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This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Miami

Miami is full of surprises. It certainly lives up to its image of silky beaches and palm-fringed swimming pools set in Modernist-Spanish courtyards, flamingos and cocktail umbrellas, but there’s a layered history beneath its shiny skin. A story of rapid expansion and devastating disasters, natural and economic. Of huge population influxes from around the Caribbean. Of dramatic historical events — a foiled presidential assassination attempt (Roosevelt, in 1933); violent rioting after a George Floyd-like police murder (of Arthur McDuffie, in 1979); the vast 1980s cocaine trade that sparked a vicious crime wave. 

More recently it has become a city of art. In the commercial arena, the resplendent Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellite fairs spring up each December. But beyond the hoopla of fair season there’s a wealth of permanent public art, and it is well worth ferreting out a few of the more unusual, as well as relishing the best known. 

To start with the obvious: the famous Art Deco buildings of Miami Beach. Think of these ornate, wedding-cakey structures as one single great public artwork, spread out from 6th Street at the southern end of Ocean Drive right up to 13th Street and beyond. Though most of the best Art Deco buildings have now been given a full facelift, a few delightfully tatty remnants are still around. There are tours on offer, but it’s also a thrill just to wander and discover examples such as the Essex House hotel with its fantastic pronged elevation and gloriously elaborate lobby. 

Looking at these flamboyant constructions, with their mouldings and embellishments, their turrets and flourishes and garish neon, it’s astonishing to realise that barely 40 years earlier, when Miami was incorporated as a city in 1896, it had fewer than 400 inhabitants. Yet by the mid-1940s its population had increased to more than 325,000. Tenuously sited on its stormy coast, defying floods and hurricanes, the place had mushroomed with amazing speed, and it would be easy to assume that the Art Deco style was a product of affluence. Not really. One example is the stern but grandiose Miami Beach Post Office, on Washington Avenue and 13th Street. It was built in 1937 not so much as a luxury show-off but as a job-creation scheme by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression: opulent display created in defiance of a catastrophic economic crisis. 

Inside the Post Office, architect Howard Lovewell Cheney’s dramatic circular lobby (domed skylight, central fountain and more) houses an intriguing triptych of New Deal murals by Charles Russell Hardman depicting scenes from the region’s history: Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León meeting with indigenous tribes in the territory he had dubbed “La Florida” in 1513; a later colonialist, Hernando de Soto, in battle with Native Americans in 1539; General Thomas Jesup negotiating with indigenous peoples in 1837. Although it might barely squeak past as acceptable to our eyes today, the work is full of interest. 

Another commemoration that might seem at odds with Miami’s sun-and-fun image is its remarkable Holocaust Memorial. In the 1980s, South Florida was home to as many as 25,000 Holocaust survivors. A memorial was proposed and Miami, after all, does not do understatement. The giant centrepiece of architect and sculptor Kenneth Treister’s multi-part landscaped creation is a 40-foot upraised hand reaching for the heavens as hundreds of writhing, emaciated human figures cling to its forearm. It is one of the most upsetting and moving of public sculptures, but at the same time a peaceful, contemplative place to walk and rest. 

Many of Miami’s public artworks — apparently there are more than 700 — lean more towards the city’s exuberant, light-hearted side. Most well known are those in The Bass museum’s Art Outside project, which showcases signature works from its permanent and temporary collections. If you have a mind to track down less-publicised pieces, one of the most enjoyable is situated downtown outside the Stephen P Clark Government Center: “Dropped Bowl with Scattered Slices and Peels” by husband-and-wife team Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Imagine a monumental plate of half-eaten fruit, the pieces carelessly strewn around as if by a naughty child: it’s a vivid, irreverent work in painted concrete and resin that celebrates the carefree mood of this highly diverse city. 

Another, quite literally playful piece in one of Miami’s public open spaces — this time in Bayfront Park — is Isamu Noguchi’s smooth white marble “Slide Mantra”. Elegant, cool, sophisticated, like all the work by its renowned Japanese-American creator, the artwork is also a real spiral slide for kids of all ages: a perfect match of form and function, exemplary as a public artefact. 

A local installation with a ludic twist also celebrates Miami’s relationship with the sea: “Obstinate Lighthouse” in South Pointe Park, at the entrance to the Port of Miami. Created by German artist Tobias Rehberger and installed in 2011, this apparently wonky pile-up of 19 brightly tinted sections, like children’s building bricks, is topped with rotating lights. In contrast to the lighthouse’s traditional function as a warning, it aims, according to the artist, to welcome in visitors and “references the lively spirit of Miami Beach”. 

All of these works are in some way specific to their sites, chiming with some aspect of the spirit of place. Miami, though, is also host to unexpected incomers. In The Wolfsonian museum, a stained-glass series by Irish maker Henry (Harry) Clarke, the “Geneva Window”, arrived with a rich back-story. Commissioned in 1926, it was intended as a gift from the new Irish Free State to the League of Nations in Geneva. Intensely coloured, its busy narrative celebrates 15 of Ireland’s writers, from James Joyce and WB Yeats to a poem by Patrick Pearse written the night before he was executed by the British for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. It’s considered a masterpiece of Celtic Revival decorative art, a fascinating symbolic and storytelling work packed with wit, humanity and allusive detail. 

Sadly, though, the new Irish state had not shaken off the mindset of the past. Clarke’s inclusion of banned writers such as Liam O’Flaherty (not to mention the scanty clothing of his pretty companion, as well as the tight breeches of some characters that emphasised their “virility”) fell foul of the censors of the day. Sex, nudity, alcohol — even Protestants: a step too far. The vibrant Window never made it to Geneva, and it was finally bought from Clarke’s family in the 1980s by Mitchell Wolfson Jr, who gave it a permanent home in the Miami museum he founded. It seems somehow appropriate that the deep-seated traditions depicted (and rejected) by the Geneva Window should end up in this most febrile of American cities.

Jan Dalley is an FT contributing editor

What’s your favourite piece of public art in Miami? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter

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