New Work Miami 2013

Before making the transition to its new facility in Museum Park in 2013, Miami Art Museum will present three final exhibitions in its current space that deal with issues of identity and place and represent significant contributions to contemporary art internationally, nationally and locally. The exhibition program builds on the Museum’s dedication to providing its diverse audiences with dynamic experiences that relate to their contemporary lives and to which they will have strong connections.

Miami is a place of contradictions. It is equal parts verdant paradise and concrete jungle. It is a thoroughly American city, yet it is abuzz with a cacophony of other cultures and other languages. It is both over- and under-imagined—riddled with infrastructural deficiencies, as if not fully thought through, yet envisioned and re-envisioned ad nauseum in advertisements, movies, television shows, music videos, and song lyrics. Of all of Miami’s disjunctures, the sharpest one may lie between the city that appears so often in mass media and the one that its residents navigate each day.

New Work Miami 2013 is the last official show at Miami Art Museum’s building on Flagler Street: MAM is contained within the circa-1984 Philip Johnson-designed Miami-Dade Cultural Center Plaza, which also houses the downtown branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library and HistoryMiami. Next fall, MAM reopens in the new Museum Park complex on Biscayne Bay and is hoping to rock a Herzog & de Meuron-designed monolith of marquee architecture.

WSVN's Deco Drive previews New Work Miami 2013 just as Art Basel kicks off. Host Louis Aguirre takes a tour of the exhibition on the last day of installation, interviewing New Work Miami 2013 curators and artists.