Miami Art Week, early December, is slowly fading away. And yet, a number of opportunities to enjoy art in public places remain. At least one – The Doors to Freedom – is a hold-over moved to a new location. The other – The Mothership Connection – was entirely new. Constant Companion took the time to see bth and added them to our list of must-see exhibitions that we are slowly working to see.

Last year, the Miami Design District hosted Marta Minujín’s inflatable Dreamscape sculpture in their Jungle Plaza (see April 2, 2025 post). This year J’OUVERT by British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové again transformed Jungle Plaza into an immersive environment filled with Afrofuturist imagination for a few short weeks. On display were two of Ové’s significant monumental works, The Mothership Connection and The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness.

The Mothership Connection (2022) is a nearly 30-foot-tall totemic sculpture that fuses African iconography with futuristic form. Imagery on the towering sculpture references architectural elements from the Great Mosque of Djenné, Masonic geometry, and Western civic arches. Crowning the tower is an enlarged female Mende mask. The title refers to George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic album of the same name, underscoring Ové’s long-standing engagement with music, movement and collective consciousness.

Surrounding the tower were forty identical graphite, fiberglass human-size figures from The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness (2016), each standing just over six feet tall with arms raised in an open, declarative gesture. The sculptures are based on an ebony sculpture given to Ové by his father, pioneering filmmaker Horace Ové. They draw upon a multiplicity of references, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Renaissance masque traditions, and West African sculptural lineages. Together, they represent dignity and resilience while activating a conversation between ritual, tradition, and the future.

A little while later, as our chilly temperatures lifted Constant Companion and I took an early afternoon stroll down Lincoln Road to see The Doors to Freedom. They had been installed in mid-Beach during Art Week last December. Unfortunately, the day we sought them out was the day after they were removed. The collection, a partnership between the City of Miami Beach, the Human Rights Foundation, and Cuban Freedom March, features works by seven internationally recognized artists who have faced censorship, imprisonment or exile for challenging authoritarian regimes—from Cuba and Venezuela to North Korea and China.

Each artist represented in the public art installation has been harassed, jailed, or exiled for refusing to remain silent in the face of authoritarian regimes.

Pedro X. Molina (Nicaragua): An exiled cartoonist who wields sharp satire and commentary as instruments of civil resistance against the Ortega-Murillo regime.

Rayma Suprani (Venezuela): Forced into exile for her sharp satire and infamous ‘Salud’ political cartoon, Suprani continues to give voice to the silenced.

The Gao Brothers (China): Through politically charged performance, photography, and sculpture these brothers confront the Chinese Communist Party. Their defiance led to Gao Zhen’s ongoing imprisonment since 2024.

As we strolled Lincoln Road, we found the business district’s newest instagram-perfect installation, Empower Flower-White Lotus and Dream Machine by Rubem Robierb.

And we caught one more of the delightful bubblegum inflatables Mr. Pink Takes Flight by French artist Philippe Katerine.