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(Photo by Lazaro Llanes)
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is presenting artist Woody De Othello’s first museum solo exhibition in his hometown, coming forth by day, on view throughout Miami Art Week and until June 28, 2026.
The exhibition showcases an entirely new body of work featuring hand-built sculptures, mosaic wall works, and a large-scale bronze sculpture. In exploring the primordial relationship between body, earth, and spirit, the immersive installation incorporates grounding materials such as clay-painted walls and subtle herbal scents.
“Recognizing the artist’s personal ties to Miami, we are particularly delighted to host Woody De Othello’s first significant museum presentation and to share his striking sensibility with our audiences near and far,” said Franklin Sirmans, Sandra and Tony Tamer Director at PAMM. “The artist’s work is a powerful reminder of how organic materials in the present can have a deep resonance with vernacular and folk cultures throughout the world in different eras of time.”
Known for his distinctive anthropomorphic forms, Othello’s practice is rooted in animating the inanimate and infusing everyday domestic objects — such as fans, faucets, phones, and televisions — with emotional and spiritual charge. These assemblages and vessels are playful — often sprouting spindly legs, elongated arms, and outsized ears — yet also take on a quiet vitality, appearing to lean, rest, and embrace as if shaped by the weight of memory and emotion.
The exhbit coming forth by day marks an evolution in Othello’s practice, deepening his engagement with diasporic spiritual traditions and metaphysical symbolism. The exhibition’s title references the ancient Egyptian funerary text “Egyptian Book of the Dead:
The Book of Coming Forth by Day” — a guide for the soul’s passage through the afterlife.
Othello invokes this mythology as a metaphor for transformation and renewal, constructing a sacred space of introspection, bridging the mundane with the spiritual, the earthly with the divine.
At the emotional apex of the exhibition stands a large-scale bronze sculpture of two embracing figures. Towering yet tender, the figures’ exaggerated proportions suggest the gravity of grief, longing, or surrender. one becomes two, two becomes one (2025) creates a culminating moment of communion and invites viewers into spaces of protection and collective emotional experience.
Surrounding the central sculpture, the gallery walls are painted in clay-colored hues and dotted with a constellation of wall-mounted ceramics and vibrantly glazed mosaics. These two-dimensional tableaux — framed in intricately carved wood — draw from Othello’s intuitive drawings, a medium he has embraced with great focus in recent years.
Across the gallery stands one of the show’s most striking elements: a freestanding wooden pyramid structure fitted with shelves that hold crystals, incense, and ceramic objects created by Othello. This altar-like installation channels a wide range of diasporic cosmologies, from Egyptian funerary architecture to Afro-Caribbean rituals and New Age mysticism.
This culmination of works invites contemplation and conjures a liminal space between life, death, and rebirth — spiritual concepts that are deeply embedded in Othello’s sculptural vocabulary. Informed by his Haitian heritage and a deep engagement with African spiritual traditions, Othello treats clay not only as a medium but as a vessel for memory, breath, and becoming. His practice acknowledges the material’s ceremonial roots and positions each object as an agent of spiritual presence.
Presented with deep intentionality, coming forth by day offers more than an exhibition. It is an invitation into a space of quiet transformation and communion, where the ordinary becomes sacred, the familiar becomes metaphysical, and the act of looking becomes a form of care.
“Woody’s return to Miami for his first major solo exhibition is profoundly meaningful,” said PAMM curator Jennifer Inacio. “coming forth by day transforms the gallery into a space of spiritual presence — where clay, bronze, and wood carry palpable emotional weight, and viewers are invited to slow down, reflect, and experience the sacred in the everyday. More than a presentation of objects, I hope visitors experience this exhibition as a ritual space where tenderness is honored, the material becomes metaphysical, and transformation quietly unfolds.”
Woody De Othello: coming forth by day is organized by Jennifer Inacio, PAMM curator, with the support of Fabiana A. Sotillo, curatorial assistant. The exhibition is presented with lead support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and supporting sponsorship from Simi Ahuja and Kumar Mahadeva, and Goldman Sachs. Additional support from Wagner Foundation, Leslie and Greg Ferrero, and Rona and Jeff Citrin is gratefully acknowledged.
Following its debut at PAMM, the exhibition will travel to the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis in the fall of 2026.
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