Over the past decade, Miami-born and based, first-generation Cuban American artists Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares have cultivated an expansive and experimental collaborative practice. Working across video, performance, sculpture, sound, and light, their work gives physical form to the mechanics of power, exposing the absurdities embedded within hegemonic systems.
At Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Wright and Millares present Exile, a two-part exhibition unfolding within the gallery’s Survey Space. Developed over several years, the exhibition reflects on the immigrant experience through themes of displacement, resistance, and survival. Installed across two interconnected spaces, Exile constructs a layered narrative that moves from monument to trace.
In the first space, viewers encounter the work that gives the exhibition its title: Exile, a large-scale installation centered on a refugee boat salvaged from the coast of Miami after washing ashore in Key Biscayne, Florida. Used by Cubans fleeing the island, the vessel becomes both artifact and witness. Through sound and light, Wright and Millares transform the boat into a defiant monument, honoring not only the Cuban diaspora but refugees worldwide.
The second space deepens the exhibition’s inquiry through gesture, and the ambiguity of numerical systems. Also immersed in blue, the adjacent gallery presents a selection of Wright’s cyanotypes and Millares’ paintings alongside Desembarco, a collaborative standalone sculpture that embodies both exile and arrival. Found inside the refugee vessel was a makeshift paddle, a humble tool used to navigate uncertain waters. Wright and Millares embed this paddle into native South Florida oolite limestone, creating a grounded yet suspended object: a quiet monument to crossing, landfall, and survival.
Surrounding Desembarco, Wright’s cyanotypes bear the marks of physical intervention. Using a hammer, the artist performs acts of smashing and impact upon glass laid over chemically treated paper to create photograms or non-negative exposures using the sun. Millares’ ongoing series Paint by Number (begun in 2011) transforms numerical data drawn from real financial documents into layered silkscreens on paper, canvas, vellum, and acetate. Stripped from their original economic contexts, the numbers are repeated, stacked, and obscured within dense chromatic fields.
Together, the two spaces of Exile move between the monumental and the intimate, the sonic and the silent, the physical and the abstract. The exhibition interweaves personal history with collective memory, situating the story of a single boat within a broader framework of global migration, systemic violence, and resistance. Through immersion, material gesture, and the disruption of numerical logic, Wright and Millares draw viewers into close proximity with Exile as lived and embodied experience shaped by displacement, rupture, and the enduring act of survival.
Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to present Japanese artist Yuken Teruya returning to Miami for his second solo exhibition, What We Carry, presenting new works in sculpture, stencils, and traditional Okinawan Bingata-dyed fabrics that reflect on Okinawa’s wartime history through the imagined futures of two para-fictional protagonists, Seiken and Shizuko.
The exhibition draws from the Battle of Okinawa (April 1-June 22, 1945), one of the deadliest battles of the Pacific War, in which more than 100,000 Okinawan civilians perished.
The exhibition centers on two figures drawn from Teruya’s own family history: Seiken, inspired by the artist’s paternal grandfather, embodies survival, imagination, and endurance, while Shizuko, inspired by Teruya’s great aunt, represents loss, memory, and the fragility of youth during wartime.
For Teruya, these figures embody not only the tragedy of Okinawa’s past, but its enduring legacy: the wounds of war carried quietly across generations alongside resilience, and grace. courage,
At the heart of the exhibition is Break the Curse, Teruya’s newest series, which examines inherited trauma while imagining the possibility of renewal. Works such as Geronimo and Ultraman reclaim Bingata, the historic dyeing tradition of the Ryukyu Kingdom, transforming it into a contemporary meditation on memory, concealment, and revelation.
Across stencil-based pallet works, symbols of freedom-birds and balloons-are juxtaposed with fighter jets and parachuting soldiers,
creating a visual tension between violence and hope. Ultimately, the exhibition asks what it means to carry both the wounds and the wonder of those who came before us, and how storytelling becomes an act of survival.
Yuken Teruya (b. 1973, Okinawa, Japan), is a Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist whose work draws from memories of his homeland, Okinawa. Using discarded materials such as shopping bags, currency, and paper rolls, he transforms symbols of consumer culture into delicate landscapes and intricate sculptural forms inspired by nature.
Blending Japanese paper traditions with contemporary social critique, Teruya creates poetic works that juxtapose the excesses of consumption with the quiet beauty of the natural world. Through this tension, his practice reflects on environmental fragility while offering a hopeful meditation on renewal and reconnection with nature.
Piero Atchugarry gallery presents a contemporary art program and modern art survey. The gallery opened to the public in September 2013 with a Post-War Italian art exhibition. By January 2014 the gallery moved to a large stable adapted as an exhibition space in Garzón. In this space the program allowed outdoor and indoor proposal exploration, through the creation of dialogue between architectural features and curatorial practices.
On December 2018, the program expanded to North America with a second location, a 9000 square feet warehouse on 5520 NE 4th Avenue in the Design District neighborhood. The participation of the gallery in what is a boiling art community that connects Europe, Latin America and both coasts of the United States represents the commitment of the program to support and present the work of local and international artists with an institutional approach.
