Before Rachel Feinstein walks me though her exhibition at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum, the artist is talking to me about circularity and repetitions. Specifically, the ups and downs—the building booms and busts, the trendy neighborhoods turned ghostly blocks, the placid stretches to violent storms—of South Florida.
“It’s really always changing significantly. There was a time when Miami was not doing well. They overdeveloped. But now, it’s amazing… Each generation experiences it differently, but there are moments, no matter what, when there is absolute magic.”
The exhibition, officially titled Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years, is a hauntingly paradisiacal and unapologetically personal retrospective. Its material dates from the 1990s to 2024, and while it may initially seem motley—stuffed dolphins here, melting disco balls up there, a plywood macaw nearby—there are invisible neon veins and asphalt-black arteries that bind them: a visual vascular system born of the Magic City itself.
Feinstein was raised here in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as she sees it, it’s a place, perhaps more than any other American metropolis, that’s defined by the fleetingness of its phases. It has a “weirdness that lures you in, to the point you never want to leave,” Feinstein says. (She does live in New York with her husband, the artist John Currin, and their family, but Miami is never far from mind.)
“There were very few museums, there was no ballet, there was nothing,” Feinstein, now represented by Gagosian Gallery, says of her early creative development. We’re standing in front of her newest work, a large panoramic painting titled Panorama of Miami. “It was actually kind of incredible. It was a gift. I didn’t have any intimidation from some big famous artist or institution. I never knew anything. I made work from, like, my Dad’s medical supplies.” Her immediate family worked in healthcare, and it was her grandmother who was the ancestral creative spirit: “She would vacuum in the nude.”
A detail from Rachel Feinstein’s A Panorama of MiamiaPhoto: Maris Hutchinson, © Rachel Feinstein, Courtesy Gagosian
