Invitation to Openness

Frost Art Museum Miami · Coral Gables / Coconut Grove

Exhibition on view: May 2, 2026 - Nov 8, 2026

"Invitation to Openness", a response to "David C. Driskell and Friends", is a listening room exploring collaboration through music. Listening stations feature jazz collectives and avant-garde musicians from the 1960s on, such as the AACM, the Sun Ra Arkestra and Mongo Santamaria, plus hip-hop and Miami experimental scenes, alongside visual works by Terry Adkins, Sam Gilliam, Masimba Hwati, Bertina Lopes and Pauline Oliveros.

Terry Adkins

Terry Adkins (1953–2014) was an American sculptor, musician, filmmaker and printmaker who orchestrated installations and multisensory experiences. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, he studied printmaking before receiving an MFA in sculpture from the University of Kentucky. In 1986 he founded the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, a revolving collective whose "recitals" combined sculpture, music, video and performance. His one-person exhibitions include "Recital" at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, "Infinity is Always Less Than One" at ICA Miami and "Resounding" at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. He was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the 2015 Venice Biennale. From 2000 until his death he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and Tate.

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) was an American painter and sculptor who, over a seven-decade career, continuously reshaped abstract painting. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, he became a leading figure associated with the Washington Color School, the movement begun in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s that emphasized large fields of color. In the mid- to late 1960s he created his Beveled-edge paintings, folding unstretched canvas before staining it with acrylic and stretching it over beveled frames, and then his celebrated Drapes, in which he freed stained canvas from the stretcher entirely and suspended it from ceilings and walls, transforming painting's relationship to the architectural space in which it is seen. In 1972 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, and he returned to the Biennale in 2017. He continued painting until the end of his life and was represented by Pace and David Kordansky Gallery.

Artworks in this exhibition

Masimba Hwati

Masimba Hwati is an artist from Harare, Zimbabwe, who works internationally in sculpture, sound, performance and video. He studied sculpture at the Harare Polytechnic, earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2019 and holds a PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Known for unconventional mixed-media and sound sculptures, he examines postcolonial themes by re-appropriating archives and culturally imbued objects, from cars to shoes, and repositioning them in contemporary urban settings; his work has also juxtaposed the Detroit Jitt and Zimbabwean Jiti dances. He exhibited in the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and took part in the 2021 British Textile Biennial. His work is held by the Philharmonie de Paris, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Iziko South African National Gallery, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and Manchester Art Gallery.

Masimba Hwati. Photo by Baynham Goredema, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Bertina Lopes

Bertina Lopes (1924–2012) was a Mozambican-Italian painter, sculptor and activist, considered one of the most important women artists from Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Maputo to a Portuguese father and an African mother, she studied in Lisbon, where she engaged with Portuguese Modernism and international avant-garde movements. After returning to Mozambique in 1953, cultural nationalism became a crucial ideological and artistic influence, and her work combined African iconography with the political events of the time. Following a forced return to Europe, she settled in Rome in 1963, where her paintings expressed an end to colonialism and a desire for independence; from the late 1990s her work turned to free, gestural abstraction in extraordinary color. She held retrospectives in Rome in 1986 and 2002, and her work was shown at the 60th Venice Biennale and the 36th São Paulo Bienal.

Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was an American composer, accordionist and electronic music pioneer best known for "Deep Listening," a practice she described as "listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing." Born in Houston, she began playing the accordion at nine and moved to San Francisco in 1952, studying composition with Robert Erickson at San Francisco State College. With Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick she was part of the early electroacoustic scene that led to the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which she later directed when it merged with Mills College. Her vocal work "Sound Patterns" won the Gaudeamus Prize in 1962, and her "Sonic Meditations" (1971) offered instructions for collective listening. She coined the term "deep listening" in 1988 after recording in an underground cistern, and her foundation became the Deep Listening Institute. She died in Kingston, New York.

Pauline Oliveros. Photo by Allan J. Cronin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons