"There's a Gator in The Pool", Summer is for the Locals
ALEX NUÑEZ
FAENA ART PROJECT ROOM
June 25th, 2025
There’s a Gator in the Pool invites viewers to step into a living painting by Miami-based artist Alex Nuñez. In this site-specific installation, Nuñez transforms the Faena Art Project Room into an immersive environment with walls covered in waves and a pool to step into rippling colors below your feet. Suspended above you, a large blue pool with a gator swimming by becomes part of a layered, fluid composition where art and atmosphere blur.
Drawing from the dreamlike tensions of her personal geographies with family roots in Cuba, New Orleans, and Miami, Nuñez reminds us of the surreal nature of South Florida life, where the shimmer of a backyard pool holds both wonder and the wild with the a sudden glimpse of a gator beneath the surface. The title, There’s a Gator in the Pool, nods to a shared South Floridian experience: the unexpected thrill and quiet fear of nature reclaiming domestic space. In Nuñez’s hands, the gator becomes a symbol, a reminder that paradise is always edged with unpredictability.
In this installation she plays with the reflective qualities of water, where color, texture, and light collide in a hypnotic choreography. Waves of color across the room evoke a kind of tropical surrealism that is both seductive and slightly unsettling. This is an oasis that feels alive, a place suspended between pleasure and danger. A celebration of sensory tension, this installation is a vibrant retreat where beauty meets risk, and where the boundaries between land, water, and dream dissolve. It’s a wet hot Floridian summer thrill.
BIO
Born and raised in Miami, Alex Nuñez is a Cuban-American mixed-media painter whose vibrant practice explores cultural identity and material experimentation. She holds an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY) and was awarded the C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship, culminating in a solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Her 2022 solo show No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá was presented at Club Gallery in Miami. Nuñez’s work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio (New York). She is the host and producer of Sunday Painter on Jolt Radio, now in its eighth year of production, and a recipient of The Locust Projects’ Wavemaker Grant. Her work and projects have been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, CNN, Art Nexus, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, W Magazine, and The Observer. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Collective 62 in Miami. She is currently working with Art in Public Places on her first public art commission.