by Jana Astanov
Featured image Citlali Haro @citlali.haro at Pali Galeria @paligaleria at SCOPE
SCOPE Art Show arrived in Miami this year as a fusion of global voices shaped by migration, memory, and visionary experimentation. The 2025 edition unfolded under the theme Be Here Now, a call back to presence, grit, and honesty in a moment where attention fractures and truths distort. Ninety-five galleries from eighteen countries and territories gather under one pavilion, more than thirty of them exhibiting at SCOPE for the first time. Large-scale installations, performances, and collaborative activations spill beyond their designated spaces, dissolving the usual fair boundaries between artist, artwork, audience, and site. What emerges is a shared field of perception where the multicultural currents of global contemporary art meet, clash, and harmonize in real time.
For CREATRIX Magazine, SCOPE felt less like browsing and more like divination, a chance to read the cultural moment through the artists who are shaping it. My selections from the fair reflect an embodied cartography of voices that resonated on psychic, aesthetic, and ancestral frequencies:
Walking through the galleries was like moving across continents in a single evening. Mexican artist Citlali Haro brought her dream-inflected visual language to the booth, blending ironic figuration, vivid color, and introspective narratives that reflect inner emotional landscapes with a playful yet poignant edge.
Citlali Haro @citlali.haro at Pali Galeria @paligaleria
At Claire Oliver Gallery, Gio Swaby’s work offered a soft yet commanding presence, drawing on intimacy and diaspora memory with quiet precision.
Gio Swaby @gioswaby at @claireolivergallery
At Fuze Art Fair, Lillian Blades presented mixed-media assemblages that merge personal heritage with Caribbean architectural motifs, layering painted panels, found materials, and domestic objects into vibrant altars of memory and cultural mapping.
Lillian Blades @lillianblades at @fuzeartfair
Also at Fuze Art Fair, Veronica Dorsett introduced a different register of textile inquiry, using fabric to braid personal narrative with broader cultural memory.
Veronica Dorsett @vodorsett at @fuzeartfair
At Spiralis Gallery, Zsudayka Nzinga approached textiles through her own lens, combining batik techniques with screenprinted motifs to consider lineage, cultural hybridity, and the textures of lived experience.
Zsudayka Nzinga, “Collective Black Joy” @zsudaykanzinga at @spiralisgallery
Nearby, Tamika Galanis, and Averia Wright at Fuze Art Fair, Anindita Dutta and Pyaari Azaadi at Pen + Brush each engaged with ancestral geographies and speculative futures, presenting distinct yet interlinked approaches to identity and cultural inheritance.
Tamika Galanis @tamikagalanis at @fuzeartfair
Averia Wright @averiacwright at @fuzeartfair
Pyaari Azaadi @pyaari_azaadi at @penandbrushnyc
Anindita Dutta @aninditadutta at @penandbrushnyc
Photography, long anchored in documentation, is increasingly operating as a multidisciplinary laboratory where artists test material, emotional, and conceptual limits. From Millie Benson’s collage-driven investigations to Lynn Parotti’s printed satin works and Natasha Chomko’s esoteric lenticular images, the medium is emerging here as a hybrid research tool, moving beyond representation and into new emotional and material territories.
Millie Benson @millliebenson at @gallery70
Natasha Chomko @postwook
Lynn Parotti @lynn_parotti_artist at @fuzeartfair. Lynn Parotti from the series The Space Between Need and Loos, Queen of The Night, Printed Satin Fabric, 60X80 inch, 2025
Victor Quinonez, better known as MARKA27, brought urgent critique, graffiti-rooted rebellion, and bold reclamation to the fair. His striking pyramid of gold coolers at the entrance to SCOPE Elevar La Cultura honored Indigenous and immigrant street vendors, as well as undocumented workers, standing as a powerful symbol of resilience and solidarity. His booth blended Mexican folk influences with playful aesthetics and pointed political commentary, creating a powerful dialogue in an intimate space. Victor Marka27 Quinonez offered generous, heartfelt insight into the origins of his concepts – a memorable encounter that exemplifies SCOPE’s commitment to bringing fresh, dynamic voices into conversation with more established gallery presences.
Victor “MARKA27” Quinonez @marka_27 at @streettheorygallery
Meanwhile, Samit Sang at Claire Oliver Gallery, Nadine Tralala of Thinkspace_Art, and Danny Ochoa filled corners and booths with unexpected narratives, each a fractal of identity, and reverie.
Samit Sang @samitsangart at @claireolivergallery
Nadine Tralala @kopfscheu at @thinkspace_art
Danny Ochoa @danny.ochoa
The result was more than a fair. SCOPE became a portal, a site where global artistic consciousness turns itself outward and inward at once, inviting us not only to witness but to participate in the unfolding cosmology of now. For a magazine rooted in myth, astrology, ancestral sensibility, and ritual vision, SCOPE offered not just art, but a living archive, a mosaic of global memory, of bodies rooted in struggle and celebration.
As always, thank you SCOPE Art Fair for the Press Pass.
About the author:
Jana Astanov is a multidisciplinary artist and writer, author of six poetry collections: Antidivine, Northern Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, Birds of Equinox and AvantGarden. She is the founder and editor of CREATRIX Magazine and Red Temple Press, its poetry imprint. Her interviews and essays focus on art, poetry, and new media.
