At Laundromat Art Space, Toward What Comes Next feels like more than an exhibition title—it feels like a condition. Curated by Christopher Barake, the show brings together new work by Ignacio Beroiz, Noann Maia, and Jazz-Sofia Ramos-Izquierdo, three rising seniors from the New World School of the Arts BFA program who spent a month in residence at the Miami artist-run space.
Opening August 15, 2026, from 6 to 9 p.m., and on view through August 31, the exhibition marks the culmination of an intensive summer residency shaped by studio visits, professional dialogue, mentorship, and critical feedback from artists, curators, and practitioners across Miami’s art community. But what makes the show compelling is not simply that it presents young artists on the verge of their senior year. It is that each artist approaches this moment of transition with unusual seriousness, vulnerability, and formal ambition.
The exhibition includes painting, drawing, installation, photography, printmaking, and site-responsive works. Across these different media, a shared question emerges: how does an artist build a practice while still becoming the person who will carry it forward?
For Jazz-Sofia Ramos-Izquierdo, the work begins with the body—but never as a fixed or passive subject. Their practice engages painting, sculptural surfaces, Puerto Rican folklore, gender, performance, and the long history of representation. Trained through more traditional approaches to drawing and painting, Ramos-Izquierdo has developed a practice that both acknowledges and challenges the histories embedded in those methods.
Their figures are often constructed as hybrid presences: part body, part symbol, part mask, part offering. References to the vejigante, a figure from Puerto Rican folklore rooted in Spanish, Yoruba, and Indigenous traditions, appear alongside doll-like joints, horns, masks, and fragmented anatomies. These elements create a language where the body becomes chimeric—assembled from culture, memory, vulnerability, and resistance.
Ramos-Izquierdo is deeply aware of painting’s capacity to both honor and exploit the subject. Their work asks how the figure can hold presence without becoming spectacle, especially when dealing with trans and feminine bodies, performance, and visibility. Labor becomes essential here. Through layers of oil, fabric, pieced surfaces, and sculptural interventions, the work insists that devotion to the object can become a form of care. The surface is not merely where the image appears; it becomes a body of its own.
For Ignacio Beroiz, born in Argentina and based in the United States since 2019, the central themes are care, invisible labor, and provisional belonging. His artistic practice is deeply connected to drawing, which remains both foundation and point of return. His earlier academic training gave him a formal structure, but his time at New World helped him loosen it and reconsider how drawing could hold ambiguity, memory, and place.
Paper plays a central role in his work. Beroiz is drawn to its dual nature: a trusted material, historically used for records, notes, documents, and preservation, yet also fragile. It creases, yellows, and changes over time. That tension makes it an ideal surface for thinking about labor—especially labor that is easily overlooked, erased, or absorbed into daily life.
In this residency, Beroiz also moved toward site-responsive and ephemeral work. Unlike an object meant to endure, some of his work at Laundromat is made with the understanding that it may be painted over or washed away after the exhibition. That temporary quality mirrors the residency itself: a brief but formative moment of presence within a larger community. His inclusion of names and references to the people around Laundromat speaks to the social nature of the experience. For Beroiz, the residency was not only about production; it was about entering a living network of artists and relationships.
Although Noann Maia’s conversation was not recorded, his presence in the exhibition completes the triad. Originally from Brazil, Maia brings another layer of migration, experimentation, and cultural perspective into the show. Alongside Beroiz and Ramos-Izquierdo, his work contributes to the exhibition’s broader meditation on identity, place, material inquiry, and artistic emergence.
What makes Toward What Comes Next resonate is its refusal to overstate itself. These are not artists pretending to have arrived at final answers. Instead, they are showing work that is alive with process—work that still carries the marks of questioning, testing, and discovery. That openness is the exhibition’s strength.
In many ways, the show is also a portrait of Laundromat Art Space itself: a place where emerging artists can enter conversation with Miami’s wider creative ecosystem, where mentorship becomes friendship, and where experimentation is treated as serious work. The residency offered these three artists not only studio time, but also a glimpse into what a sustainable artistic life might require: community, critique, generosity, and persistence.
As Beroiz described the experience, three words came to mind: grateful, nutritious, expansive. The phrase could easily stand for the exhibition as a whole. Toward What Comes Next is about the nourishment that happens before the next chapter fully begins. It is about the summer before senior year, the studio before the career, the gesture before the language becomes fixed.
At Laundromat Art Space, the future is not abstract. It is already being made—in paint, paper, fabric, image, installation, and conversation.
Toward What Comes Next opens August 15, 2026, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Laundromat Art Space, located at 185 NE 59th Street, Miami, FL 33137. The exhibition remains on view through August 31, 2026.
