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Winter in Miami is coming. We may not need shovels, but soon many of us will spend more time indoors than in the glorious outdoors we take for granted from November through early May. Most of what we love about our cultural life – the festivals, the concerts, the neighborhood art walks, cafe life, the serendipity – thrives in the dry season: GEMS, iiiPoints, Miami Book Fair, Art Week, ULTRA, the Canes, March Madness, the World Baseball Classic, and more than one Messi miracle. Now one of the final celebrations of spring, the Miami Film Festival, has passed.
April in Miami can feel a little like Pennsylvania’s Groundhog Day – you look outside and try to guess whether we’ll get another month of nice weather or immediately slide into the steam room. Once hurricane season arrives, our outdoor splendor retreats. Artistically, navigating this becomes more complicated. So let’s look at what’s happening inside this summer – the places where the AC works, the roofs don’t leak (usually), and the art still insists on being seen.
The biggest headline is at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols opens June 25, a compact but potent exhibition of nine paintings and one sculpture from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection. For that loan, Griffin deserves credit.
But that’s where the credit ends. Miami rarely gets Basquiat, and it’s telling that when we finally do, it arrives through the filter of one of the wealthiest men in America. Griffin’s expanding footprint in Miami – real estate, philanthropy, cultural influence – is impossible to ignore. Some people may applaud it. Others, myself included, feel the familiar tightening that comes when private wealth positions itself as a reputation laundering arbiter of public culture. I can admire the art while questioning the machinery that delivers it.
So let me add perspective: if I cleared a million dollars a year, it would take me about 50,800 years to match Griffin’s fortune – longer than human civilization has existed. It would take me roughly 508,000 years to match Ken Griffin’s fortune if I cleared $100,000 a year. This illustrates the absurdity of private wealth acting as a cultural gatekeeper and not taxing it properly.
Let’s be honest: Basquiat would not have approved nor appreciated this arrangement. His career was a critique of the forces that now package and present him – the exploitation of Black creativity, the commodification of artists, the violence of wealth and power, the erasure of marginalized people, the hypocrisy of elite cultural institutions, the way capitalism absorbs and sanitizes rebellion. Basquiat painted AGAINST erasure; Miami keeps handing an eraser to whoever can afford a penthouse. The irony is almost perfect: a painter who fought the system arrives in Miami courtesy of someone who owns it.
To complete the picture, the museum’s announcement of Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols does not list any special free‑admission provisions. It’s presented as a major show timed with the World Cup, supported by loans from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection, but with no indication of waived entry fees. Art for the people – access priced by the penthouse. Miami deserves Basquiat; what we don’t deserve is this billionaire era that curates civic life and reshapes it from the penthouse down. That’s not cultural stewardship. It’s leverage.
Still, the work is Basquiat – unmistakably. Go see it, and keep your eyes open.
Summer in Miami tests our patience – with the heat, the storms, the traffic, the developers who believe God helps those who help themselves (and so they help themselves). But art remains one of the few places where the public good still feels possible. Indoors, away from the humidity and the noise, Miami’s museums and galleries offer something rare: reflection. Inside our cultural spaces, at least for a moment, we can remember that ambition doesn’t have to mean erasure – and that beauty, unlike naming rights, doesn’t change every three years. And if Basquiat teaches us anything, it’s that the people who draw the lines decide what disappears – and the least we can do is notice who’s holding the pen.
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