Each December, during Miami Art Week, Miami Beach becomes the epicenter of the art world, with roughly 1,200 galleries exhibiting work by thousands of artists. This year, Gato Gordo Gallery is pulling art lovers into Liberty City for a one-night Basel event featuring new work by two community members.
Founder and multidisciplinary artist Inna Malostovker and Oscar Esteban Martinez set out to provide a community-oriented art experience when they opened Gato Gordo’s main gallery and art academy in Liberty City. “We don’t want to be another white-wall gallery where people are scared and uncomfortable stepping in,” Malostovker said.
An undated photo of the Gato Gordo Gallery in Miami. The gallery is feature two Liberty City artists as its featured Art Basel exhibition. (Photo/Great Miami Convention & Visitor’s Bureau)
The gallery has become a cultural engine for Liberty City, bringing in diverse artwork and artists, including iconic ant sculptures by Colombian artist Julián Cerón Bolaños. “We don’t specialize in one thing. We have artists from a lot of different countries. We have emerging artists and really well-known ones,” Malostovker said.
For 2025 Miami Art Week, Gato Gordo Gallery focused its special Basel exhibition on two artists: rising Haitian painter and filmmaker Thalia Bouchereau and Miami-based educator and visual storyteller Dinah Dorvil.
Bouchereau, known for her acrylic abstractions and arresting portraiture of Black bodies, broke new ground this year with Blue Boy, a short poetry film that traces a young man’s coming-of-age. The film is being shown at 6 p.m. tonight (Friday) at the gallery, which is at 4700 NW 7th Ave.
“She used to draw as a child and now she paints. She doesn’t have a lot of work, but it’s striking,” the gallery noted. “We’ve worked together on a couple of exhibits and thought her work would be a perfect complement to this show.”
The gallery also features Dorvil’s Finding Light in the Void, an intimate visual narrative that blends image, sound and reflection to explore how loss reshapes us and how resilience guides us back to ourselves.
Both artists are part of the “Voices of Resilience” exhibition, which celebrates art as a bridge between diverse cultures and showcases creators from the United States, Canada, Colombia, Russia and Haiti. The exhibition runs until Jan. 8.
Artist Thalia Bouchereau with one of her works. (Photo/Instagram)
Gabriela dos Santos is a reporter for Key Biscayne Independent. She is a Brazilian-American writer from South Florida who holds a B.A. in English Literature from Florida Atlantic University. Her writing ranges from sociocultural essays to poetry to independent journalism, and she has been featured in Voyage MIA and Shoutout Miami as one of South Florida’s inspiring voices.