Tracey Emin Will Light Up Miami With Her First Solo Show in a U.S. Museum
By: Rozalia Jovanovic
Come December, Tracey Emin, whose current New York show has taken over both of Lehmann Maupin’s spaces here, will be getting her first show at an American museum. Kicking off the next edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami will present “Tracey Emin: Angel Without You,” a show devoted exclusively to Emin’s neons.
Miami, a seaside city illuminated by vintage neon, and which Emin now calls home for part of the year, provides a resonant backdrop for the show whose 60 pieces will span two decades of Emin’s career. It will include some early favorites like her 1995 work “The Tracey Emin Museum,” a neon based on her loosely scrawled hand-writing, as well as a large-scale piece she’s creating in the museum’s courtyard. The show is centered on Emin’s neon because that work marked a shift in her approach from her more diaristic efforts to her inscrutable and open-ended later works.
The museum will also present the film “Why I Never Became a Dancer,” which shows scenes from the artist’s childhood home, the British seaside town of Margate, decked with neon signage, and conveys Emin’s tale of her turbulent adolescence. The film was purchased by MOCA in 1998, marking the first acquisition of Emin’s work by an American museum.
“As a towering figure in Britain’s contemporary art community — and arguably one of the most significant female artists of her generation,” said MOCA’s executive director and chief curator Bonnie Clearwater, “Tracey Emin is long overdue for a solo museum exhibition in the United States. As an early supporter of Tracey’s work, we’re thrilled to mount this unprecedented exploration of her neon sculptures.”
We’re thrilled to see it.