The two shows on ICA Miami's ground floor both close on Sunday, Nov. 22. Nine days later, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, the museum opens new exhibitions in both of its buildings on NE 41st Street. ICA lists its opening-day conversation as a Miami Art Week event, and BitBasel starts the next day. If you live near the Design District, that makes the next few weekends the last quiet time to see the current shows. The two new shows open just as Art Week gets underway.
Admission is free, and that hasn't changed. ICA's visit page says admission is "free of charge," courtesy of City National Bank of Florida. It recommends advance tickets because walk-ins may be turned away when the building is full. Galleries are open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The gift shop is open every day on the same hours.
Two first-ever shows close Nov. 22
Both closing shows are firsts, and both have been on view a short walk from Paradise Plaza since April 30.
"Manoucher Yektai: The Stranger and the Tree" is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It fills four ground-floor galleries: the Mendelson, Herzberg Family, Katzman and Kadre Family galleries. Yektai was born in Tehran in 1921 and was a founding member of the New York School. The show brings together about thirty paintings from four series made between 1948 and 1963. They range from early blue, cream and brown compositions to thickly painted still lifes from the 1950s. ICA describes those later works as "almost sculptural," drawing on Persian rugs, Iranian flora and calligraphic forms.
"Manuel Chavajay: Xojowi ja qa tee ruachulew" (Mother Earth Dances) is the first one-person institutional exhibition by the Tz'utujil Maya artist. Chavajay lives in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala. The show has eleven works from the past three years:
- paintings made with marine oil, featuring traditional embroidery patterns that show the landscape around Lake Atitlán
- earthenware pots the artist has altered
- remnants of site-specific performances
According to ICA, the work deals with growing pollution in Lake Atitlán and with Tz'utujil ancestral knowledge about how the land connects to the cosmos.
ICA has posted nothing that extends either show past Nov. 22.
The November calendar, day by day
Counting from Thursday, Oct. 29, the ground-floor shows have 18 open days left.
- Oct. 29 to Nov. 1. Thursday through Sunday, the first of four remaining weekends.
- Nov. 4 to 8. A full Wednesday-to-Sunday week. On Sunday, Nov. 8, at 11 a.m., ICA has a family watercolor workshop with Alejandro Piñeiro Bello. It costs $50 per person and includes lunch in the Sculpture Garden, so it is a paid event, not a free walk-in.
- Nov. 11 to 15. Veterans Day falls on Wednesday, Nov. 11, and ICA lists it among the federal holidays when it closes. That leaves four gallery days that week.
- Nov. 18 to 22. The last five days, ending Sunday afternoon at 6 p.m.
Thanksgiving, Nov. 26, is also on ICA's closure list, but by then both ground-floor shows will have ended.
The works in ICA's Sculpture Garden are listed as ongoing, so they stay put through the changeover. They are by Damián Ortega, Pedro Reyes, Mark Handforth and Allora & Calzadilla.
The building next door is mostly dark until Dec. 1
ICA's second building at 23 NE 41st Street is the main reason December looks so different from November.
The building was home to the de la Cruz Collection, which offered free admission for years. WLRN reported in April 2024 that the collection had closed and its works were headed to auction. In October 2024, WLRN reported that ICA had bought the building for $25 million. The collection's own website now says it is closed.
ICA's expansion plan describes about 30,000 square feet of new space. It includes special-exhibition galleries, a Knight Foundation new-media gallery, permanent-collection galleries, classrooms, a performance space and a digital media lab. So far the building has opened for one show at a time. Its last exhibition, "From the Heart to the Hands: Dolce&Gabbana," ran Feb. 6 to June 14, 2026. ICA's visit page gives no regular hours for 23 NE 41st Street. No exhibition is listed there for October or November.
The first Tuesday of December changes that.
Dec. 1 is a Tuesday, a day the galleries are normally closed
On Tuesday, Dec. 1, ICA opens a new show in each building. It's a day the galleries are normally closed, and ICA lists the opening-day conversation as part of Miami Art Week.
| Main building | Expansion building | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 61 NE 41st St. | 23 NE 41st St. |
| Exhibition | "Carroll Dunham" | "Friedrich Kunath: I'll Romanticize This Later" |
| Runs | Dec. 1, 2026 to March 14, 2027 | Dec. 1, 2026 to Jan. 22, 2027 |
| What it is | More than 50 works from 1983 to the present | Paintings, sculpture, installations and an interactive digital environment, on the second floor |
| First of its kind | Dunham's first museum survey of paintings in more than 25 years | Kunath's first solo museum exhibition in the United States |
Miami New Times' 2026-27 arts guide says the Dunham survey traces his move from bold, graphic imagery toward the psychological and allegorical sides of form. The paintings range from abstraction to figuration and from landscapes to scenes of violence. The guide confirms admission is free. The same guide lists BitBasel at the Sagamore Hotel on Collins Avenue from Wednesday, Dec. 2, through Saturday, Dec. 5. That puts ICA's opening the day before BitBasel begins.
The Kunath show is easy to recognize. It is a collaboration between ICA Miami, DMINTI and the Nassima Art Foundation. ICA's listing says it mixes the visual language of German Romanticism with American pop culture. Kunath was born in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1974. His work engages with Caspar David Friedrich, especially Friedrich's Rückenfigur, the figure seen from behind as it looks out at a view. The interactive digital room invites visitors to play with Kunath's use of song lyrics, titles and other text.
At 11 a.m. on opening day, Kunath will talk with Klaus Biesenbach at the expansion about German Romanticism and Friedrich's influence. The exhibition page has an RSVP link. Since the conversation is on a Tuesday morning, it's easiest to fit in for people who live or work nearby.
Between the two dates
Nov. 23 through Nov. 30 is the gap between ICA's two seasons, and the area around it has its own schedule.
Locust Projects is a free gallery at 297 NE 67th Street, open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Edison Peñafiel's exhibition opens there Nov. 14 and runs to Jan. 9, 2027. The gallery is closed Nov. 26 through 30 for Thanksgiving. That means the best time to see it overlaps with ICA's last week of the spring shows, not with the gap that follows.
Back on 41st Street, the Design District's posted hours are Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. Buckminster Fuller's Fly's Eye Dome stands at 140 NE 39th Street, and the Palm Court Garage is the closest parking. Two shops on the walk to ICA are new this year. The Carolina Herrera flagship at 127 NE 41st Street opened Aug. 15. It's about 3,000 square feet and sells ready-to-wear, accessories, beauty, fragrance and eyewear. Jacquemus opened its first Miami boutique, a two-story store, at 157 NE 40th Street in September.
Both ICA buildings sit on the same block of NE 41st Street. You can see the Yektai paintings on a weekday in November, then come back Dec. 1 for the Kunath show next door and the Dunham survey in the main building, all without leaving the street.
If you're planning a move to Miami and want to know which neighborhoods put a free museum and a gallery calendar like this within walking distance, I'm happy to share what I know, in English or en français. Caroline Perez. Let's Connect.
