As part of our 2026 Guide to the Arts in PRIME Magazine, entertainment writer Phillip Valys offers his Critic’s Picks for the best visual arts exhibits coming up in South Florida. Want to see the full issue? Go to SunSentinel.com/prime.
‘This Land We Share: Celebrating 250 Years of America’
Through Nov. 30, 2026, at Big Cypress Gallery, 52388 Tamiami Trail E., Ochopee, 239-695-2428, ClydeButcher.com/exhibits
With his trademark silver beard and infinite patience, guardian of the swamp Clyde Butcher has lived in and photographed Florida’s Everglades for decades, always in black-and-white, always up close. The conservationist icon is known for wading into the grassy marshes and water lilies of Big Cypress National Preserve with his large-format cameras, cowboy hat and khakis, waiting until the sun catches the banyan trees just right to capture the quiet power of nature’s glory. But in “This Land We Share,” a new survey honoring America’s 250th anniversary, the 84-year-old trades the swampland for the nation’s forests, coastlines, wetlands, mountains and deserts. Here, we see a skylight from the floor of Arizona’s Antelope Canyon, the fog-shrouded forests over Idaho’s Redfish Lake, dark clouds gathering over South Dakota’s Badlands, and the summit of El Capitan framed behind Californian trees. The show is on view at Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery on Tamiami Trail in Ochopee (about an hour west of Miami), which is a worthy trek into nature for breathtakingly epic images filled with gratitude for the country’s unspoiled wilderness.
Collection NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Gift of Joel Meyerowitz / Courtesy
“The North Wall, New York City, 2001″ is featured in “Joel Meyerowitz: Aftermath,” on view through February at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. (Collection NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Gift of Joel Meyerowitz/Courtesy)
‘Joel Meyerowitz: Aftermath’
Through Feb. 14, 2027, at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, 954-525-5500, NSUArtMuseum.org
In the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mayor Rudy Giuliani shut down the Ground Zero site to everyone except emergency personnel. After persistent negotiation with city officials, New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz was let in to document the mass of rubble, broken buildings, steel and glass. The result are thousands of agile photographs of destruction and heroic recovery, all painterly and dutifully somber like the moment he’s capturing, which have been culled to 28 large-scale images now on display at the NSU Art Museum. Versions of Meyerowitz’s “Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive” have been touring globally since 2002. But these 28 particular photos are part of a donation that Meyerowitz made to the museum in 2025 to teach new generations about resiliency and healing after national trauma.
Pérez Art Museum Miami / Courtesy
Pérez Art Museum Miami is showing “Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” through June 2027. (Pérez Art Museum Miami/Courtesy)
‘Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols’
Through June 6, 2027, at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, 305-375-3000, PAMM.org
Billed as the largest showing of Basquiats in Florida, this showcase features 10 massive masterworks from the late urban-art eccentric whose celebrity and visual style exploded in the 1980s before his death, at age 27, in 1988. Anti-capitalist visions of racial identity, class and urban street life are common themes in these paintings, which remix comic books, graffiti, corporate logos, hip-hop aesthetics and fashion. All 10 works — nine canvases and a sculpture — are on loan from Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge-fund billionaire who bought them over the past six years and estimates their combined value at $500 million. They include “Pez Dispenser,” a 1984 painting of a crown-wearing dinosaur, and “Untitled,” a graffiti-inspired skull that, according to the online art market Artnet, Griffin snagged for $200 million alone.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucas Foglia / Courtesy
“Treasure Island” (2020) is featured in “Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb,” opening this fall at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucas Foglia/Courtesy)
‘Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb’
Oct. 31, 2026-March 14, 2027 at Norton Museum of Art, 1450 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, 561-832-5196, Norton.org
For more than 50 years, Mimi Plumb has cultivated a sense of doom with her images of social strife, environmental emergencies, and the anxieties of a world falling apart. In her photographs, the instability is never in your face; it lurks slightly out of frame, brimming with tension. And now, many decades of Plumb’s work (1972-2025) have been collected for “Blazing Light,” a new 100-photo touring show full of clear-eyed visions burning with prophesy. Just look, for example, at “Treasure Island” (2020), where a colonial mansion resembles a fragile dollhouse under the looping concrete of a freeway overpass. Or “Traveling to the Receding Lake II” (2022), where young girls tow a cooler and an inflatable to a near-dry lakebed in the middle of a drought. Or look further back in Plumb’s career to “Crowd and Fire” (1976), where bystanders climb rocks to glimpse a distant fire — a scene that underscores her consistent focus on showing a country out of balance.
AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
Robots in the likeness of Elon Musk, foreground, and Jeff Bezos, left, are displayed at the installation titled “Regular Animals” by the artist Beeple, which was a viral hit when it debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Art Basel Miami Beach/Miami Art Week
Dec. 4-6 at Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, 786-276-2600, ArtBasel.com/Miami-Beach
In case you think only multimillionaire art collectors go to Art Basel anymore, think again: Huge crowds gathered for Beeple’s “Regular Animals” in 2025, a point made virally clear by the multitudes of social videos of flesh-colored robot dogs rumbling in the ring wearing the lifelike faces of personalities including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. (The dogs snapped images of the masses and “pooped” out original artworks.) Still, veteran art-crawlers know the granddaddy art fair, returning with 250-plus galleries this year, is just the tip of the Miami Art Week iceberg. The many satellite fairs and pop-ups swooping into Miami’s orbit during the week of Art Basel are also intoxicating, soul-nourishing and often much wilder than a pack of dogs with tech billionaire masks.
Gonzalo Fuenmayor and Dot FiftyOne Gallery / Courtesy
Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s charcoal-on-paper work, “The Slip,” is part of his “Lights, Camera, Bananas! The Spectacle of Politics” exhibition, headed to the Boca Raton Museum of Art in 2027. (Gonzalo Fuenmayor and Dot FiftyOne Gallery/Courtesy)
‘Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Lights, Camera, Bananas! The Spectacle of Politics’
April 24, 2027-Oct. 3, 2027, at Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton, 561-392-2500, BocaMuseum.org
Let’s just say banana-themed artworks have kind of a controversial track record in this region. They’re controversial for Gonzalo Fuenmayor, too. In his charcoal drawings, he uses bananas as shorthand for the Western history of Latin-American stereotypes and tropical excess, evoking depictions of Carmen Miranda wearing fruit hats in old Hollywood films and the cartoon Miss Chiquita in modern brand marketing. A Miami-based artist born in Colombia, Fuenmayor’s new show is full of bananas (and humor and political satire), blended with Tinseltown sheen. “Lights, Camera, Bananas!” unspools like a Hollywood movie, with drawings that include “The Slip” (2022), showing a banana peel, a stage curtain and someone slipping offstage; and “Apocalypse Magnus,” a gaudy chandelier crowned with bunches of, well, you know.
Woody Walters for Clyde Butcher / Courtesy
Florida Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher’s “This Land We Share: Celebrating 250 Years of America” is on display at his Big Cypress Gallery in Ochopee. (Woody Walters for Clyde Butcher/Courtesy)