what not to miss in and out of the fairs

DESIGNBOOM guide to miami art week 2025

 

Art and design lovers from around the globe are heading to Florida for Miami Art & Design Week, one of the coastal city‘s most coveted annual events. From December 2nd — 7th, Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami take center stage, opening their doors to collectors and enthusiasts alike. With perfect weather in the forecast and a lineup that blends world-class art fairs, public activations, exhibitions, and parties, the Magic City transforms into the ultimate creative hub. Whether you’re here for the fairs, the city-wide art installations, or the museum exhibitions, this guide has everything you need to make the most of Miami Art & Design Week 2025.

 

 

The FAIRS

 

Art Basel Miami Beach

 

Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 brings together 283 galleries from 43 countries, reinforcing the fair’s role as a global gateway to the Americas and a major platform for artistic production across Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The fair features a strong showing from the Americas — more than two-thirds of participating galleries operate in the region — alongside a major international presence of blue-chip dealers and influential contemporary spaces. Across its sectors, visitors will find major solo and historical presentations, emerging voices, and experimental practices.

 

what: Art Basel Miami Beach

where: Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach

when: December 3rd — 4th, 2025 (VIP preview), December 5th — 7th, 2025 (public) 

Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. Lee ShinJa, Tina Kim Gallery. courtesy of Art Basel

 

 

Design Miami/

 

Design Miami celebrates its 20th anniversary year with a Miami Beach edition built around the theme Make. Believe., spotlighting design as a space where skilled craft and imaginative projection meet. The fair brings over 70 international exhibitors, including more than 25 debuts, and launches its first-ever Title Partnership with Bank of America Private Bank, marking a new chapter for the platform. Curatorial director Glenn Adamson leads the anniversary program, including Design Miami 2.0, a special project featuring eight standout contemporary designers and signaling the fair’s future direction.

 

what: Design Miami
where: Pride Park, Convention Center Drive & 19th St., Miami Beach
when: December 2nd, 2025 (VIP preview), December 3rd — December 7th, 2025 (public)

image courtesy Design Miami

 

 

Untitled Art

 

Leading contemporary art fair Untitled Art, Miami Beach announces exhibitors and a new Guest Curators program, ushering in a more collaborative and dynamic curatorial approach for its 14th edition. This year, Untitled Art, Miami Beach will feature 160 exhibitors. Comprised of galleries and non-profit organizations from 29 countries and territories, the 2025 edition spans participants from over 70 cities worldwide.

 

what: Untitled Art Fair

where: South Beach at 12th Street and Ocean Drive

when: December 2nd, 2025 (VIP preview), December 3rd — 7th, 2025 (public)

Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2024, Image by World Red Eye @worldredeye

 

 

Alcova Miami

 

Alcova returns for its third Miami edition, once again transforming the historic Miami River Inn, the city’s oldest hotel and a serene, palm-shaded counterpoint to Miami Art Week’s intensity. Building on the success of last year’s edition, the 1908 pastel-colored Victorian boarding house will host a new constellation of projects and site-specific installations that engage directly with its courtyards and timber interiors.

 

In keeping with Alcova’s curatorial ethos, the venue becomes a layered narrative and guides visitors through a sequence of intuitive, atmospheric encounters with work by visionary, forward-thinking designers. This way, the contemplative and slow-paced oasis offers one of Miami Art Week’s most immersive design experiences.

 

what: Alcova Miami

where: River Inn, 437 SW 2nd Street, Miami

when: December 2nd — 7th, 2025

image courtesy Alcova

 

 

MUSEUMS

 

 

Pérez Art Museum Miami

 

Miami-born artist Woody De Othello unveils ‘coming forth by day,’ an immersive installation of ceramic and wood sculptures, tiled wall works, and a major new bronze that examines the primordial ties between body, earth, and spirit.

 

Infused with grounding materials — including clay-painted walls and subtle herbal scents — the exhibition draws from precolonial and diasporic African traditions, referencing nkisi power figures, Dogon ritual forms, and Egyptian pyramids.

 

Othello’s anthropomorphic sculptures, known for their lush glazes and hand-built tactility, animate everyday objects such as clocks, mirrors, and vessels, blurring the boundary between body and thing to illuminate the emotional and unseen forces that shape daily life.

 

what: Woody De Othello: coming forth by day

where: Pérez Art Museum Miami

when: November 13th, 2025 — June 28th, 2026

installation view: Woody De Othello: coming forth by day, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2025-26. photo: Lazaro Llanes

 

 

MOCA North Miami, Hiba Schahbaz

 

‘Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden’ is the first major retrospective of the Pakistani-American artist, spanning fifteen years of work and gathering her recurring motifs — global allegory, a feminist gaze, and fantastical beings moving through elemental worlds shaped by both nature and architecture.

 

Conceptually anchored in the idea of the jannat, or ‘Paradise Garden,’ the exhibition draws from Islamic and Sufi traditions while resonating with global notions of gardens as spaces of refuge, abundance, and transcendence. Its curatorial structure echoes the ‘char-bagh,’ the quadrilateral garden plans of Persian and Mughal landscapes, used here as a poetic navigational framework rather than a prescriptive layout.

 

Informed by Schahbaz’s training in Indo-Persian miniature painting, the exhibition reflects her contemporary reimagining of historical aesthetics through a feminist lens, while also engaging Miami’s lush horticultural culture and diasporic traditions of communal tending. 

 

what: Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden

where: MOCA North Miami, 770 NE 125th St, North Miami

when: November 5th, 2025 — March 16th, 2026