Jack Pierson in Miami: An Artist and a City in Transformation – The New York Times

1 December 2025

Just after Christmas in 1984, a struggling young photographer named Jonathan Pierson, fresh out of art school, took an impromptu road trip from New York to Miami Beach with his friend and infatuation, Andre LaRoche.

Drawn to the city’s cheap and easy beach life, thrift shops and seedy glamour, Pierson stayed on for six months working as a busboy at the fabled deli Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue, where a Cuban co-worker struggled to pronounce his name and called him Jack. It stuck.

Return trips throughout the 1980s, as Miami was undergoing a rapid physical and cultural transformation, left a lasting impact on how Pierson approached making art. “Jack Pierson: The Miami Years,” on view at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach through Aug. 16, 2026, shines a spotlight on this formative period for the artist, who first exhibited in New York in 1990. He came to prominence during the AIDS crisis for his intimate, informal views of everyday gay life and bohemian culture, alongside photographers such as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Pierson’s diaristic assemblages — which evoke ideas of longing, loss, beauty, transience and memory — can incorporate photographs, printed matter and record covers, found objects and signage, paintings and drawings.

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

Through Sunday, in an apartment on Liberty Avenue a short walk from both the Bass Museum and the convention center hosting Art Basel Miami Beach, Pierson is staging an Elliot Templeton pop-up. Open by appointment, it features what he termed “masterpieces of the male nude” by artists including Victor Skrebneski, John Brock Lear, Vincenzo Galdi, Danny Fitzgerald and Alessandro Raho.

At Art Basel Miami Beach from Friday through Sunday, Pierson’s own work will be on view at Regen Projects and Thaddaeus Ropac, galleries that have represented the artist since the ’90s. Lisson Gallery, which began showing him in New York in 2023, will present a new word sculpture titled “THIS PERFECT MOMENT,” the phrase spelled with mismatched oversized letters salvaged from abandoned commercial signage; and “MALE ARRAY” (2024), collaging images of classic male idols from found posters and prints with Pierson’s own photography.

Read the full 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.