MIAMI BEACH, FL (May 15, 2025) – The Bass is pleased to share its exhibition schedule for the 2025 – 2026 season, spanning September 2025 through August 2026, featuring new solo exhibitions by Jack Pierson and Sarah Crowner. This season, museum visitors are invited to explore the shifting, fragmented, and multifaceted nature of perspective, reflecting on how histories, identities, and cultural narratives—key themes throughout the new exhibitions—are fluid and evolving, shaped by both personal perspectives and the larger systems and structures through which they are understood and experienced.

In this process, the museum transforms into a dynamic space where different viewpoints and contexts intersect, overlap, and reshape one another, with each exhibition offering an opportunity to reflect on the range of interpretations that arise from personal, cultural, and institutional frameworks.

CHARLES ATLAS: HAIL THE NEW PURITAN
MAY 28 – OCT 19, 2025
Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan presents the artist’s groundbreaking 1986 film, a fictionalized portrait of dancer Michael Clark set against the vibrant underground scene of 1980s London. Fusing classical ballet with the raw energy of punk, post-punk, and queer club cultures, the film reveals performance as a site of transformation, style, and resistance. Presented in conversation with assume vivid astro focus: XI, on view across the museum, Hail the New Puritan highlights Atlas’s enduring influence on how movement, persona, and theatrical display are captured and reimagined across generations.

FAIRE FOYER: SARAH CROWNER IN DIALOGUE WITH ETEL ADNAN
AUG 20, 2025–JUL 26, 2026
Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan brings together new work by Sarah Crowner and a monumental ceramic mural by Etel Adnan, the only example of its kind by the artist in the United States. Crowner, whose practice engages geometric abstraction across painting, sculpture, and design, creates a semicircular carpeted alcove—or in French faire foyer, to create a welcoming transitional space—that frames Adnan’s mural. Within this setting, Crowner presents highly reflective bronze sculptures cast from enlarged beach stones, arranged in relation to the mural and to photographs of the California coastline taken by Adnan in the 1960s. The installation invites viewers into a tactile, spatial encounter with materiality, movement, and the traditions of abstraction explored by both artists.

For the exhibition Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan, Crowner creates a warm, welcoming setting for this formal exchange. Her semicircular carpeted alcove—what the artist describes as faire foyer, the French term for creating a pleasing transitional space connecting the exterior to a home’s interior—invites viewers into an embodied spatial experience with Adnan’s art and Crowner’s own sculptures.

ISAAC JULIEN: VAGABONDIA
ON VIEW AUG 20, 2025
Isaac Julien: Vagabondia presents the artist’s celebrated 2000 film and video installation, recently gifted to The Bass’s collection by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz. For this presentation, the gallery is transformed into a lush, immersive environment, with red walls and carpet creating a theatrical setting for the two-channel projection. The film follows a conservator at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, an institution filled with artifacts from Britain’s imperial history. Along her path, ghostly figures emerge, representations of lives and stories omitted from official narratives. Vagabondia exposes how museums construct and reinforce particular versions of history, challenging viewers to reconsider whose stories are preserved—and whose are erased.

THE KALEIDOSCOPIC: WRITING HISTORIES THROUGH THE COLLECTION​
AUG 20, 2025–JUN 3, 2026
The Kaleidoscopic: Writing Histories Through the Collection reimagines The Bass’s permanent collection as a dynamic, evolving archive. Rather than presenting history as fixed or linear, the exhibition embraces its shifting, fragmented nature.

At its core is a question: How do we write histories today knowing that every source—including a museum collection—offers only a partial view? Museums are not neutral; they actively shape narratives through the choices curators make about what to preserve, emphasize, or exclude. The Kaleidoscopic invites visitors to engage with the collection as a living, multivocal space where meanings change over time and histories are continuously written, rewritten, and righted.

JACK PIERSON: THE MIAMI YEARS
SEP 24, 2025–AUG 16, 2026
Jack Pierson: The Miami Years is the first exhibition to explore the city’s transformative impact on Pierson’s life and work. Emerging alongside such contemporaries as Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierson built a multivalent practice spanning photography, sculpture, drawing, film, and installation. His diaristic portrayals of queer life, wanderlust, loss, and impermanence are deeply rooted in experiences shaped by cities like New York, Los Angeles, Provincetown—and Miami Beach. Pierson’s first extended stay in Miami in 1984 marked a crucible of personal and professional growth, where the city’s sun-soaked landscape, thrift-store finds, and queer nightlife fueled the currents of escapism and longing that still run through his work today.

At ten by fourteen feet, Jack Pierson’s monumental ARRAY (MIAMI), a new commission by The Bass, combines ephemeral printed materials—such as posters, poems, and postcards—alongside his own photographs and works on paper. These juxtapositions offer visual narratives and journeys exploring such themes as desire, nostalgia, and transience that infused the artist’s life in Miami Beach.

LAWRENCE LEK: NOX PAVILION
NOV 19, 2025 – APR 26, 2026
Lawrence Lek: NOX Pavilion presents a film set within a virtual environment as the London-based artist explores the future of automation, perception, and consciousness. Depicting a near-future smart city designed for driverless vehicles, NOX follows an AI car’s search for purpose after its network is shut down. Through richly rendered digital landscapes and a meditative narrative, Lek examines the emotional life of machines and the blurred boundaries between memory, reality, and simulation. NOX offers a speculative reflection on what it means to navigate a world built by—and for—artificial intelligence.

In this presentation, NOX will be reframed within a newly commissioned installation at The Bass that draws from the tradition of pavilions at world fairs, biennials, and parks, evoking the role of these spaces as sites for gathering and display. Complementing the installation, a new element in the film component of NOX will introduce an AI character—a guide embodying the spirit of service often projected onto AI today—who helps orient visitors within the work’s virtual world.

ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS: XI
ONGOING
assume vivid astro focus: XI is an immersive installation that transforms the gallery into a vibrant, flexible environment for performance, connection, and expression. Originally conceived in 2004, XI envelops visitors in a dynamic landscape of color, pattern, audience seating, and moving images. Continuing into its second year at The Bass, the installation will be newly activated through a series of performances, programs, and gatherings. True to avaf’s vision of art as participatory and ever-evolving, XI invites visitors to experience the work as a living stage shaped by the collective energy of all who encounter it.

Select performances and activations hosted in XI throughout the year have been envisioned and organized in collaboration with assume vivid astro focus. XI was gifted to The Bass collection by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz.

SOCIAL ASSEMBLY: THE COMMUNAL TABLE
ONGOING
Social Assembly: The Communal Table continues The Bass’s reimagining of the museum as a space for gathering, dialogue, and shared experience, first introduced with the exhibition’s previous iteration, Social Assembly: Welcome to the Museum. Installed in the Harrison Gallery, the project centers on a long, winding red table—part sculpture, part gathering place—that anchors the gallery as a communal dining room. Visitors are invited to sit, eat, cowork, and spend time informally among the exhibition’s works, using the space as a site for conversation, reflection, and connection. Throughout the year, The Communal Table will host programs, discussions, and collaborative events, further activating the museum as a lived-in, evolving space shaped by its visitors.

Look for special events and more throughout the season as The Bass continues its proud tradition of sharing powerful international contemporary art that excites, challenges, and educates audiences, bringing new perspectives to Miami Beach’s diverse cultural context.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jack Pierson: The Miami Years and Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan are curated by James Voorhies, Curator at Large. Isaac Julien: Vagabondia, Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan, The Kaleidoscopic: Writing Histories Through the Collection, Social Assembly: The Communal Table, and assume vivid astro focus: XI are curated by Claudia Mattos, Associate Curator of New Media Art. The series of performances and activations hosted in 2025-26 within assume vivid astro focus: XI are curated by Claudia Mattos, Associate Curator of New Media Art, in collaboration with assume vivid astro focus.

Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan, Isaac Julien: Vagabondia, and Lawrence Lek: NOX Pavilion are funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation New Media Initiative. The Bass is generously funded by the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and The Bass membership.