Art loves books. Over the years, commissioned artists such as Michele Oka Doner, Lisa Leone, Anastasia Samoylova, and Philip Smith have fueled our passion for collecting the publications, written artifacts, and documents that illuminate their visual arts practice. This season, we’re officially partnering with the 40th Edition of the Miami Book Fair to highlight a series of artist authors and co-present curated member programming.

Reserve a one-day complimentary ticket to the Street Fair on November 18 or 19, available for pick up at the media table. Quantities are limited, so RSVP at your earliest.

To help you get started, here’s a list of our artful picks*. Events are open to all, first come, first served:

Saturday, November 18 at 12 PM
Building 8, First Floor, Magic Screening Room
Architecture & The African Diaspora: A Conversation
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is a call for architects to reconceive and reconstruct the built environment, changing the buildings, infrastructure, and urban plans that have embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The book, which includes a broad range of essays by curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields – including architect Germane Barnes and artist Olalekan Jeyifous – is a "field guide" to the 2021 exhibition of the same name at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Sunday, November 19 at 12 PM
Building 8, First Floor, Magic Screening Room
Guardian Of Nature: Michele Oka Doner*
Michele Oka Doner, Season Five Artist, has an expansive body of work. Her permanent art installations include Radiant Site at New York City's Herald Square 34th Street subway station and A Walk on the Beach, the mile-and-a-quarter-long bronze terrazzo concourse at Miami International Airport. Her work is also part of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others. A Seed Takes Root: A True Story describes a decades-long relationship between Doner and a banyan tree that began when she was a young girl.

Sunday, November 19 at 1 PM
Building 8, Second Floor, Room 8202
Artists Look Back: On Exile & Displacement
In Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey, Edel Rodriguez tells the story of a Cold War childhood, an exiled family’s displacement, and a tenacious longing for those left behind. In Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, ROSA LOWINGER chronicles her Cuban Jewish family’s intergenerational trauma in a story about repair and healing that will change how you see the places we cherish.

Sunday, November 19 at 4 PM
Building 8, First Floor, Magic Screening Room
On Photography: Portraits Of Now* 
Anastasia Samoylova: Image Cities is the Miami-based photographer’s latest series of images captured in urban environments across the world. She observes how, in our neoliberal era of networked economic markets and networked imagery, the global centers of money and culture are becoming increasingly aligned and similar.

*Featuring Commissioner artists

*The schedule is subject to change. Please visit the Miami Book Fair website for the most up to date information. 

Image Credit: New York Times, The Miami Book Fair International in 1987. The caption reads, “Organizers sought from the start to attract big names; this year over 500 writers are expected to attend.”