SEP 25, 2024 – AUG 17, 2025

The Bass Museum of Art announces a new exhibition as part of the 2024-2025 fall season, Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years, on view September 25, 2024, through August 17, 2025.

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years spans almost three decades of work by the New York–based artist and is her first major exhibition in her hometown. Displaying Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approaches to sculpture—which have encompassed 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 societal factors that shape human behavior and female identity.

Feinstein has often created enveloping environments that serve as exhibition scenography, at times incorporating wallpaper into her projects. The works in the exhibition showcase the artist’s recurring use of scenography, specifically the theatrical flat as a form that both exposes and reinforces the notion and structures of artifice and 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.  

Feinstein’s exhibition includes a new site-specific commission Panorama of Miami (2024), a massive installation of painted mirrored wall panels spanning thirty feet, where the artist explores how Americans and U.S. society absorb and appropriate European culture. Akin to the eighteenth-century panoramic wallpapers developed by Jean Zuber and Joseph Dufour, this modern-day tropical setting pictures the Miami region with its contradictory marks of sophistication and decadence, exuberance and decay. The architectural assemblages merge space and time with architectural styles culled from local history, from the Hotel Breakwater on South Beach’s Ocean Drive, to the Atlantis Condominium of Miami Vice fame, to the original Parrot Jungle, Miami Seaquarium, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, the Biltmore Hotel, and the long-closed Miami Serpentarium. 

Feinstein has often created enveloping environments that serve as exhibition scenography, at times incorporating wallpaper into her projects. Old Cutler (2024) is another new site-specific work commissioned by the Bass on view in the exhibition. Here viewers step into the representation of a lush landscape, initially rendered in charcoal on paper and then transformed into this room-scale wallpaper. Its design draws from an archival photograph of Old Cutler Road, a historic, banyan-lined thoroughfare in Miami intimately associated with Feinstein’s memories of growing up in South Florida.  

Feinstein’s vision of Old Cutler straddles a balance between enchanted and troubling, reminiscent of the foreboding dark forests that often serve as backdrops for fairytales and folk stories. The towering trees, thick brush, and twilight conjure a landscape brimming with the capacity for transformation, where beauty and fantasy veil potential danger and unease. Welcoming visitors into the exhibition, the work functions as a kind of liminal space between the exterior and the artist’s interior world.  

With fragmentation echoing throughout Feinstein’s artmaking practices, The Miami Years is Feinstein’s first exhibition to consider the underlying impact of South Florida’s collective imagination and extreme realities on her rich and sweeping. The artist wields a spectrum of cultural, social, aesthetic and art historical references—from eighteenth-century rococo paintings by 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.