You will not likely find any of this stuff in an MTV crib, but a mother lode of bling is tricking out the Wolfsonian in a flashy exhibit boasting the richness of American silver design during the past century. Opening today, “Modernism in American Silver: 20th Century Design” features more…

You won’t need to drop hallucinogens or strap yourself into an isolation chamber to get into the spirit of this trippy show exploring the uncharted regions of the brain. “Altered States,” opening tonight at 7:30 at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, buzzes with the sense of the distorted imagery and dizzy…

Not only does he draw with a vengeance, but artist Santiago Rubino also has a way of manifesting an atmospheric mood that suggests he has been visited by a dark muse. His figures reflect a bygone era of remembered scenes and people — as if conjured from the foreboding reservoir…

Asian Art from the Bass Museum Collection and Treasures from the Bass Museum of Art: With a bushel of blue-ribbon shows, the Bass has embarked on perhaps its busiest programming season. Deciding on which shows to see among the museum’s expansive menu might be as slippery as handling a hog…

For more than 1500 years the basic technology of Maya weaving has remained the same. Contemporary Maya weavers still use the backstrap loom to create the dazzling textiles and clothing they wear today, just as their ancestors did in pre-Columbian times. “Flowers for the Earth Lord: Guatemalan Textiles from the…

In H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, a nut-bag scientist upsets the balance of nature by grafting animal parts onto human beings, creating a schizzy breed of mutants that made the reader’s hair stand on end. Students and faculty of the Miami International University of Art & Design have…

Vietnamese artist Huong knows about the grim realities of war. She was forced to flee her ravaged homeland in 1975 and has since devoted herself to recovering from memories of her war-scarred youth by painting images of peace. During the past ten years, Huong has been working on a 300-foot…

When Erika Morales was a little girl, her grandma warned her that if she swallowed watermelon seeds, vines would sprout from her bellybutton. And her father often recruited her as an assistant when he was tinkering with his inventions in the garage. The wide-eyed nostalgist has dipped into her sack…

For nearly a decade Pablo Cano’s lavish marionette productions at the Museum of Contemporary Art have left adult eyes glued to the stage and pint-size patrons bouncing in their seats like giddy jumping beans. The inventive wizard weaves a spell on his audiences by creating fantastic puppets from refuse salvaged…

Asian Art from the Bass Museum Collection and Treasures from the Bass Museum of Art: With a bushel of blue-ribbon shows, the Bass has embarked on perhaps its busiest programming season. Deciding on which shows to see among the museum’s expansive menu might be as slippery as handling a hog…

In a blood-red work Bruce Nauman created in 1970, the word war is spelled out in neon tubing, with several cables snaking to a black transformer box on the floor. The piece seems to detonate like a bomb, the letters popping in reverse, countdown style. First the r flashes on…

Nothing quite girds you for an aural assault like the intense underground imagery of a handmade rock poster announcing that your favorite wailers are in town. By the time the house lights go down and the band strikes up a chord at the honky-tonk, your scalp is itching with anticipation…

Asian Art from the Bass Museum Collection and Treasures from the Bass Museum of Art: With a bushel of blue-ribbon shows, the Bass has embarked on perhaps its busiest programming season. Deciding on which shows to see among the museum’s expansive menu might be as slippery as handling a hog…

The image of a woman pointing a gun in one’s face in “10 Defining Experiments” at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (cifo) could not be a more apt metaphor for the still-crappy nabe that is home to the gallery. After all, it’s difficult not to believe most folks would feel…

Science has identified about one million species of insects so far, accounting for almost half of all life forms known to man. Bugs can be found buzzing almost anywhere on Earth. For example, rock crawlers survive in the peaks of the Himalayas, producing a kind of antifreeze that prevents them…

Asian Art from the Bass Museum Collection and Treasures from the Bass Museum of Art: With a bushel of blue-ribbon shows, the Bass has embarked on perhaps its busiest programming season. Deciding on which shows to see among the museum’s expansive menu might be as slippery as handling a hog…

In 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a pair of public speeches at Cambridge University where she argued that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The contents of her lectures were published in A Room of One’s Own, whose thesis states…

Intoxicated by the buzz of an electric beer sign outside a grocery store in his San Francisco neighborhood, Bruce Nauman was inspired to create his first neon piece, Window or Wall Sign, in 1967. In it he spelled out the slogan “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic…

Despite its title, “The Land That Time Forgot,” Juana Valdes’s solo show, opening tonight at 6:00 at Diaspora Vibe Gallery, is not a sendup of the cheesy sci-fi movie you might expect. You won’t find images of a German U-boat blasting roaming dinosaurs on a tropical island or scantily clad…

I’m So Much Better than You: Magnus Sigurdarson’s installation features four tons of Miami New Times papers interlocked like bricks to form a curving hip-high wall. It houses a DVD player and monitor where the artist is seen performing a puppet show in Xiamen, China. Sigurdarson, who was born in…

Although controversy has stuck to “Bodies … The Exhibition” like a blood tick on a hound dog’s tail, more than 10,000 spectators had flocked to see the corpse show at a local mall within days of its debut. Scheduled to run through March of next year at the Shops at…