The Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33139
Sep 25, 2024 – Aug 17, 2025
By Yvonne Owens
The exhibition was approached through a dark green entrance hall transformed by Rachel Feinstein into an encompassing art installation. Old Cutler (2024) is a new site-specific work commissioned by the Bass, drawing inspiration from an archival photograph of the historic thoroughfare. As viewers entered into Feinstein’s rendering of a dark, lush landscape, the entry hall gave the sense of a verdant mystical threshold experience. Journeying through the liminal space beckons the viewer into a place where (as the curatorial statement promises), “…beauty and fantasy veil potential danger and unease.” Old Cutler is the portal by which we begin to encounter the vital, indecent, burgeoning bud and bubbling rot of Feinstein’s memorial vision. The old Miami two-lane highway is lined with heavily wooded areas and mangrove jungles, reminiscent of the forbidding forests that traditionally serve as the backdrops for the darkest of fairytales. The fronds and vines and coiling, waterborne banyan trees tower and loom in a glimmering light effect.
My own memories of the historic road are triggered by the ‘sense-surround’ effect of the wallpaper piece. At certain times of year, hordes of giant blue land crabs would migrate across Old Cutler. Claws raised, waving defiantly at the oncoming cars, they were on a mission, travelling inland to mate. Then, job done, the survivors would journey back again like a diminished army returning home, battered and scarred, sometimes with claws missing entirely. At other times, droves of giant toads could be seen hopping across the thoroughfare on their mysterious missions, en masse. The squashed remains of all manner of wild creatures would regularly coat the old country road, violently contrasting the aspirational splendour of the luxurious Deering family’s private estates that once inhabited the stretches of mangrove forest between Old Cutler and the sea (now converted into public gardens and museums). At night, the heady odours of night-blooming Jasmine, ever vying with those of vegetal rot and still darker, more fleshly decay, scented the air. The dense green growth serves as the backdrop for a phantasmagorical scene, like a surreal suburban diorama from a David Lynch movie, accented with trademark grisly and macabre close-ups. And now, of course, there are giant pythons to consider.
Resident in New York since the early 1990s, Rachel Feinstein is best known for her baroque, fantasy-inspired sculptures and haunting fantasy realist paintings. With over two dozen group and solo showings of her work in the United States, Europe, and Asia, she was most recently featured in a thirty-year retrospective survey exhibition at the Miami Bass Museum of Art. Titled “The Miami Years,” the show focused on her experience of having grown up in America’s tropical playground during the 1970s and 80s. Fantastical and mythical and fey in the telling, the story the show relates is part memoir, part wonder tale—part homage and part beautiful freak out in response to the surreality of coming of age in Miami. “Since it’s a museum show, it has almost all borrowed older works. It’s based on my growing up in Miami, so anything related to that.” In the current show, as in a fairytale, all the elements and elementals of Feinstein’s remembered Miami dream landscape are weighing in—its landmarks, bizarre creatures, underworld denizens, and freaky lushness. Children in idyllic sub-tropical ocean-girt settings swim with dolphins. Florida kids laugh in the face of dire peril and swim with sharks, cottonmouths, barracuda, and alligators. Unsuccessful Miami wannabe drug lords swim with the fishes, though everyone in America’s Disney-esque playground nowadays struggles to keep their head above water.
Amid a virulent miasma of political chaos, agricultural chemical run-off, toxic algae bloom infestation, and leaky decommissioned nuclear reactors (with the retired Turkey Point Energy Plant as a perfect example), the Miami scene may look idyllic. It might seem All-American, possibly even somewhat decorous on the surface, but a close-up will take you under the surface into a simmering underworld forged primarily of paradox. Wildness and decadence, amorality and innocence, sex and crime, drama and burlesque, wonder and threat exist side-by-side in equal measure in Feinstein’s vision. Extraordinary beauty and stygian grotesques vie for one’s complete attention, constantly. Growing up in 1980s Miami, the young Feinstein acted out artistically. For her medically inspired wearable art designs, she took alginate impressions of her vulva, cast them in various materials, and wore the resulting jewelry around the house. In a precocious blossoming of what would later become a performance art-based practice, she also wore them to school, to the mall, and to family dinners. Her fascination with the beautiful/terrible before-and-after photos of repaired accident victims and sequential images of remedial dermatological results, lavishly illustrated in her father’s medical books, emerged later in multi-disciplinary photo series and sculptures. Fairytale themes emerged in beguiling (if somewhat disturbing) performance art pieces. As an emerging artist, Feinstein created short films that can be described as both whimsical and terrifying.
Attributing the wild inventiveness of her vision to the freedoms allowed for by the near anarchy of the city’s cultural stew, Feinstein regards growing up in Miami during the 1980s and 90s as key to her artistry and imagination. She describes the beauties and the grotesqueries, cultural deprivations and social endowments alike, as boons to her darkly exotic imaginarium.“Growing up in Florida as we did, we were able to breathe as young people,” she said to me, “…it was such a lawless and fruitful time. Like the American West.” Like children in a prairie town bordering on a desert wasteland, we who grew up in Miami contemplated a vast, primordial, untrammelled space to stretch into, conceptually. A place where we could expect our voices would emerge unhindered, to grow unique and resonant—perhaps not to be ‘heard’ so much, as to echo back to us, enlarged. Only ours was different than the arid Western movie wilderness. It was one of sea, and Everglades, and social free-fall. A cultural and environmental mosh pit.
Feinstein’s exhibition includes another new site-specific commission by the Bass—a massive thirty-foot-long installation of painted mirrored wall panels, titled Panorama of Miami (2024). The mural reimagines the iconic landmarks, roadside tourist attractions, and historic locales of Miami as a rolling landscape of towering aspirations and faded glory. Contrasting the kitschiness and lux of the famed tourist Mecca, the painting includes images redolent of Old Miami and the burgeoning 20th-century tourist resort. The Vizcaya mansion (once the centrepiece of a wholly apocryphal story about how it was built as a marriage gift for a Spanish princess who never arrived, breaking the heart and spirit of the would-be groom), the Serpentarium road-side attraction (the founder of which, Bill Haas, died in 2011 at the age of one hundred years, attributing his longevity to the scores of venomous snake bites he’d endured), the Parrot Jungle (escapees from which flocked hammocks, orchards and backyards across Miami), the iconic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables (which, when it was built in 1926, held the twin distinctions of having the tallest tower in Florida, modelled on the medieval tower of the Cathedral of Seville, and the biggest pool in the world, where Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller gave swimming lessons) –all make an appearance. The Venetian Pool, the Hotel Breakwater on South Beach’s Ocean Drive, the Atlantis Condominium featured in Miami Vice, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens, and the Seaquarium also feature in Feinstein’s memorial to Miami’s storied past.
One of Feinstein’s traditional vanitas signifiers is the image of the typically hastily erected, carelessly designed faux-historic mini-mansion as an icon of conspicuous consumption. Architectural follies such as these tend to advertise newly acquired fortunes, garnered from licit or not-so-licit means, and have infiltrated old and established neighbourhoods throughout the Miami area. They cropped up with irritating frequency near Feinstein’s family home in Coral Gables, but can also be seen on Miami Beach, embedded in the stretches of mangrove forest between Old Cutler Road and the Atlantic, and amid the tropical hardwood hammock of Coconut Grove. They receive their rightful pillorying in Feinstein’s representations of the satirical “McMansions” as vain spectacle and vulgar display. Another of Feinstein’s signature motifs is the gleaming, luxury collector car icon. The car images have been part of her specialized visual vocabulary since her 2018 “Secrets” solo exhibition at Gagosian in Los Angeles. Her brilliantly polychromed, classically posturing Victoria’s Secret “Angel” sculptures also made their debut in that show. They show up here as the perfect exemplars of Miami fashion, transience, and ephemerality.
My Miami childhood experience took place roughly two decades earlier than Feinstein’s, during the 1960s. There was no resident opera guild or ballet company. You’d have to wait for ABT or New York City Ballet to come to town (which they did only once or twice a year) and put up a show at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. During my teenage-to-early-adulthood tenure, my art club friends and I would drive regularly to Key Biscayne on school nights to skinny dip in the balmy waters off the pristine, private, white sand hotel beach. Richard Nixon was known to hang with well-known gangster, Bebe Rebozo, at the Key Biscayne Hotel of an evening. They’d get drunk together in the lounge, sing Frank Sinatra songs at the grand piano (which Nixon would play—quite well, apparently), get maudlin, talk about invading Cuba, and fantasize about assassinating Castro. (We can assume Rebozo’s organized crime-affiliated enterprises in Cuba took a hit from Castro’s Communist takeover.) Every other fledgling millionaire with a Donzi outboard ‘cigar boat’ pulled up on a trailer in their “McMansion” driveway was a drug dealer, wallowing in cocaine and armed to the teeth. The lively, lawless vibe of Miami was tangible, visceral—an integral part of the texture of the place. Feinstein’s fond memorial to her youthful haunts in the fabled, bizarre ‘Magic City’ serves as the sentinel of a bygone Miami, one receding ever more rapidly into a copper-tinted, lachrymose haze.
In the past, the artist’s singular approach has landed on topics of: Women; women as witches; feminism; Victoria’s Secret models and their milieu; fairytales and their influential, ancient narratives; Los Angelinos’ vanities, excesses, and conceits; and the magic and psychology of mirrors in art and history. Among the many subjects of her penetrating, fond and unsparing gaze, Feinstein’s take on Miami-of-the-past reimagines it as the bygone wild frontier of human behaviour—of angelic aspirations and primal impulses in America’s haunted playground. The cars, the McMansions, and the Victoria’s Secret fashion model-inspired sculptures function as vanitas cyphers and memento mori insignia for a disappeared world.