Miami has long been a city of reinvention, and few artists capture that spirit as vividly as Jack Pierson. Jack Pierson: The Miami Years, on view at The Bass Museum to August 16, 2026, is the first exhibition to explore the city’s profound influence on the artist’s work and life.

Born in New England in the 1960s, Pierson came of age during the turbulence of the AIDS crisis, alongside figures like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, and Kiki Smith. His multidisciplinary practice, spanning photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, and installation, grapples with desire, loss, memory, and the fleeting passage of time. Emerging in the early 1990s, Pierson gained recognition for intimate portrayals of queer life and bohemian subcultures across New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Provincetown, and Miami Beach, alongside peers such as Nan Goldin and David Armstrong.

Pierson’s work fuses the everyday with glamour. Weathered furniture, found objects, and repurposed signage sit alongside commissioned fashion imagery, blurring the line between commercial and gallery practice. Themes of isolation, escapism, and longing for another place or time thread through his career, reflecting both personal experience and the precariousness of the era.

Miami first called to Pierson in the winter of 1984. That initial six-month stay in South Beach, a city already alive with art, nightlife, and celebrity culture, proved transformative. Sun-soaked streets, cheap apartments, and thrift-store treasures fueled experiments in both life and art, while the city’s Art Deco revival, glittering nightlife, and nascent Art Basel scene left a lasting imprint on his aesthetic, balancing glamour with freedom.

At the heart of the exhibition is Pierson’s new monumental commission, ARRAY (MIAMI). Spanning ten by fourteen feet, it combines posters, poems, postcards, photographs, and works on paper into a sprawling collage that charts his Miami years. The piece embodies Pierson’s fascination with desire, nostalgia, and transience, offering an immersive glimpse into the emotional and visual landscapes that shaped him.

Curated by James Voorhies, The Bass Curator at Large, Jack Pierson: The Miami Years highlights the city’s lasting imprint on a singularly American artist, while reflecting the vibrant intersections of contemporary art, fashion, and culture in Miami.

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Images: Jack Pierson: The Miami Years, 2025, installation view. Photography by Zaire Aranguren. Courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach.