Before Rachel Feinstein walks me though her exhibition at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum, the artist is talking to me about circularity and repetitions. Specifically, the ups and downs—the building booms and busts, the trendy neighborhoods turned ghostly blocks, the placid stretches to violent storms—of South Florida.
“It’s really always changing significantly. There was a time when Miami was not doing well. They overdeveloped. But now, it’s amazing… Each generation experiences it differently, but there are moments, no matter what, when there is absolute magic.”
The exhibition, officially titled Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years, is a hauntingly paradisiacal and unapologetically personal retrospective. Its material dates from the 1990s to 2024, and while it may initially seem motley—stuffed dolphins here, melting disco balls up there, a plywood macaw nearby—there are invisible neon veins and asphalt-black arteries that bind them: a visual vascular system born of the Magic City itself.
Feinstein was raised here in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as she sees it, it’s a place, perhaps more than any other American metropolis, that’s defined by the fleetingness of its phases. It has a “weirdness that lures you in, to the point you never want to leave,” Feinstein says. (She does live in New York with her husband, the artist John Currin, and their family, but Miami is never far from mind.)
“There were very few museums, there was no ballet, there was nothing,” Feinstein, now represented by Gagosian Gallery, says of her early creative development. We’re standing in front of her newest work, a large panoramic painting titled Panorama of Miami. “It was actually kind of incredible. It was a gift. I didn’t have any intimidation from some big famous artist or institution. I never knew anything. I made work from, like, my Dad’s medical supplies.” Her immediate family worked in healthcare, and it was her grandmother who was the ancestral creative spirit: “She would vacuum in the nude.”
Feinstein is a sculptor first, and many of her sculptures are on display here. But she paints, too, and Panorama of Miami is rendered on mirrored panels that span thirty horizontal feet. It’s full of the untethered, almost day-dreamy spirit to which she speaks, featuring both Miamian stereotypes and personal memories alike.
There’s an unbranded scissor-door sports car placed near an airboat called “Kate,” named for her teenaged niece who recently passed away due to cancer. Panorama also includes Feinstein’s deceased parents’ former home, “which was sold and is about to be demolished,” her mother as a 1950s pin-up girl surrounded by parrots (Feinstein’s mom was a wild parrot conservationist), Arquitectonica’s iconic Atlantis condo (“the first cool building in Miami”), and a superyacht, “which is a weird I idea that I don’t get.” The tones are rust and gray and algal green—a kind of kaleidoscope befitting the polychrome place, but as if viewed through that super-car’s exhaust. Or, the haze of grief. “I am really aware of time right now,” says Feinstein as we reach the mural’s end. “And how I’ve lost a lot of people. And how Miami has just… become completely different.”
There is a strong, almost cyclical, link between her personal history and her work—both early and recent. One piece, Jazz Brunch (1998), is a sculpture featuring a plywood piano, palm tree and parrot. In the exhibition’s first room, there’s Super 8 footage of Feinstein’s wedding day to Currin (also in 1998), which occurred at the now defunct Parrott Jungle in Pinecrest, and where she carried a thicket of parrot tail-feathers as her bouquet. Yet Jazz Brunch, at first, was based off of Feinstein’s memories of an old South Beach club, where “a man in a leather g-string and a saddle on his back would take you around. It was really decadent.”
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Ballerina (2018) and Tourist (2018)–multihued not-quite-life size figures of melted and morphed female figures–might hold the strongest bond between the creator and her childhood confines. “I see myself on the inside very differently than what’s on the outside,” she clarifies. For better or worse, outside-versus-in is also a very Miamian topic: It’s a city that prizes the outrageously superficial, a sandbar rife with all manner of enhancements. When I was in college here at the University of Miami back in the aughts, I met someone who drove a Lamborghini but slept on an air mattress in a studio apartment. Point being: What you see on those pastel-washed streets and driving about in those six-figure cars is largely just projection, and not as postcard pretty as it all seems. Probably nowhere near it, actually.
Feinstein has recognized all of this–the ephemerality, the enthrallment, the shiftiness, the speed, the adrenaline, the insecurity and the intangible magnetism–of Miami through a prism of her own family and nostalgia in the The Miami Years. She calls it a “bittersweet” thing. I see it more as dark magic.
Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years runs until August 17, 2025. The Bass Museum will host an official opening cocktail during Art Basel Week on December 4, 2024.