Sarah Harrelson’s Artists to Watch during Miami Art Week

Between art fairs, galleries, and pop-up exhibitions, Miami Art Week brings together countless artists’ works—so it’s helpful to have a tastemaker point you in the right direction.

Ahead of the major American art world moment, we caught up with Sarah Harrelson, the founder and editor-in-chief of Cultured Magazine, to hear about the artists she’s most eager to see in Miami this year. Here, we share her picks, whose works can be found from the aisles of Art Basel and NADA to a highly anticipated solo show at ICA Miami.

 

Sasha Gordon

Works on view at ICA Miami

I’ve followed Sasha Gordon’s hyper-personal, Surrealist-tinged work since her 2021 solo show at Matthew Brown in Los Angeles. We included her in Cultured’s annual Young Artists list last year, and her star has only risen since then. Her practice mines the tradition of expressionist, figurative painting with special attention to the spectrum of emotions her experience as a young, queer Asian American woman engenders. Her first solo museum exhibition opens at the ICA Miami at the top of Art Week and will be a must-see for any lover of painting. In the presentation, she’s playing with the figure of the avatar as it relates to her hybrid identities.

 

Theresa Chromati

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Jessica Silverman, booth B1

I’ve kept tabs on the Baltimore-born and -based Theresa Chromati’s work since she burst onto the painting scene in the late 2010s, and we included her in this year’s Young Artists list. Trained as a graphic designer, Theresa’s practice centers around totemic figures that guide her and her viewer through the multilayered universe of her canvases. In recent shows at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and VETA in Madrid, she’s experimented with expanding her visual taxonomy of otherworldly beings into the sculptural realm. She’ll have a few new pieces on view at Jessica Silverman’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth this year, and also has a solo show at Dallas’s Tureen gallery until December 16th.

 

Oscar yi Hou

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with James Fuentes, booth D28

Installation view, “Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon,” at the Brooklyn Museum, October 14, 2022–September 17, 2023. Photo by Danny Perez. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.Also included on our Young Artists list this year, Oscar yi Hou is a prolific painter and poet. Born in Liverpool, U.K., and based in Brooklyn, he opened “Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon” last year at the Brooklyn Museum at age 24, making him one of the youngest artists ever to have a solo presentation in a major New York institution. That exhibition closed in September, but he’ll have works on view at James Fuentes’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth during Art Week and is currently preparing his next New York solo show with the gallery. His practice centers the “subterranean semiotics” of immigrant communities and unpacks and explodes our understandings of Asian American identities.

 

Jo Messer

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Morán Morán, booth B49

I discovered Jo Messer’s work at 56 Henry a few years ago. A bold (and humorous!) painter of the chaos and complexities attached to the female body, her delightful practice was showcased at one of my favorite places to see art in Miami—the Rubell Museum—until last month. If you missed that opportunity, she’ll have a work in Morán Morán’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth, and is preparing a solo show at the gallery’s Mexico City location next April. I’m thrilled to include her in this year’s Young Artists list; she’s definitely one of the most exciting young voices in painting today.

 

Violet Dennison

Works on view at NADA Miami with Tara Downs, booth B-211

I first encountered Violet Dennison’s work at the 2018 New Museum Triennial, “Songs for Sabotage.” For the exhibition, she installed bundles of Floridian seagrass onto the institution’s walls. Five years later, the New York–based artist is still making forceful work, although she’s turned her focus to the canvas. Violet’s recent pieces have explored Ovidian mythology and the symbology of flowers; at Jan Kaps this past summer, she showed several multipaneled paintings that filled the white cube with ecstatic bursts of color. She’s one of the 27 makers in our Young Artists list this year, and you can find her latest work in Miami at Tara Downs’s NADA booth.

 

Willa Nasatir

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Chapter NY, booth C46

On the heels of her eponymous third solo exhibition with Chapter NY, Willa Nasatir will show several new works at the gallery’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth during Art Week. A 2023 Cultured Young Artist, the painter and photographer had a solo show in 2017 at the Whitney Museum (only five years out of Cooper Union!) and has continued to unspool realms of consciousness in her practice ever since. Her almost collage-like deconstructions and compositions across both mediums have kept her on my radar throughout the years.