The Best Booths at NADA Miami 2025, From a ‘Nacho Calder’ to The Game of Life

In 2019, Devin N. Morris was a printmaking fellow at New York’s legendary EFA Robert Blackburn Workshop, where he honed his craft in stencil monotypes. Now, Morris has returned to collaborate with Blackburn in support of its year-round printmaking activities, with the sale of his work at NADA. In these works, you see the shadow of Morris’s stencil monotypes depicting various figures. He then collages these elements into larger compositions incorporating found objects—from parts of gold frames to door frames to sets of keys on hooks to deflated balloons.

This presentation, titled “Building Materials,” considers what “the home” represents, or as Morris put it in an artist statement, “as a metaphor for peace” and all that entails. That idea connects directly to his use of collage, which he describes as his “charge, utilizing what one has to make what one needs.” The tableaux on view depict intimate domestic scenes with a surrealist bent. Among the strongest are Shaving Grays (2025), in which a buff man in a towel faces a bathroom mirror as he grooms his groin in a frame resembling a doorway, and Burning (2025), featuring a blinking red telephone in front of an emergency exit door, seen through a circular portal in a hardwood-floor artist frame.

Concerns around housing insecurity are also central to Rivalry Projects’ booth dedicated to the late artist Rodney Taylor, who died in 2019. After a decade in New York, Taylor returned to his hometown of Buffalo, New York—where Rivalry is also based— and began making art on his porch on the city’s East Side, a community deeply impacted by redlining. He wanted his work to be approachable for residents who might otherwise feel intimidated by visiting the city’s major museums.

On view are selections from Taylor’s “Untitled (House) Series,” which depict ghostlike home structures fading into their backgrounds, as if their permanence were in question.

At first glance, it might seem like school is back in session at this joint booth. On the floor is a work by COBRA that resembles a rug from a primary school classroom, designed to help young children learn their numbers. The work is in fact titled The Game of Life, a board game in which players can roll the dice to move along the journey of an artist—from emerging to established—and all the career benchmarks that blue-chip success entails.

Spread throughout the booth are the artist’s personal objects: a ceramic piggy bank shaped like a dinosaur, and what appears to be the leg of an end table. What do these works mean exactly? It’s unclear; the artist hasn’t even revealed the concept to his gallerist. But any artist who has navigated the art world’s ladders will likely find COBRA’s Game of Life readily legible.

Like many artists, Faith Icecold is interested in the hierarchy between high and low art—and how to dismantle it. In their mixed-media works, Icecold brings together dollar-store items, magazine cutouts, and internet printouts, scouring the web and meme culture to create visually dense assemblages. References to Black artists appear throughout, including nods to the abstractions of Stanley Whitney and Howardena Pindell, while still making those idioms their own.

At the center of the booth is Hush (2024), a piano-shaped construction made from cardboard, duct tape, aluminum foil, hot glue, nail polish, and more. This maximalist work includes a four-part adaptation of Will Smith confronting a robot in the 2004 film I, Robot. When Smith asks, “Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?” the robot responds, “Can you?”—sending Smith into tears.

Half of David B. Smith Gallery’s booth is devoted to work by Justin Favela, a rising artist best known for tissue-paper sculptures resembling piñatas. Hanging overhead is the tongue-in-cheek Nacho Calder, a mobile that transforms Alexander Calder’s modernist tendrils and primary palette into a rotating plate of dripping, cheesy nachos. Nearby is the much smaller 2017 work Mini Nachos (Floor Nachos Study), in which a single brown tortilla chip is suspended by a yellow string of melted cheese.

The standout is Valle de México desde el Tepeyac, After José María Velasco (2024), named after the 19th-century Mexican painter whose sweeping landscapes helped shape Mexico’s national identity.

At the center of this group presentation is a striking work by Lima-based artist Claudia Coca, whose practice often examines the legacies of colonialism and mestizaje in Latin America. Across three linen panels resembling overlapping window shades, Coca paints details of pre-Columbian artifacts—specifically those depicting figures in erotic embraces. These figurines are typically tucked away in the far corners of anthropological displays, if shown at all. Coca’s interest is not pornographic; she aims to highlight how pre-Columbian cultures viewed sensuality as ritual, a means of entering the liminal space between life and death, between the sacred and the profane.