Twelve artists will transform twelve of Miami Beach's most storied hotels into temporary contemporary art destinations this fall, according to the City of Miami Beach, which has released the full lineup for No Vacancy 2026 — the seventh edition of the city's juried public art competition.
The installations will be on view from November 12 through December 19, 2026, matching the scale of last year's sixth edition, which also placed 12 artists in 12 hotels. Each artist or collective receives a $10,000 stipend, and $35,000 in prizes will be awarded: a $10,000 Public Prize from the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau and a $25,000 Juried Prize chosen by a jury of local art professionals. Artists were selected from a city call for submissions by representatives of the Art in Public Places Committee, the Cultural Arts Council and the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority.
Here is a look at each project, in the city's alphabetical order by artist.
Kevin Arrow at Casa Faena
The Magic Is You!
3500 Collins Avenue · Built 1928 · Architect: Martin L. Hampton
Arrow draws on his personal archive of 35mm slides, gathered over decades of living and working in Miami Beach. Selected slides are enlarged, repeated and lit to become an immersive installation in dialogue with the hotel's architecture, treating the archive as both personal memory and unofficial history. Arrow is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist based in Miami Beach whose work is held in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Pérez Art Museum Miami and the city's Art in Public Places collection.
Artist links: Instagram @arrowfuentes
Luján Candria at Balfour Hotel Miami Beach
Living Archive
350 Ocean Drive · Built 1940 · Architect: Anton Skislewicz
Candria's installation consists of suspended, translucent photo-based textiles carrying layered, fragmented images of native South Florida vegetation. The imagery evokes landscapes that predate the city's rapid development, and asks what persists as a city changes.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @lujancandria
Yanira Collado at The Shelborne By Proper
Converging Timelines/Woven Silhouettes
1801 Collins Avenue · Built 1940 · Architect: Igor Polevitzky
Collado's site-responsive work uses upcycled paper, wood and textiles to elevate regional geometric motifs as visual languages of heritage. Framed as a layered visual timeline, it aims to bring underrecognized local and global narratives to the hotel's transient audience.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @yanira_collado
Morel Doucet at Avalon Hotel
To Bloom Under the Midnight Stars
700 Ocean Drive · Built 1941 · Architect: Albert Anis
Doucet, a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist and arts educator, presents a nocturnal meditation on resilience, transformation and belonging. Native and cultivated South Florida flora emerge from deep fields of color, lit as if by moonlight, in a landscape the city describes as a living archive of migration, cultural memory and environmental change.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @moreldoucet
Diana Eusebio at The Royal Palm South Beach Miami
Home, Safe
1545 Collins Avenue · Built 1939 · Architect: Donald G. Smith
Eusebio uses textiles, photography and natural dyes to map migration, tracing the movement of plants, people and knowledge across the Americas. The installation pairs Home, Safe (2025–2026), first shown in her solo exhibition at MOCA North Miami, with Ceiba (2025). The title borrows the baseball term for a runner arriving safely, a nod to the sport's role in migration from the Dominican Republic and to the immigrant's search for belonging. Eusebio was born and raised in Miami to Peruvian and Dominican immigrant parents.
Artist links: Website
Gonzalo Hernández at Sherry Frontenac OceanFront Resort
AMERICA
6565 Collins Avenue · Built 1947 · Architect: Henry Hohauser
A monumental textile work of seven jacquard-woven banners spelling A-M-E-R-I-C-A, with each letter drawn in colors from the flags of Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. By rebuilding the word through South American references, the work challenges its common identification with the United States. It arrives as the country marks its 250th anniversary.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @hernandezgonzalo
Justin H. Long at Hotel Croydon Miami Beach
Abyssal Wunderkammer
3720 Collins Avenue · Built 1937 · Architect: E. Dean Parmalee
Long presents a fictional collection of undersea relics in an Art Deco display cabinet. The objects are made, not found, using techniques that mimic the growth of sea life and centuries of aging. Several resemble Venus figurines with tail appendages, tied to mermaid lore, alongside an assemblage of lost human miscellanea such as luxury watches and wares from shipwrecks.
Artist links: Website
Emmett Moore at Eden Roc Miami Beach
Riviera
4525 Collins Avenue · Built 1955 · Architect: Morris Lapidus
Moore imagines a stainless steel exhaust pipe tying itself into a knot, an ouroboros-like sculpture of a machine consuming itself on its way to obsolescence. The artist frames it as both a tribute to and a eulogy for the combustion era: cars helped build Miami Beach, while their emissions have contributed to the rising seas that now threaten it. The twisting pipes also recall the city's growing flood-control infrastructure.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @emmettmoore
Alex Nuñez at Kimpton Surfcomber Hotel
You Cannot Step into the Same Ocean Twice
1717 Collins Avenue · Built 1948 · Architects: MacKay and Gibbs
Nuñez builds an environment from South Florida's Caribbean light and dense vegetation. Printed aluminum palms rise around an iridescent portal that reflects the viewer and casts colored shadows across the hotel, while paintings and works on paper carry the imagined ecosystem onto the surrounding walls.
Artist links: Website
Marlon Portales at Marriott Stanton South Beach
Busco en El Monte Amparo
161 Ocean Drive · Built 1939 · Architect: Anton Skislewicz
Named for a verse by Cuban poet José Martí, the installation pairs two monumental paintings on identity, migration, memory and belonging. Female Gaze layers a male portrait onto a female figure, suggesting identity as a process of becoming. Opposite it, El Monte evokes the Cuban countryside through memory, an imagined landscape of ancestry and longing. Together they offer what the artist calls a moment of amparo, or refuge.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @marlonart91
Lulu Sanchez at International Inn
Palm Court Ship: The Jury is Out at the International Inn
2301 Normandy Drive · Built 1956 · Architect: Melvin Grossman
Sanchez designed her installation for the hotel's bayfront glass pavilion: a gathering of towering, hand-sculpted palms that glow from within. By night the pavilion becomes an otherworldly "earthship" whose green light echoes the hotel's vintage neon sign for people crossing the bridge. The project is also a tribute to the subtropical landscape and to Miami art-scene matriarchs Mira Lehr and Michele Oka Doner.
Artist links: Website · Instagram @lu_too
Ricardo E. Zulueta at The Betsy Hotel
RISING GLITCH LEVELS
1440 Ocean Drive · Built 1941 · Architect: L. Murray Dixon
Created for No Vacancy, Zulueta's single-channel experimental video is mapped onto the sculptural form of the hotel's Orb. Animation, glitching, datamoshing, saturated color and an ambient sound composition render familiar images of architecture, coastline and everyday life in constant motion, treating digital instability as a source of energy and renewal.
Artist links: Website
The run overlaps Miami Art Week (Nov. 30 to Dec. 6) and the public days of Art Basel Miami Beach (Dec. 4 to 6). Project descriptions come from the city's artist pages. The city does not list building dates or architects; those come from the Miami Design Preservation League's earlier No Vacancy previews, Historic Hotels of America and other published accounts. For more information, call the city's Tourism and Culture office at 305.673.7577.
