Queer Artists Highlighted at 2020 Miami Art Week

The Betsy Hotel South Beach, Miami’s high-end LGBTQ+ friendly beachfront hotel in the heart of the Art Deco District has just unveiled ten new art exhibitions and two outdoor public installations in time for Miami Art Week (Art Basel Miami Beach has gone digital this year).

One of the artists featured at The Betsy this year is gay Latinx artist Carlos Betancourt (art work above). Betancourt was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico 1966. The  multi-disciplinary artist's work explores issues of memory, identity, and personal experience through re-examinationation, recycling, and reinterpreting the past. His work also explores multi-racial, multi-lingual, and trans-national Caribbean and American culture.

Another artist exhibiting at the Betsy isn't queer himself but has a asethetic that has earned him the nickname "the Andy Warhol of Marrakech." Born in Larache, Morocco Hassan Hajjaj immigrated to London when he was 12. His latest exhibit “My Rock Stars” is an eclectic collection of portraits featuring performers in sculptured frames with Moroccan-infused multiculturalism. 

Example of Hassan Hajjaj's artwork (but not part of the current exhibition)

Docent tours are available at The Betsy (with masks and social distancing) and the exhibition spaces will welcome guests when the hotel reopens on December 18, 2020. The installations will be in place through the 2020-21 season.

Other queer creators who will be featured as part of the Miami Art Week or Art Basel include Geovanna Gonzalez and Jeffrey Gibson.

Oolite Arts presents Geovanna Gonzalez’s “Transformation and Futility: a queer deconstruction of space,” (below) a series of works that reflect on transmutation and perception. The artist is interested in past and present, ideas and feelings, human and nonhumans, and how those things morph and meld.

Gonzalez’s sculptures of oxidized steel, acrylic glass, and wood; capture glimpses of what happens in a fleeting moment when there is a state of change. The works offer diagrams of gender representation, sexuality, and desire. 

On December 6th Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at the Florida International University  hosts its annual outdoor Art Week Breakfast in the Park (virtually this year) featuring a lecture with 2019 MacArthur “Genius” grant winner Jeffrey Gibson, who incorporates traditions of his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage with contemporary and queer themes. 

Work by Jeffrey Gibson at the Frost Art Musuem.