Design Miami 2022: galleries and exhibits to add to your cultural calendar this year

The lush and vibrant city of Miami, with its ever-present gushes of humid air that caress the land that reaches out to meet the rich blue sea, is one of the world’s most popular tourist locations. Teeming with picturesque subtropical landscapes, the city offers a lot more than a mere holiday destination. Design Miami, a global forum for design, comes about as a testimony of the growing cultural and creative richness of the metropolis. Design Miami 2022—the 18th iteration of the design festival—brings designers, curators, critics, and gallerists from around the world under one roof, exhibiting and celebrating collectable design. Inspired by this year’s theme, The Golden Age: Looking to the Future, the highly anticipated design event will take place from November 30 to December 4, 2022. “We’re filled with excitement for the 18th edition of our Miami Beach fair. We look forward to welcoming a brilliant line-up of new and returning exhibitors across our gallery, Curio and partner programs, whose presentations are set to inspire and delight audiences both in person and across our digital programming. We look forward to sharing exciting previews over the coming months,” says Jen Roberts, CEO of Design Miami.

Nearly 50 gallery and Curio presentations will feature furniture design, lighting design and art objects across the event in conjunction with an array of cultural programmes including lectures, panel discussions and networking sessions surrounding architecture, music, film and design. STIR enlists the gallery presentations that will headline the festival experience ahead of Design Miami 2022 and its accompanying design fairs.

1. Gallery FUMI

Gallery FUMI, a UK-based design gallery founded by Sam Pratt and Valerio Capo in 2008, rarely ever fails to propagate their singular vision of design—unique aesthetics, a curiosity about materials, and playful attitudes toward object-making. The unadulterated power of objects to carry narratives and ideas is the protagonist in their pieces, which are usually handmade using traditional techniques, embodying the value of craftsmanship. Gallery FUMI will take the stage during Design Miami 2022 with a selection of new pieces including several of its latest creations in bronze. The presentation will encompass furniture designs, table design, chair design, stool design, and benches amongst others, sculptural vases and an array of sculptural objects. Designers such as Francesco Perini, Voukenas Petrides, Max Lamb, and Casey McCafferty will partake in the stirring showcase at the Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, USA.

2. Hostler Burrows

Carrying a legacy of Nordic design and decorative arts, Hostler Burrows joins the design festival with an ensemble of new works. Founded in 1998 by Juliet Burrows and Kim Hostler, the design gallery has built a strong reputation in the design community with its programme and a full roster of contemporary artists, both established and emerging, as well as historical works. Although global in vision, the gallery focuses the spotlight on Scandinavian design and is rooted in the tradition of studio ceramics, particularly work by female artists. During Design Miami 2022, the New York-based gallery will exhibit new creations by Jasmin Anoschkin, Jenny Nordberg, Gal Gaon, and Egeværk in Booth G29.

3. Jason Jacques Gallery

Jason Jacques Gallery is all set to partake in the 18th edition of Design Miami with its troupe of moss people. The American contemporary art gallery specialises in artists working in clay; over the thirty years of its presence, the gallery has made its mark building museum collections of late 19th century European Art Pottery and gained acclaim for exhibiting influential international contemporary ceramic artists. Spotlighting Kim Simonsson’s ‘Moss People,’ now reimagined as towering, monumental Moss Giants, the New York-based art gallery will lead the viewers into a fairytale-like world. Now standing at 5 metres tall, Simonsson’s Moss Giants push the boundaries of fabrication to create monumental versions of these iconic designs. Simonsson infuses great sensitivity into his clay work, which is all handcrafted in the artist's studio.

4. Southern Guild

Southern Guild will make a return to Design Miami with Inkundla, an exhibition of handcrafted furniture and objects presented in an imagined domestic environment. The works, which are rich in physicality and form, are linked by a strong sense of materiality and an exploration of spiritual themes. The booth of the Cape Town-based gallery will feature specially commissioned pieces by 16 of South Africa’s most seminal artists and designers, including ceramicists Zizipho Poswa, Andile Dyalvane, and Madoda Fani; internationally renowned artists Nandipha Mnthambo, Porky Hefer and Rich Mnisi; design duo Dokter and Misses, and sculptor Stanislaw Trzebinski. Beyond the literal translation of ‘arena’ or ‘court,’ Inkundla is a derivative of the Xhosa term for the area at the forefront of a homestead’s cattle enclosure— a communal space for the interchanging of ideas, the mundane unwinding, and the welcoming of all people.

5. Mercado Moderno

Bringing Brazilian creatives to the forefront is the Brazil-based design gallery Mercado Moderno. The gallery has played a pivotal role in the recent revival of appreciation for modern Brazilian furniture. Its foundation, in 2001, coincided with the moment when, after two decades of exile, a historical review of works produced in Brazil between the 1940s and 1970s began. Along this journey, the gallery has also built a rapport with leading names in contemporary Brazilian design production, and represents some of the most creative and consistent initiatives in this segment. Rigorous investigative work resides at the core of the gallery’s operations, still the daily routine for its founders, Alberto Vicente and Marcelo Vasconcellos. The gallery will unveil a series of new works at Design Miami 2022, reiterating their expertise in mid-century and contemporary Brazilian design.

6. Nilufar Gallery

Nilufar Gallery will narrate new stories through the dialogue of contemporary design and collectable pieces. Since the 2000s, Nilufar has been home to experiments and ‘cross-contamination’ exhibitions, enhancing the gallery’s reputation as an international reference point for historical and contemporary design lovers. For the latest edition of Design Miami, Nilufar Gallery will unveil the works of Audrey Large and Khaled El Mays. Vacillating between art and design, Large’s practice explores the potential of digital image manipulation to design our material surroundings. Riding the wave of exponential digitisation, her practice is an interdisciplinary form of design that employs digital cinema and image theory to fuel her design methodologies. Large will present her collection dubbed Afterglow, while the Beirut-based multidisciplinary studio helmed by Mays will display the Lotus series.

7. Objective Gallery

Objective Gallery fosters a narrative environment in which art and design are approached in a personal and collaborative manner. Bringing together artists and designers to create collections of functional yet elegant furniture, lighting, art, and lifestyle objects, the gallery, housed within a historic building on Shanghai's Bund in China, is set to present Reincarnation: New objects old soul at Design Miami 2022. The multi-disciplinary gallery will showcase works by designers such as Charlotte Kingsnorth, Nicholas Devlin, J McDonald, Manu Bano, and Vincent Pocsik.