Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 — The Central Constellation
Art Basel continued to be the reigning star. Beyond the bustle and multi-million dollar headlines—such as the record-breaking sale of Warhol’s “Muhammad Ali” for $18 million or the mini-Kahlo valued at $15 million—what truly defined this edition was the dialectic between the monumental and the intimate.
Miami Week Art.
Notable installations and initiatives I witnessed:
- Es Devlin, Library of Us — a rotating library on Faena Beach that literally turned books into landscape, a theater of collective knowledge engaging with the beach as the boundary between public and sublime.
- Meridians, curated by Yasmil Raymond — projects that blurred the lines between sculpture, memory, and personal narrative, like Anne Samat’s moving piece about a family in mourning transformed into art.
- Pilar Zeta at The Shelborne — a monumental presence on the beach that invited reconsideration of perception through light and reflection.
Artists Who Shone at Basel:
Do Ho Suh — his practice between the intimate and monumental continued to interrogate identity and space.
Rashid Johnson — works that blended abstraction and cultural narrative.
Sam Gilliam — his epic presence at Pace highlighted the importance of expanded painting.
Moreover, Latin America and the Caribbean had renewed prominence with modernist women —Feliza Bursztyn, Tecla Tofano, Emma Reyes— and intergenerational voices rewriting the region’s history from a global present.
NADA, Untitled, and the Emerging Experience
On the other side of the artistic solar system were NADA and Untitled Art Fair, demonstrating that cultural pulse no longer beat solely in the super-galleries.
In NADA and Young Arts, I saw a fresh constellation:
- Adrien Vescovi — canvases dyed and embroidered that functioned as conversational textiles.
- Julia Felsenthal — watercolor reflections that seemed liquid.
- Sam Moyer — granite and monumental scale redefining materiality and silence.
- Joseph Hart, Brian DeGraw, Anne Wehrley Bjork — voices integrating composition, texture, and visual rhythm.
In Untitled Art Fair, figures emerged that challenged visual neutrality:
- Alexandra Tarvier — installations merging darkness with vibrant light.
- Nicole Cherubini — utilitarian work questioning where art ends and functional life begins.
- Meghann Riepenhoff — cyanotypes as poetic maps of captured light.
- The Ant Project — a Mexican platform led by art historian Guadalupe García, presenting “This Was The Future,” a collaborative work between Marcos Castro (Mexico City) and Yanira López (Havana).
Untitled registered a record attendance and sales, solidifying itself as a hub where the market met great ideas.
Art Miami, Design Miami, and Satellites
Art Miami maintained its traditional platform, while Design Miami celebrated its 20th edition by mixing disciplines, functionality, and cultural narratives.
In design, I observed:
- Erik Speer — spatial curation that challenged the logic of objects.
- SCAD / Sarah Fonsi — lamps functioning as sculptures of light and form.
- De Fleur Santorini Design — Mediterranean translations into conceptual furniture.
Focus on Latin America / Mexico
The Latin American presence wasn’t just quantitative; it was ideological.
- Lucía Vidales, with her extensive composition “Viendo el Monte Calvario,” reopened dialogue with Siqueiros from a critical generation, disbelieving in dogmas but fascinated by history with galería Proxyco.
- Gabriel Rico entwined the organic and symbolic, tracing human connections with matter and memory with Galería Perrotin.
- Néstor Jiménez, from Proyectos Monclova, presented two pieces from a series related to the glowing wall “Resplandeciente Sol de Canícula,” soon to be exhibited at the Erarta Museum in Russia.
- Darío Ortiz, with Duque Arango Gallery from Colombia at Art Miami, presented two beautiful portraits of ethnic women.
The Cecilia Vicuña Prize — an echo of poetic resistance—affirmed that in this Art Week, art was not merely merchandise but thought, depth, humanity, and visibility.
Digital Innovation and Pop Culture
In Zero10, digital had a powerful voice: Beeple returned with his Regular Animals series, a pop and generative reinterpretation that drew the audience into a hybrid future. I dare say they were the most controversial pieces of the entire Miami Art Week. Meanwhile, artists like Alec Egan, Justin Favela, Lily Stockman, Widline Cadet, among others, demonstrated that the global scene was heterogeneous in media and thematic focus.
Art as a Map for Complexity
Miami Art Week 2025 wasn’t just a fair; it was an expanding constellation where history and emergence, analog and digital, local and global converged. Each artist orbited like a star with its own gravitational field—from cultural policies to installations that blurred the line between artwork and experience.
It served as a reminder that the contemporary scene thrives not on names but on questions: what do we want to see? How do we want to feel? What does it mean to be public in a city turned spectacle?
My Favorite
Library of Us, presented by British artist Es Devlin during Miami Art Week 2025, is a monumental installation that reimagines the library as a living, sensory, and collective space facing the sea. The work consists of an enormous triangular shelf over 15 meters long, constructed from around 2,500 books that have marked the artist’s life and creative practice.
The structure slowly rotates over a shallow pool of water, creating a hypnotic effect of reflections between light, landscape, and text. Around it, a circular reading table invites visitors to sit, flip through the books, and interact with one another. The experience is completed by an LED screen projecting literary fragments and Devlin’s voice reading those texts, transforming reading into an audiovisual and meditative act.
At the installation’s end, the books will be donated to schools and libraries in Miami, extending their impact beyond the fair. Together, the work turns the idea of a library into an active space for encounters, memories, and human dialogue.
Why It Was My Favorite
Library of Us deeply moved me because it transforms something as intimate as reading into a collective act. Not only is it visually powerful—that rotating structure like a beacon of knowledge over water—but it proposes a library that breathes, moves, and calls. I was fascinated by how Devlin turns books into a visible bridge between strangers:
- You sit, read, listen to a voice, and before you know it, you’re sharing a moment with someone else.
The work combines monumentality with vulnerability, silence with coexistence, and turns written memory into a common space.
It was my favorite because it rarely offers what an art fair seldom provides: a place to pause, reflect, and feel part of something greater than oneself. It’s a piece that not only observes but inhabits and connects with all and everyone.
