Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years
A focused exhibition examining the underlying impact of Miami’s contradictory marks of sophistication and decadence, exuberance and decay on Rachel Feinstein’s rich and sweeping practice centered on the commission of a panorama mirrored wall.
Curated by James Voorhies, with Claudia Mattos
The Bass Museum of Art
Miami Beach, FL
September 25, 2024–August 17, 2025
Made possible with funding and staff from The Bass; realized within my responsibilities as Chief Curator of The Bass
Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years is a presentation spanning almost three decades of work by the New York–based artist and her first major exhibition in her hometown. Displaying Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approaches to artmaking—encompassing sculpture, painting, video, performance and installation over the course of her career—The Miami Years reflects on themes of intimacy, vulnerability and abjection, exploring Feinstein’s examination of the societal factors that shape human behavior and female identity. The works on display also showcase the artist’s recurring use of scenography, specifically the theatrical flat—lightweight scenery used to create the illusion of different settings onstage—as a form that both exposes and reinforces the notion and structures of illusion.
While early influences include figures like Carolee Schneemann and Kiki Smith, there is another powerful undercurrent in Feinstein’s work: Miami. The artist grew up in the “Magic City” during the 1980s. Miami, then and now, is defined by the collision of extremes: lush landscapes of extraordinary natural beauty juxtaposed with commercial overdevelopment and industrialization, glittering façades adjacent to crumbling urban neglect, and clashing architectural styles found in any single block. Florida—as the terrain of winter sunshine, Disney World, Art Deco, and American kitsch—is enmeshed in escapist fantasy while simultaneously embroiled in the conflicted realities of contemporary life, politics and the environment.
With fragmentation echoing throughout Feinstein’s artmaking practices, The Miami Years is the artist’s first exhibition to consider the underlying impact of South Florida’s collective imagination and extreme realities on her rich and sweeping oeuvre. She wields a spectrum of cultural, social, aesthetic and art historical references—from eighteenth-century rococo paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, to fairytales and folklore, to fashion advertising and the cultural traces of Los Angeles. Exaggerated, incongruent, cobbled-together and sometimes monstrous, Feinstein assembles these disparate parts and pieces—be they human forms, architectural relics or theatrical settings—into cohesive, compelling works.
Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years is the second in an annual series of solo exhibitions examining the internationalism of Miami and its impact on a single artist’s life and work. Inaugurated with the 2023–24 exhibition Nam June Paik: The Miami Years, which considers the late artist’s history in Miami Beach and his large-scale commissions for Miami International Airport, Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years explores the city’s lingering effects on the artist’s early life and enduring impact on her decades-long career.
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