A museum wall in Miami is about to carry the visual language of Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, built from bark paper and river pigment gathered along Venezuela's upper Orinoco River. His first solo museum exhibition in the United States opens November 19 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, eleven days before Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellite fairs fill the city for Miami Art Week.
Hakihiiwe was born in 1971 in Sheroana, Venezuela, and still lives in the Poripori community where he grew up. He learned to make paper from tree and plant fiber in the 1990s while studying with the Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata, and his work has been part of the Fondation Cartier's permanent collection for years. Since 2022 that work has traveled to the Venice Biennale and the Sydney Biennale, and in 2023 it appeared in The Yanomami Struggle at The Shed in New York, a touring show built around photographer Claudia Andujar's decades of work with the Yanomami. The Fondation Cartier states plainly that the ICA Miami exhibition is his first solo presentation at a major U.S. institution.
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe Builds a Visual Language From the Forest
The exhibition, co-curated by Gean Moreno, director of ICA Miami's Art + Research Center, and Michela Alessandrini, curator at the Fondation Cartier, gathers more than 100 works across four sections. The first, Building a Language, follows Hakihiiwe's earliest attempts to translate Yanomami cultural experience into drawing and paper, including an early work titled Shapono. A second section tracks the notational, almost taxonomic drawing practice he began developing in the early 2010s. A third, Landscapes, widens his compositions into larger tableaus and new materials. The final section, Shamanic Initiation, includes a new film soundtracked by the artist's own chanting, a site-specific mural, and an installation built around a set of shamanic poles, work made after Hakihiiwe's recent shamanic training.
The artist has described the stakes of that work in blunt terms. "Everything you can see is beautiful, but it's all at risk of disappearing, including my family, my community, the language we speak, and everything I know in the forest, animals, plants, rivers, even me," he said in 2023 at the opening of Siamo Foresta, a Fondation Cartier exhibition in Milan.
Mauricio Rocha Designs the Galleries Around Light and Earth
The exhibition design comes from Mauricio Rocha, the Mexico City architect whose firm, Taller de Arquitectura, won the 2023 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for its renovation of the Anahuacalli Museum. Working from the atmospheric qualities of the shapono, the communal Yanomami dwelling, Rocha's design filters natural light through the galleries and uses natural earth pigments and framed views of the surrounding landscape to slow visitors down before they reach the work itself.
Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami's Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, framed the show as part of the museum's broader effort to give international artists exposure they have not yet received in the United States. "It is especially meaningful to present this landmark exhibition in Miami, given the city's enduring connections to Latin America and its position as a vital cultural crossroads in the Americas," Gartenfeld said.
The exhibition opens two weeks before Miami Art Week, which runs November 30 through December 6 this year and pulls more than 20 fairs and hundreds of galleries into the city. That timing puts an artist working out of a remote riverside community in front of one of the largest concentrated art audiences in the country.
Hakihiiwe's platform in the United States has grown gradually rather than all at once, through group shows including MoMA's 2023 "Chosen Memories" survey and the Shed exhibition that preceded it. The ICA Miami show is the first time an American institution has given him a solo stage on his own terms, and it arrives as he keeps returning to the same warning he gave in Milan two years ago: that the forest he draws from, and the community he draws it for, are not guaranteed to still be there.
