Miami Art Week is a party-packed twilight zone in which the worlds of fashion, art and entertainment converge on the tip of the Florida peninsula. It goes without saying that any event which brings waves of tech money, art world cognoscenti, fashion crowds, and nightlife seekers together will bristle with absurdity and spectacle. Here, we bring you the highlights from the art scene’s moment in the sun.
The Low-Brow Instagram Spectacle
Artificial intelligence was everywhere this year, from the monolithic Refik Anadol screen standing in the ICA courtyard to Marco Brambilla’s A.I.-generated After Utopia installation at the Wolfsonian. But the work that truly conquered the Internet was Beeple’s Regular Animals, 2025, shown as part of Art Basel’s new Zero 10 sector for digital art. It featured a dozen or so flesh-colored robot dogs with the disturbingly realistic faces of various billionaires and artists, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Pablo Picasso, wandering around inside a glass pen. I stepped inside the installation for a few minutes to chat with the artist, and felt like I was picking out an ugly new puppy. 
The Heaviest Traffic Jam
During fair week, traffic from Miami to Miami Beach is always bumper to bumper. In Leandro Erlich’s new sculptural installation, 20 cars made of marine-grade concrete sit at the bottom of Biscayne Bay, where traffic’s not moving at all. The Argentine artist’s untitled piece is the first installment of the Reefline project, a planned seven-mile underwater sculpture garden where living coral will eventually thrive. This week, visitors bored by all the art on dry land had the opportunity to accompany Reefline’s team on a diving and snorkeling tour of the project.
The Hottest Commission
Paseo Ponti, at the heart of the Miami Design District, is luxury row—brands like Dior and Hermès cluster there, nestled in architectural marvels. The promenade’s annual public art commission this year went to Katie Stout, who installed “Gargantua’s Thumb,” a series of clay figures including a mermaid, a crab, a pony. The artist made the original pieces in miniature before scanning and scaling them—imperfections, finger indentations, and all—to life size.
The Crowd Favorite
Think of Sukeban, the heavily stylized Japanese women’s wrestling league, as a total reimagining of the fashion show concept. The ring becomes the runway, a stage to showcase S&M- and anime-inspired costumes from the Parisian brand Olympia Le-Tan. The models are highly adept at half-nelsons and piledrivers. On Wednesday, the perennial crowd pleaser returned to art week at the Miami Beach Bandshell, where Ichigo Sayaka brought home the Marc Newson-designed champion belt.
The Most Wholesome Meal
After subsisting for several days on light bites and standing dinners, the annual Cultivist lunch offered the rare opportunity to sit down for a proper meal: wine, salmon and chocolate cake with crystal-blue views off of the 1 Hotel’s Ocean Terrace. The artist of the hour was Kennedy Yanko, with various well-known friends alongside—Mickalene Thomas, Shinique Smith, Hugh Hayden, Hank Willis Thomas and Kat Olschbaur among them. After dessert, tipsy creatives were left to talk business strategy, with the most empowered words of wisdom coming from Senegalese French artist Alexandre Diop. “I’m 30 now. I have nothing left to lose.” 
The Craziest Door
The basement of The Edition reprised its perennial role as the place to be, with Parisian nightclub Silencio taking over nightly Tuesday through Friday. The highlight was arguably Yves Tumor’s night-one set, which a friend summed up thusly: “The old people were gagging (derogatory) but the young people were gagged (complimentary).”
The ‘High-Brow’ Instagram Spectacle
In collaboration with Faena, acclaimed set designer Es Devlin delivered The Library of Us, a beachfront installation showcasing 2,500 titles that the Bristol University English major deems as formative, including works by Jane Austen, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. The books are arranged by color on a 20-foot-tall, triangular bookshelf that rotates at the center of the installation, surrounded by a pool of water. At night, the pool reflects the towering illuminated shelf, creating the illusion of distant ships cutting across the water. 
The Coolest Group Show
“That Was Then, This is Now,” curated by Jeffrey Deitch director William Croghan, highlights 25 young artists from overlapping social circles to capture a moment in contemporary culture. Highlights include work by an LA contingent including Mario Ayala, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.,and Michael Alvarez, whose works zero in on textures of the Southern California landscape. A personal highlight was the artists doing surprising things with materials—Lindsay Lou Howard’s iconoclastic ceramics (particularly her buttery-yellow homages to the great American county fair) or Adrian Schachter’s cosmic imagery digitally printed on cashmere. I asked Jeffrey if we’d see him at Coachella again this year, but he’s still TBD.
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