THE MAGIC IS YOU!
–KEVIN ARROW
A site-specific installation based on photographic archives on the the city of Miami and its visual culture at Casa Faena.
Presented in partnership with No Vacancy-a program commissioned by the City of Miami Beach, in collaboration with the Miami Beach Convention and Visitors Authority.
The Magic Is You!, a site-responsive installation, draws from Kevin Arrow’s personal and eclectic archive of 35mm slides, accumulated over decades of living and working in Miami Beach. The archive contains a vast, fragmentary record of people, places, architecture, events, and everyday moments that reflect the evolving visual culture of the city.
For No Vacancy, selected slides are transformed from photographic documents into an immersive installation, bringing images from the archive into dialogue with the architecture and atmosphere of the Faena. Through enlargement, repetition, transparency, light, and spatial arrangement, individual photographs become fragments within a larger visual field.
The work explores the archive as both personal memory and unofficial history. By recontextualizing photographs made across different moments in time, the installation invites viewers to consider how time and place is remembered, represented, and continually transformed.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kevin Arrow (b. Mineola, New York) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist based in Miami Beach, Florida. Active in South Florida’s visual arts community since the mid 1980s, Arrow works across hand cut paper collage, painting, film, light-based works, and design. His practice explores pattern, abstraction, perception, and the transformation of modest materials into complex visual systems.
Arrow’s work has been exhibited throughout South Florida and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass, Miami Dade Public Library, the University of Miami, and the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places. His work is characterized by a sustained interest in geometry, repetition, archives, obsolete media, and the relationship between art, design, and everyday visual culture.
For No Vacancy Miami Beach, Arrow continues this investigation through a site responsive project developed specifically in relation to its architectural and cultural setting.
ABOUT NO VACANCY
No Vacancy is a juried art competition that supports and celebrates mainly local artists, provokes critical discourse, and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as temporary art destinations. No Vacancy 2026 marks the program’s seventh edition presenting 12 artists creating site-specific works at 12 iconic Miami Beach hotels. The installations will be on view from November 12 through December 19, 2026.