Twelve Miami Beach hotels, from the Betsy and the Avalon to the Eden Roc, will each give a space to a local artist this season. No Vacancy, Miami Beach, the city's juried art competition, returns for its seventh edition with installations on view from Nov. 12 through Dec. 19, spanning Miami Art Week.

The City of Miami Beach runs the program with the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. This year's call to artists drew 228 submissions, which the city says is a record.

Who is showing, and where

  • Avalon Hotel: Morel Doucet, with South Florida's tropical plants reworked as a night piece on resilience and memory.
  • Balfour Hotel Miami Beach: Luján Candria, who covers hotel windows with translucent photo textiles of native vegetation.
  • The Betsy Hotel: Ricardo E. Zulueta, with animated video projected onto the Betsy's glowing Orb, set to ambient sound.
  • Casa Faena: Kevin Arrow, building an immersive room from decades of 35mm material gathered around South Florida.
  • Eden Roc Miami Beach: Emmett Moore, with a knotted stainless steel exhaust pipe sculpture about gas engines and obsolescence.
  • Hotel Croydon Miami Beach: Justin H. Long, with an invented collection of undersea relics in an Art Deco display cabinet.
  • International Inn: Lulu Sanchez, with an arboretum of hand-built sculptural palms.
  • Kimpton Surfcomber Hotel: Alex Nuñez, with printed palms and an iridescent portal.
  • Marriott Stanton South Beach: Marlon Portales, showing two monumental paintings set in an imagined Cuban landscape.
  • The Royal Palm South Beach Miami: Diana Eusebio, working in textiles, photography and natural dyes.
  • The Shelborne by Proper: Yanira Collado, with a layered installation of upcycled paper, wood and textiles tracing regional histories.
  • Sherry Frontenac OceanFront Resort: Gonzalo Hernández, with seven jacquard-woven banners spelling A-M-E-R-I-C-A in colors drawn from South American flags.

How the prizes work

Each selected artist receives a $10,000 honorarium to make the work. On top of that, two prizes totaling $35,000 are awarded: a $25,000 juried prize chosen by a panel of art world professionals, and a $10,000 public prize presented by the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The artists were picked by a committee drawn from the city's Art in Public Places Committee, its Cultural Arts Council and the Visitor and Convention Authority. Funding comes from the Cultural Arts Council, the MBVCA and the GMCVB.

Why the hotels

The idea behind the program is to send people into Miami Beach's hotels as art destinations rather than just places to sleep, and to put local artists in front of the crowds that arrive for Art Week in early December. Several of the host hotels are a short walk from one another, so more than one can be seen in an evening.

If you go

The installations are on view Nov. 12 through Dec. 19 at the 12 hotels above. Updates are posted by the City of Miami Beach at miamibeachfl.gov.

Sources