Artnews

The Best Booths at Art Basel Miami Beach, From Visions of Palestine to Scenes of Queer Life
By Maximilíano Durón
December 4, 2025

Art Basel Miami Beach opened its 2025 edition on Wednesday morning to VIPs. While long lines formed at each of the fair’s entrances around the Miami Beach Convention Center ahead of the 11 a.m. opening time, the fair felt much quieter than last year’s iteration. Even at 4 p.m., when there’s usually a left-the-office-early wave, the aisles still felt relatively walkable.

As New York gallerist Nicola Vassell told ARTnews, “It’s much quieter and a bit more serious, which is better.” A slimmed-down attendance, however, didn’t seem to impact sales, as many dealers reported a slew of them after day one, seemingly buoyed by the energy of $2.2 billion in spending at the New York auctions just a couple weeks ago. As has been the case at fairs worldwide the past few years, dealers also said that they had good interest in works and that clients were taking a bit more time to finalize sales, but that they expected to have good news to report by end of day Sunday, when the fair closes.

As the country’s largest fair, Art Basel Miami Beach tends to have some high-profile works, though an interesting addition this year is mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth bringing a Picasso to South Florida. (A work by an artist of that ilk is typically saved for Art Basel’s Swiss fair in June.) But the fair’s best offerings are not those shinier, blue-chip pieces, generally.

Some of the fair’s strongest presentations are in the Kabinett sector, which is spread throughout the convention center, taking over a wall or a small room in a given gallery’s booth. There’s also a robust selection of fiber art, a medium that has been on the rise in the market over the past few years and in institutions for a bit longer than that.

Below, a look at the best on offer at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Nicholas Galanin at Peter Blum

Hanging on one wall of Peter Blum’s booth is Nicholas Galanin’s latest fiber work, Imperial Prayer Rug (2025). The eight-foot-wide prayer rugs show the viewfinder of a drone, with the marking for altitude and the target visible in bright red and the radar system in an eerie green. The work is a commentary not just on how the US and other nations across the globe are surveillance states but also on how these empires use imaging technology to commit violence.