Miami Design District has a robust lineup of new exhibitions, workshops and installations for September.
Here are a few we are checking out.
“Melissa Wallen: you are not an island.”
Opens Thursday, Sept. 4 through Thursday, Sept. 25 at 151 NE 41St., Suite 129, Miami.
Melissa Wallen’s paintings open onto spaces where color collides and disperses, placing viewers at the edge of what can be seen and sensed. Her canvases remain unsettled: gestures layered, surfaces shifting, forms never fixed.
Their register extends outward, evoking celestial markers, natural phenomena, and states of desire and procession.
Melissa Wallen, "Procession 2024," 32 x 40 inches, oil on linen
“you are not an island” presents painting as an open condition. In Wallen’s work, color generates form through relation rather than isolation, offering painting as a site of connection that exceeds its surface.
Melissa Wallen (b. 1987, Voorhees, New Jersey) lives and works in Miami, Florida. She received a BFA in Painting and Fibers from Florida International University (2010). Her practice spans painting, collage, video, and curatorial projects. Wallen is drawn to thresholds; between material and immaterial, analog and digital, public and personal.
“Luna Palazzolo-Daboul: Scattered Pieces.” Opens Thursday, Sept. 4 through Tuesday, Sept. 30 at 151 NE 41St., Suite 129, Miami.
“Scattered Pieces” is a site-specific installation by Miami-based artist Luna Palazzolo-Daboul, presenting her body of work as an archive and constellation.
For her debut solo in the Miami Design District, Palazzolo-Daboul engages Robert Morris’s critical 1968–69 Scatter Piece, a floor installation of dispersed industrial fragments, and reimagines its logic through her own production.
For her debut solo in the Miami Design District, Luna Palazzolo-Daboul engages Robert Morris's critical 1968–69 Scatter Piece, a floor installation of dispersed industrial fragments, and reimagines its logic through her own production.
Where Morris privileged chance and anti-form, Palazzolo-Daboul introduces structure, intimacy, and memory.
The work is composed of fragments drawn from the last six years of her practice—finished works, remnants, and new objects—arranged across the room’s floor.
Each element bears the persistence of labor and the intimacy of devotion, transforming the act of scattering into a deliberate reconfiguration. By inserting her own material history into this lineage, Palazzolo-Daboul complicates a canon that has too often excluded women’s voices, proposing scattering as a constellation, and both an act of disruption and belonging.
Ad Minoliti: “Pink Spatial Microbiota.” Permanent Exhibition Opens Friday, Sept. 26.
The Miami Design District will debut a new permanent site-specific commission by internationally acclaimed Argentine artist Ad Minoliti (b. 1980) - marking the artist’s first major project in Miami. “Pink Spatial Microbiota” transforms the four-story stairwell of MDD’s Buick Building, 3841 NE 2nd Ave., into a surreal “digestive tube,” animated by playful, geometric figures.
Drawing inspiration from the microbiota that live inside all bodies, Minoliti reimagines the building itself as a non-binary organism, infusing Latin American avant-garde traditions with humor, subversion, and a distinctly queer perspective.
The permanent work, debuting Friday, Sept. 26, will be viewable by appointment only.
Ad Minolit will also be at Dale Zine Shop from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24 for the opening of their first-ever Miami exhibition at Dale Zine, 50 NE 40th St., Miami.
The artist will lead a workshop on zines and present a new limited edition of prints.
For information about art in the Miami Design District, go to https://www.miamidesigndistrict.com/district-art/
