designboom’s guide to miami art & design week 2025: 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.

image © Aurora Kreativ Space

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

installation view, Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden. images by Zachary Balber

El Espacio 23

El Espacio 23 debuts its sixth exhibition, ‘A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible: Territory Narratives’ in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection. The show is curated by MACBA’s Claudia Segura Campins in collaboration with EE23 curators Patricia Hanna and Anelys Alvarez.

Featuring nearly 150 works by more than 100 artists from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and beyond, the show explores territory as both a physical and symbolic landscape shaped by memory, migration, and ecology.

The exhibition positions ‘territory’ as a living, dynamic force, and invites visitors to rethink belonging and identity through painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations.

what: A World Far Away, Nearby, and Invisible

where: El Espacio 23

when: November 20th, 2025

El Espacio 23, ‘A World Far Away, Nearby, and Invisible’, Thomson Mungo, Red Wave, 2024

Bass Museum of Art

Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan stages an intimate, material-driven encounter between new work by Sarah Crowner and the museum’s monumental ceramic mural by Etel Adnan — the only example of its kind in the United States.

Sarah Crowner, known for her geometric abstraction across painting, sculpture, and design, constructs a semicircular carpeted alcove — a ‘faire foyer,’ or welcoming threshold — that frames Etel Adnan’s radiant mural. Within this setting, Crowner installs her reflective bronze ‘stones,’ cast from enlarged beach pebbles, whose surfaces reflect the mural’s color and the viewer’s movement.

what: Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan

where: Bass Museum of Art

when: August 20th, 2025 — July 26th, 2026

installation view, Faire Foyer. image courtesy The Bass Museum of Art

HOTEL ACTIVATIONS

Andaz Miami Beach

For Miami Art Week 2025, We Are Ona teams up with Andaz Miami Beach and Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis for an immersive, multi-day culinary installation. The project unites Marcelis’s luminous, material-driven design language with menu curation by the José Andrés Group.

Sabine Marcelis collaborates with SolidNature on custom stone tables and Bocci on atmospheric lighting, extending her ongoing exploration of transparency and material depth first developed in their partnership during Milan Design Week 2023 (see designboom’s coverage here).

what: We Are Ona at Andaz Miami Beach with

who: We Are Ona, Sabine Marcelis, José Andrés Group, SolidNature

where: Andaz Miami Beach

when: December 1st — December 4th, 2025

WE ARE ONA + Sabine Marcelis and SolidNature in collaboration with Andaz Miami Beach, José Andrés Group

Faena Miami Beach

For its tenth anniversary in Miami Beach, Faena Art will present Es Devlin’s Library of Us, a fifty-foot rotating, illuminated library installed on Faena Beach and free to the public. The large-scale kinetic sculpture is shaped as a triangular bookshelf holding 2,500 books that have influenced the British artist’s thinking. It revolves within a circular reflecting pool and collective reading table, creating a space for shared encounters with text and with other visitors.

Inside Faena Cathedral, Devlin will extend the project with Reading Room, while additional drawings and glass works appear in the Faena Project Room. Throughout the week, programming will include talks, readings, performances, and workshops, and at the close of the installation all 2,500 books will be donated to libraries and schools across Miami.

what: Library of Us by Es Devlin

where: Faena Miami Beach, 3201 Collins Ave, Miami Beach

when: December 2nd — 7th, 2025

Library of Us, visualization courtesy Es Devlin

1 Hotel

1 Hotel South Beach presents a collection of seven monumental, site-responsive installations by Brooklyn-based kinetic and data artist BREAKFAST, curated by NicoleMarie Advisory. Unfolding across the hotel’s facade, lobby, and beachfront, the presentation transforms live environmental data into kinetic sculptures that render climate change newly visible.

Along the entrance, the 20-foot-wide Carbon Wake visualizes real-time global carbon emissions as shifting ripples across a gold-mirrored surface, while lobby works including Antarctic Ice, Water 80, and the new Climate Shift series translate oceanic patterns, melting ice, and human heat signatures into movement and light. On the beachfront, Consumption responds to live waste and production metrics with an unsettling choreography that accelerates and contracts with global demand.

what: BREAKFAST at 1 Hotel

where: 1 Hotel South Beach, 2341 Collins Ave, Miami Beach

when: December 2nd — 8th, 2025

BREAKFAST, Antarctic Ice, 2025

Miami Beach EDITION

Sabine Marcelis brings an expanded version of her Jelly Floats installation — first introduced at The Lake Como EDITION (see here) — to the pool at The Miami Beach EDITION for Miami Art Week 2025. The project, which reimagines the pool as an environment shaped by form, color, and interaction, will culminate in an evening gathering centered around the installation.

what: Jelly Floats by Sabine Marcelis

where: Tropicale at The Miami Beach EDITION

when: December 5th, 2025

Sabine Marcelis x The Lake Como EDITION, image © The Lake Como EDITION

The Standard Spa

Moooi, the luxury design brand by Marcel Wanders, unveils a new collaboration with The Standard Spa, Miami Beach, transforming five of the hotel’s premiere rooms each into a unique, ‘immersive sensory suite.’ From furniture, carpets, and wallcoverings to scent, bath, bedding, and curated gifts, Themed rooms include Milk and Cookies, Evergreen Dream, Electric Lounge, Earthly Delights, and Curiosity Cabinet.

The partnership also reimagines The Standard’s lobby, where Moooi debuts the Introvert Chair, the first furniture design by Robbie Williams. The chair is designed as a soothing place for introspection within a public setting, reflecting the artist’s exploration of emotion and creative sanctuary.

what: Moooi at The Standard

where: The Standard Spa, Miami Beach

when: November 28th — December 7th (lobby), October 31st — January 4th (rooms)

The Introvert Chair, visualization courtesy Moooi

Café Standard

For Miami Art Week, Gantri makes its debut at The Standard Spa, Miami Beach with a playful, vintage-inspired photobooth takeover inside Café Standard. Illuminated by a curated selection of the California-based brand’s sustainably made, digitally manufactured lights, the pop-up offers guests a warm, inviting glow and a moment of levity amid the intensity of the week’s programming—introducing Gantri’s design ethos through an intimate, nostalgic experience.

what: Gantri Photobooth at The Standard

where: Café Standard at The Standard Spa, Miami Beach

when: December 2nd — December 6th, 2025

Gantri at The Standard Spa, Miami Beach, visualization courtesy Gantri

The Shelborne By Proper

Pilar Zeta is set to unveil The Observer Effect on the beach at The Shelborne by Proper, on view from sunrise to sunset. The iridescent, monumental installation invites visitors into a field of symbolic portals where light, color, and shifting perception ‘fuse the self, nature, and architectural space.’

Through its archetypal forms and chromatic prism, the sculpture creates a bridge between the tangible and the immaterial. This echoes Zeta’s practice, which blends philosophy, mysticism, symbolism, and postmodern architectural language into contemplative worlds.

what: The Observer Effect by Pilar Zeta

where: The Shelborne By Proper, 1801 Collins Ave, Miami Beach

when: December 2nd — December 7th

The Observer Effect, visualization courtesy Pilar Zeta

What not to miss

REEFLINE

REEFLINE, a new underwater public sculpture park and hybrid reef off Miami Beach — conceived by Ximena Caminos and masterplanned with OMA / Shohei Shigematsu — is combining art and ecological restoration to create new marine habitats off the Miami Beach coastline. See designboom’s coverage of the Miami Reef Star prototypes here!

For Miami Art Week 2025, REEFLINE debuts a series of on-water and on-land activations, including a large meditation buoy by Andrés Reisinger marking the site of Concrete Coral, which visitors can reach by swimming or with custom BMW x SipaBoards electric paddleboards collected from REEFLINE’s 9th Street headquarters.

Additional programming centers on the Floating Marine Learning Center — a dive boat and research platform offering coral-restoration education and conversations with artists, scientists, and divers — with special appearances by Leandro Erlich and legendary ocean explorer Dr. Sylvia Earle, with two-hour excursions departing from Miami Beach Marina. Booking is available here!

what: REEFLINE Art and Science Dives

where: Miami Beach

when: December 1st — 5th, 2025

Concrete Coral by Leandro Erlich. courtesy Christopher Uriarte and REEFLINE

DUAL Pavilion by Pininfarina

Pininfarina will present DUAL, an experimental pavilion developed with additive-manufacturing firm Alpha Additive, at Alcova Miami during Miami Art Week 2025. First shown at ACADIA 2025, the project examines how intuition and computation — along with other often-separated modes such as emotion and reason or art and science — can operate together rather than in opposition.

Constructed from recycled car tires using Alpha Additive’s custom 3D-printing technology, DUAL pairs an aerodynamic exterior shaped as a single monocoque shell with an interior defined by parametric logic and environmental responsiveness. The design follows DFMA principles to emphasize material efficiency and circularity, thus inviting visitors to consider how industrial processes and computational tools can inform in contemporary design practice.

what: DUAL Pavilion by Pininfarina

where: Alcova Miami, 437 SW 2nd Street, Miami

when: December 2nd — 7th, 2025

DUAL Pavilion, image courtesy Pininfarina

Technogym: DESIGN TO MOVE

Technogym brings its DESIGN TO MOVE exhibition to the States for the first time at Design Miami 2025, displaying a curated selection of five artist- and designer-reimagined Technogym Benches. The presentation features art direction by Giulio Cappellini and is curated by Bruna Roccasalva.

Unique interpretations of the bench have been designed by Patricia Urquiola, Nendo, Walter De Silva & Mario Antonioli, Gustavo Martini, and Michele Bönan. From Urquiola’s sculptural Cimento-based Rocky Bench to Bönan’s carbon-fiber and natural-leather hybrid, the designs celebrate the intersection of wellness and craft. 

what: Technogym: DESIGN TO MOVE

where: Design Miami, Convention Center Drive & 19th St., Miami Beach

when: December 2nd — 7th, 2025

Patricia Urquiola’s ‘Rocky Bench’, image courtesy Patricia Urquiola

Ruinart’s Conversations with Nature

Maison Ruinart continues its long-running Conversations with Nature art program at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 with a new commission by Sam Falls. The artist’s elemental, site-responsive paintings are created directly with plants, weather, sunlight, and time.

Informed by his immersion in Ruinart’s historic Taissy vineyard in Champagne, Falls’s works — botanical ‘portraits’ made with local flowers, leaves, branches, and pigments reacting to humidity — reflect the vineyard’s ecology and Ruinart’s commitment to sustainable viticulture.

The compositions further draw inspiration from regional architecture, including the stained-glass windows of Reims Cathedral and the arched vaults of Ruinart’s chalk cellars.

what: Ruinart’s Conversations with Nature, Sam Falls

where: Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami Beach Convention Center

when: December 5th — 7th, 2025

Ruinart, Carte Blanche, image © Alice Jacquemin

Cartier Flagship

The renovated Cartier flagship has opened in the Miami’s Design District just in time for Miami Art Week 2025. Its new facade has been conceived by Diller Scofidio and Renfro, and its comprehensive renovation and interior design is realized by Laura Gonzales. The building’s undulating glass carries a rhythm that catches the changing light and suggests a sense of motion. Across the curved surface, a delicate pattern has been translated from a 1909 Cartier brooch. It appears and disappears with each shift in sun or shadow, softening the boundary between interior and exterior.

Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio and Renfro, describes the facade as a surface ‘to draw in passersby while knitting together the store and the street.’ The resulting skin is at once transparent and veiled. It extends an invitation while preserving a sense of privacy. 

what: Cartier Miami Flagship Opening

where: 147 NE 39th Street, Miami Design District

images courtesy Diller Scofidio and Renfro

‘The Art of Tomatini’ with Antonio Aricò

LPM Restaurant & Bar, Miami partners with cultural platform D’Puglia and Italian artist-designer Antonio Aricò to present The Art of Tomatini, a restaurant activation inspired by LPM’s iconic cocktail. The collaboration extends the drink’s spirit and color into a suite of bespoke objects, including hand-illustrated napkins, sculptural pepper grinders, ceramic plates, and coasters.

Aricò’s creations will animate the restaurant’s interior and culminate in a custom series of plates installed on LPM’s signature art wall, activating its gallery of whimsical Côte d’Azur–inflected works.

what: The Art of Tomatini by Antonio Aricò

where: LPM Miami Restaurant & Bar

when: December 2nd — December 19th

Cocktail Napkin, Antonio Aricò, The Art of Tomatini

Range Rover: Dipped in Black

At Design Miami 2025, Range Rover unveils the all-new Range Rover SV Black with an immersive ‘Dipped in Black’ installation marking the vehicle’s North American debut. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, the experience positions the SUV as a modernist design object.

The Range Rover will be surrounded with ‘world-first Sensory Floor technology with haptic feedback,’ a curated selection of design pieces, a bespoke soundscape by studio Father, and a luxury fragrance experience by Aeir.

The brand will also host a panel in the Design Miami Talks Theater on December 3rd, moderated by Curatorial Director Glenn Adamson, to explore modernist principles and Range Rover’s role at the intersection of automotive design and contemporary art.

what: Range Rover: Dipped in Black

where: Design Miami, Convention Center Drive & 19th St., Miami Beach

when: December 2nd — 7th, 2025

Range Rover SV Black, image courtesy Design Miami

Dream by David Rockwell x Roche Bobois

The Dream collection brings together the perspectives of architect David Rockwell, founder of Rockwell Group, and French furniture company Roche Bobois. During Miami Art Week 2025, the Roche Bobois Miami showroom will present the collection in a setting designed to highlight its emphasis on sculptural seating, rounded forms, and a calm, understated atmosphere.

The line includes sofas, coffee tables, and rugs characterized by soft, organic shapes. The sofa’s smooth contours recall the simplicity of a naturally weathered stone, while its textured fabric shifts in tone depending on the light and angle of view.

what: Dream by David Rockwell x Roche Bobois

where: Roche Bobois Miami Showroom, 3454 Biscayne Blvd, Miami

when: December 4th, 2025, 10am — 6pm

Dream collection, image courtesy Roche Bobois

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