ISSUE 1
Body of Work functions as both a critical platform and a publishing experiment: offering essays, artist projects, and editorial reflections that capture the pulse of Miami’s cultural landscape while situating it within broader conversations in contemporary art and publishing.
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ISSUE #1: WINTER 2026
FEATURED ARTIST // ISSUE_1
Juana Valdés: A Journey Through Art, Identity and Migration
By Elisabeth Campbell
Art, for Juana Valdés, is a conduit; a discourse; an archive.
As an Afro-Caribbean Latinx artist, Valdés explores race and gender, migration and transnationalism, labor and class — both weaving and unraveling material culture through the lens of postcolonial history. In plain language: Valdés looks at what surrounds her in the complicated and institutionalized identity of the United States and turns it into substance, a tangible thing.
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GET TO KNOW // ISSUE_1
How Travieso’s mischief became Trashroom gallery
By Amanda Rosa
Artists from around the world are clamoring to show their work in what is perhaps Miami’s most exclusive gallery space. It’s a small, white cube layout with decent lighting. No windows. No splashy opening night parties. Barely any sales, though 100% of the profit goes to the artist; the pieces can be purchased by sending a simple DM. Each solo exhibition is on view for about two hours, and the “privileged few” who get to see it in person are only really there to throw out their trash.
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WOMEN IN TEXTILES // ISSUE_1
Women Reshape Textiles in South Florida
By Veronica Pesantes
Textiles have long served as a means of communication, shelter, identity, and resistance. The recent institutional and art market embrace of textiles is a testament to their ubiquitous presence in our lives. Covering us from birth to death, they have carried symbolic, political, and spiritual messages across cultures, from the Inca Empire to the quilters of Gee’s Bend to the Chilean “arpilleras.”
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WHAT GRAVITY HOLDS // ISSUE 1
By Carmen F. de Terenzio
When I visited “Of Ivory & Flesh” at Primary, the gallery was silent. In daylight, Luna Palazzolo-Daboul’s four large sculptures, which make up the show, occupied an austere field of gray: concrete beads and galvanized pipe against the gray floor and walls. There was little to distract the eye. Nothing appeared to move, yet it was difficult to think of these objects as entirely still. Their tension could be felt.
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LEARNING HOW TO DISAPEER IN THE AGE OF AI // ISSUE 1
By Mario Rodriguez
In Jillian Mayer’s statement for “Placeholder Future,” her latest solo exhibition at David Castillo Gallery, she concedes to a certain failure to predict technologies, questioning the reach of predictive speculation and its inherent hopefulness for betterment.
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ARTIST X ARTIST: GERMAINE BARNES & JUANCY MATOS // ISSUE 1
DOC_45456
Germane Barnes and Juan Luis (Juancy) Matos are storytellers working in architecture and film. Both call Miami home.I first met Barnes on a tour of historic Overtown, where his warmth and knowledge engaged three generations of my family. I met Matos over lunch and was so absorbed in our conversation about cultural editing that I barely touched my food. Pairing them for Body of Work felt instinctive. What I didn’t know was that they were already friends and collaborators. Their conversation was recorded over video call on Oct. 3, 2026, and edited for length and clarity.
– Florencia Franceschetti
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THE BODY BEFORE IT KNOWS WHERE IT ENDS // ISSUE 1
By Alexandra Martinez
I was twenty-five years old when I had my daughter, now almost nine. I pushed her out of my vagina in forty-nine minutes. When she emerged, the hours of pain vanished, replaced by feral clarity. "The most beautiful thing I've ever seen," I stated as fact as the nurse placed her on my bare chest. Her body was bloody, slick, vernix-covered, still carrying traces of my own inner flesh. Her skin met mine.
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MICHAEL RICHARDS: ARE YOU DOWN? // ISSUE 1
By Amanda Keeley
A newspaper clipping taped to Michael Richards’s 1997 datebook reads: “The trouble with history is that it implies that what happened in the past isn’t happening now.” It could serve as an epigraph for “Michael Richards: Are You Down?,” published to accompany the retrospective that originated at MOCA North Miami in 2021.
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