“It’s my third rodeo,” says Gartenfeld, who also oversaw the move to their temporary space in North Miami in 2014 and the design of the permanent residence in Miami’s Design District, which opened in 2017. The expansion’s main goals are to showcase more of the permanent collection and to further support performance and film programming. “We’re just excited to amplify,” he added. “No anxieties.”
There’s also no architect attached to the project yet. Gartenfeld maintains he’s as eager as everyone else to learn who it will be: “I assure you, no secrets.”
Tuesday’s opening saw the museum packed with locals and out of towners alike, one of the major kick-off events of the city’s infamous fair-driven art week. The new shows by Humeau, Bull, and Shilun complemented two other exhibitions which had opened a couple weeks prior, both revisiting bold colorful graphics of the postwar period. On the first floor, there is a small survey of geometric paintings and sculptures from the 1960s by the Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim, who passed away in 1991. Arguably the main attraction, however, is a comprehensive retrospective of Tokyo-born Keiichi Tanaami’s work, titled Memory Collage, a first U.S. solo museum exhibition by the artist who passed away earlier this year.
“We were surprised, perhaps naively,” said Gartenfeld who’d begun working on the show with Tanaami before his passing. “I thought he was in perfect health.” Curated by Gartenfeld and Gean Moreno, the ICA Miami’s Director of the Art + Research Center, the Tanaami show spans the kaleidoscopic Pop master’s paintings, sculptures, collages, and avant-garde films with works from 1965 to 2024. “It’s a really cool responsibility to show Tanaami’s work at this moment,” Gartenfeld added.
There are threads of fantastical psychedelia between Tanaami’s pop culture-infused oeuvre, Humeau’s alien yet earthy sculpture, and Bull’s hyper-swirl colorful abstract painting, all on view until the end of March. “I was thrilled when I found out Marguerite was also having a show,” said Los Angeles-based Bull, whose U.S. museum debut “The Garden of Forking Paths” includes a 30-foot-long vertical painting in the museum’s stairwell. She was equally excited by Tanaami’s work, which she discovered through their concurrent programming, gushing: “They’re so dense, those collages!”
During its ten-year span, the ICA Miami has established itself as a place of discovery and also recovery, balancing both taste-making sensibilities and a keen attention to significant yet under-recognized artist legacies. At the opening Tuesday, Miami artist and nonprofit director Naomi Fisher emphasized the rigor that drives the ICA Miami team’s curatorial practice. “Judy Chicago and Betye Saar were iconic thorough shows about feminist heroes who are finally getting their due,” she said recalling the ICA Miami’s Chicago retrospective which opened in 2018 and Saar’s rarely-exhibited site-specific installations from the 1980s and 90s which opened in 2021. “I like that their program is so global and smart and researched, with still so much beauty. And grounded locally,” added Fisher, whose own work is represented in the ICA Miami’s permanent collection.
Gartenfeld explains the core curatorial team has been together a long time, with Moreno and assistant curator Amanda Morgan both having strong ties to the local community. Moreno, an important voice in art theory globally, originally hails from Colombia but has lived in Miami for decades while Morgan is Miami born and raised. The core team also includes Stephanie Seidel, the Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, who came to Miami from Dusseldorf for the job nine years ago. “Each of us brings different particular modes of research,” explained Gartenfeld. Today, the ICA Miami acquired a work by Kim Farkas from Tara Downs gallery at NADA as well as Jin Han Lee work from the artist’s solo booth with Union Pacific at Art Basel fair.
In addition to the exhibitions by Humeau, Bull, Shilun, Valentim, and Tanaami, on Tuesday, gallerygoers were greeted by works on display from the museum’s permanent collection, including a 2001 technicolor dollhouse by Laurie Simmons and architect Peter Wheelwright, Kaleidoscope House. (Nearby in the Design District the work has also been recreated at larger scale for a new interactive public installation, The Kaleidoscope (…Bigger) House.) On the museum’s first floor, the retro model house sits next to a band of mannequins by John Miller, the respective feminist camp and prominence of wigs both reminiscent of another standout show at the recent ICA Miami from recent memory: “Alex Bag: The Van (Redux)*” which opened in 2015. In addition to being well-researched and rigorous, the ICA Miami’s program and collection is not allergic to weirdness or humor.
We don’t know exactly when expansion will be concluded and the new additional space will be open to the public. Not before the end of 2025 Gartenfield explains. But what we can look forward to is more ICA Miami—including more room for new media, live arts, educational initiatives, and greater opportunity to showcase what the museum has collected that’s often not on display for the public right now. “It’s an incredible story that’s being told through the collection,” said Gartenfeld.
