Art Week 2023: The Wolfsonian – FIU

Free Miami Art Week Admission

Monday, Dec. 4 – Thursday, Dec. 7 | 10 AM – 6 PM
Friday, Dec. 8 | 10 AM – 5 PM
Saturday, Dec. 9 – Sunday, Dec. 10 | 10 AM – 6 PM

• • The Big World: Alternative Landscapes in the Modern Era

The Big World, focusing on depictions of the land in The Wolfsonian’s collection, challenges expectations of landscape art as it goes beyond bucolic scenes to reveal changing vistas of the modern era rendered in paintings, the decorative arts, and even a grand piano. The exhibition charts a course through the end of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th, presenting the story of global growth and shifting ideas about the world around us—from pristine nature, to its radical alteration in modern urban and industrial centers, to panoramas ruined by war and environmental disregard.

• • Harry Clarke and the Geneva Window

Widely regarded as his most important and controversial commission, Harry Clarke’s stained-glass masterpiece, the Geneva Window, is again on view at The Wolfsonian–FIU. An internationally renowned Irish artist, Clarke was commissioned in 1926 by the newly independent Irish Free State to create a window as a gift to the League of Nations in Geneva. The completed window was, however, rejected—labeled too provocative and “unrepresentative” of the Irish people. This new installation sheds light on the life and times of Harry Clarke, the stories behind the window, and the consequences of cultural censorship.

• • Silhouettes: Image and Word in the Harlem Renaissance

The flourishing of literary, visual, and musical arts between the 1920s and ’40s known as the Harlem Renaissance projected a new picture of Black life to the world. Silhouettes: Image and Word in the Harlem Renaissance considers the role of art in this movement, paying special attention to collaboration between artists and writers on illustrated books—works that reached a broad audience with stories and images that challenged demeaning stereotypes and asserted African Americans’ capacity for self-determination.

• • All the World’s a Stage: The Sketchbooks and Theatrical Designs of Albert Wainwright

Early 20th-century British artist Albert Wainwright fused modernist artistic influences with personal travel observations to produce striking costumes and sets for theaters in his native county of Yorkshire, England. All the World’s a Stage gathers a small selection of his sketches and drawings, and demonstrates Wainwright’s interest in the regional fashions, local characters, city views, and landscapes that made his visits memorable and that offered creative fodder for his work.

• • Bridge Deconstruction Site

The Department of Reflection, a collaborative creative organization led by Miami-based artist misael soto, uses The Wolfsonian–FIU’s Bridge Tender House as the foundation for a special public installation involving community and student-submitted work inspired by bridges. Originally located at Northwest 27th Avenue on the Miami River—and now part of the museum’s collection—the streetside Art Deco architectural structure has played muse to the Department of Reflection and their phased, multi-person creative investigation into infrastructure, bridges, and related political, social, and ethnographic phenomena.

• • The Breath Eaters

An animated contemporary work by new media artists Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz, The Breath Eaters visualizes CO2 pollutants and other greenhouse gasses produced by wildfire and fossil fuel plant emissions. A globe demonstrates how pollution is carried into the high atmosphere and across the earth on currents of air.