Rachel Feinstein Returns To Miami For Her Local Solo Exhibition

Rachel Feinstein’s Miami-debut exhibition reflects the Magic City’s culture, influences and ironies.

Rachel Feinstein, “Forest Flat” (1999) PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE MIMA & CESAR REYES COLLECTION AND THE ARTIST

In 1972, Rachel Feinstein’s family relocated from Fort Defiance, Arizona, to Miami for her father’s University of Miami medical residency. Like many teens, Feinstein left to pursue advanced studies, graduating from New York’s Columbia University in 1993. Inspired by celebrated female artists such as Kiki Smith, Carol Schneemann and Judy Pfaff, Feinstein developed her sculptural language by exploring fantasies and their precarious relationship to artifice. Her first 1999 solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, where she worked as a receptionist, set the stage for a celebrated career—supplemented by her standout fashionable flair (she had previously modeled in Miami) and marriage to fellow famed artist John Currin.

Rachel Feinstein, “Hawaiian Wedding” (1999). PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE RUBELL MUSEUM COLLECTION AND THE ARTIST

Feinstein returns for her first local solo exhibition, The Miami Years, on view at The Bass Museum of Art from Sept. 25, 2024-Aug. 17, 2025. Three decades of work highlight the artist’s unbounded sculptural practice integrating painting, video and her notable mirror interventions.

Feinstein’s life-size figurines “Ballerina” (2018) and “Tourist” (2018) recall traditional commemorative statues, yet articulate unapologetic female protagonists. A newly commissioned 30-foot mirrored diorama, “Panorama of Miami” (2024), shows fantastical lush landscapes meeting photographs and illustrations of iconic sites. In a Florida-kitsch style milieu, “Hawaiian Wedding” (1999), soft-toy black dolphins jump over morphed human skin-toned appendages and beaded neon-green seaweed in an enticing, humorous and uncertain situation.

Rachel Feinstein works in her New York studio. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Informed by Miami formally and aesthetically, The Miami Years is Rachel Feinstein’s inspired reinterpretation of the familiar and wonderfully peculiar.