture. The fair highlights how modernism was shaped not only in Paris and New York, but also in Havana, São Paulo and Seoul. It foregrounds artists whose practices engage memory, ecology and postcolonial histories. It treats digital art not as novelty, but as a field with its own genealogies and collectors. It experiments with new models of recognition, in which artists and institutions help determine how honors are bestowed.
In this sense, the 23rd edition is less a static showcase than a snapshot of art in motion. It is defined by ambition and depth, but also by a sense of renewal: the idea that histories can be revisited, canons revised and futures jointly imagined.
For visitors walking into the convention center or out into the streets of Miami Beach, the experience is not only one of spectacle. It is also an invitation to see the Americas, and their many stories, as part of an ongoing conversation in which the shape of art, and of time itself, continues to change.
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