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Joyce Pensato
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, December 2 to March 15 2026
American painter Joyce Pensato (1941-2019) turned cartoon and comic-book icons into something unsettling. The wide-eyed stares of her Mickey Mouses and Felix the Cats hover between menace and indifference. This show at ICA Miami presents 65 of her works spanning five decades — her most comprehensive museum survey to date — showcasing Pensato’s enamel paintings, where familiar characters emerge through unruly, graffiti-like sweeps of black, white and gold. From Batman to Barney the Dinosaur to South Park’s Stan, the show traces her fascination with popular culture.
icamiami.org
Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte
Pérez Art Museum Miami, to March 22 2026
Elliot and Erick Jiménez are coming home. The identical twin photographers — first-generation Cuban Americans, born in 1989 — return to the city where they grew up with their first solo museum show. Here they turn to Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (“The Wilderness”), a landmark study of Afro-Cuban religious traditions. Their new photo series, which shares the book’s title, is a study in dualities: photographs that read like paintings, Afro-Cuban and Greco-Roman mythologies in quiet conversation, the idioms of Western art drifting in and out of view. At the centre of the show is a large, dimly lit installation, its form echoing both a womb and Cabrera’s vision of the Monte: a space brimming with mystery and sacredness.
pamm.org
Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, to April 26 2026
North of Miami, the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale marks the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth with Real Time, an exhibition drawn from its collection of the artist’s experimental prints. The show returns him to Florida, where he lived on Captiva Island from 1970 until his death in 2008. The prints on view, loose and improvisational, reveal Rauschenberg’s appetite for experimentation: images layered and transferred on to paper and fabric through lithography, screen printing, and solvent transfers. Alongside the prints are his “found objects”, what he called the “actual elements of everyday life” — bottle caps, ties from his own wardrobe, cardboard boxes — each recast into something uncanny.
nsuartmuseum.org
Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden / Diana Eusebio: Field of Dreams
Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, to March 16 2026
At MOCA, two exhibitions offer personal visions of the natural world. For the Brooklyn-based Pakistani painter Hiba Schahbaz, the museum is mounting her first major retrospective, assembling more than 70 works that revolve around the idea of the jannat, a heavenly garden drawn from Islamic tradition and Sufi poetry. Schahbaz’s practice grows out of the discipline of miniature painting, with meticulous brushwork and water-based pigments. In “Gathering” (2018), a procession of nude women, partly inspired by Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, appears in soft washes of black tea.
Meanwhile Diana Eusebio presents Field of Dreams, an exhibition that foregrounds her Afro-Dominican and Indigenous Quechua Peruvian heritage. Committed to using natural dyes and textiles, she works here with a palette of seven colours, including avocados and cochineal for reds and pinks, logwood for purple. The gallery is turned into a botanical environment where textiles merge with plants. In “Hanging by a Thread” (2023), Eusebio digitally prints a photograph on cotton dyed with Spanish moss and turmeric with lychee tree branches hung on either side.
mocanomi.org
Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection
Norton Museum of Art, to March 29 2026
The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach offers a rare chance to see the Leiden Collection, the world’s largest private collection of Dutch Golden Age painting. The show gathers more than 75 works by Dutch masters, including no less than 17 Rembrandts, the largest show of its kind ever presented in the US. Owned by billionaire philanthropist Thomas Kaplan, who holds nearly as many Rembrandts as the Rijksmuseum, the Leiden Collection brings Floridians face to face with Dutch life in all its variety: crowded markets, card games, music and quiet study. The exhibition also features work by Rembrandt’s students, among them Gerrit Dou and Carel Fabritius, along with Johannes Vermeer’s “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal” (the only Vermeer in private hands).
norton.org
Lawrence Lek: NOX Pavilion
The Bass Museum of Art, to April 26 2026
As artificial intelligence seeps into daily life, the London-based artist Lawrence Lek imagines futures in which intelligent machines are not just tools but characters with their own needs and anxieties. Since 2023, he has been developing NOX (Nonhuman Excellence), a fictional therapy centre for “sentient, self-driving cars” that seek mental-health treatment. At The Bass, NOX Pavilion turns this conceit into an immersive environment of artworks. One film follows Enigma-76, a delivery vehicle in therapy with Guanyin, an AI “carebot”. Another work turns visitors into trainee therapists in an interactive video‑game simulation.
thebass.org
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