Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at MD
Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Miami Dade College
Saturday, October 10 • 6 PM – 9 PM
Part document and part subjective storytelling, visual art has long played a central role in shaping how history is remembered. From portraits of political and cultural figures to paintings that reflect sacrifice, resilience, conflict, and transformation, the act of painting not only represents history—it can also participate in making it.
Abstraction as Legacy examines the breadth and evolution of painterly abstraction in the United States. Through hard edges, expressive gestures, and formal experimentation, artists reimagined painting as a way to consider the human body, natural environments, architecture, emotion, and the economy of line.
Rather than presenting an exhaustive history, the exhibition highlights the richness and diversity of abstraction in the United States, particularly in the decades following the 1950s, when American art became internationally associated with experimentation and boundary-breaking forms. The exhibition also considers how artistic ideas moved across geographies, from developments emerging in Havana and arriving in the United States through exile to formal innovations shaped in New York and Los Angeles.
Featured artists include Young-Il Ahn, Sam Gilliam, Carmen Herrera, Hans Hofmann, Virginia Jaramillo, Lloyd Kiva New, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, George Morrison, Noemí Ruiz, Zilia Sánchez, and Vaughn Spann.
The exhibition also resonates with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026. This historic milestone offers an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s past while considering the cultural imagination necessary to envision its future. Within this context, the legacy of abstraction becomes a distinctive expression of experimentation, freedom, and creative reinvention.
Extending this conversation beyond painting, performance artist and educator Smita Sen approaches abstraction through the body. Working at the intersection of sculpture, dance-based performance, and advanced technology, Sen investigates the ways the body absorbs its surroundings and carries the weight of lived experience. Her practice considers the human body as a living archive, one that stores tension, movement, memory, and emotion over time.
As part of the program surrounding Abstraction as Legacy, Sen will guide visitors through the exhibition, drawing connections between the works on view and the language of her own practice. Rather than approaching abstraction as something to be decoded intellectually, she invites audiences to encounter it physically—to feel it, move through it, and allow themselves to be moved by it.
The evening continues with Ressonnance, an immersive sound and wellness collective founded by YoungArts Jazz Trumpet Awardee Alum Stéphane Clément and sonic architect Nicolaus Gelin. Clément brings his German Haitian heritage into a rich jazz foundation, while Gelin develops soundscapes that blur the boundary between music, atmosphere, and transcendence.
Together, Sen and Ressonnance will create a live response to the exhibition space and the works within it, guiding guests through an experience in which movement, sound, memory, and abstraction converge.
The program proposes another way of navigating abstraction—
