An Artist and a Metropolis in Transformation – The New York Times

1 December 2025

Just after Christmas in 1984, a struggling younger photographer named Jonathan Pierson, recent out of artwork college, took an impromptu highway journey from New York to Miami Beach along with his good friend and infatuation, Andre LaRoche.

Drawn to town’s low cost and straightforward seaside life, thrift outlets and seedy glamour, Pierson stayed on for six months working as a busboy on the fabled deli Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue, the place a Cuban co-worker struggled to pronounce his identify and referred to as him Jack. It caught.

Return journeys all through the Eighties, as Miami was present process a speedy bodily and cultural transformation, left a long-lasting influence on how Pierson approached making artwork. “Jack Pierson: The Miami Years,” on view on the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach by Aug. 16, 2026, shines a highlight on this formative interval for the artist, who first exhibited in New York in 1990. He got here to prominence through the AIDS disaster for his intimate, casual views of on a regular basis homosexual life and bohemian tradition, alongside photographers corresponding to Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Pierson’s diaristic assemblages — which evoke concepts of longing, loss, magnificence, transience and reminiscence — can incorporate images, printed matter and file covers, discovered objects and signage, work and drawings.

“I can really trace how it all happened vis-à-vis stops in Miami along the way,” mentioned Pierson, now 65, in an interview final month at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts. He opened the storefront gallery in 2023 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to showcase work with a homosexual aesthetic.

Through Sunday, in an house on Liberty Avenue a brief stroll from each the Bass Museum and the conference middle internet hosting Art Basel Miami Beach, Pierson is staging an Elliot Templeton pop-up. Open by appointment, it options what he termed “masterpieces of the male nude” by artists together with Victor Skrebneski, John Brock Lear, Vincenzo Galdi, Danny Fitzgerald and Alessandro Raho.

At Art Basel Miami Beach from Friday by Sunday, Pierson’s personal work can be on view at Regen Projects and Thaddaeus Ropac, galleries which have represented the artist for the reason that ’90s. Lisson Gallery, which started displaying him in New York in 2023, will current a brand new phrase sculpture titled “THIS PERFECT MOMENT,” the phrase spelled with mismatched outsized letters salvaged from deserted business signage; and “MALE ARRAY” (2024), collaging pictures of traditional male idols from discovered posters and prints with Pierson’s personal images.

Read the total article by Hilarie Sheets for The New York Times here.

Image: Jack Pierson: The Miami Years, 2025, Installation view. 2025 © Jack Pierson, Courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach, Photography by Zaire Aranguren.