QUEER ATLANTICS
BEX McCHAREN
Feb 22 - Mar 15, 2026
Bex McCharen: Queer Atlantics
February 22 – March 15, 2026
This focused presentation highlights framed works from McCharen’s ongoing project, Queer Atlantics, developed during their current artist residency at Oolite Arts.
In December, Dot Fiftyone Gallery offered a preview of this series in the Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach Special Projects section. This exhibition marks the first expanded gallery presentation of works from their evolving body of work.
Queer Atlantics represents a poignant evolution in McCharen’s interdisciplinary practice. Featuring quilts, photography and watercolors, the exhibition transforms the language of fashion into a visual meditation on community, care, and connection to the Miami waterways they call home.
Rooted in South Florida’s aquatic ecology, McCharen’s textiles serve as visual archives of queer and trans life, capturing moments of solace, acceptance, and renewal within the region’s oceans, springs, and bays. The work extends McCharen’s longstanding commitment to creating inclusive, affirming spaces into new emotional and material terrains.
“The ocean is where my queer and trans community in Miami gathers to feel accepted, held, and whole,” says McCharen. “I see quilts as an extension of this oceanic embrace; textiles that carry a warm, loving energy, enveloping the body with care.”
Through textile art, McCharen threads ancestral and chosen lineages, connecting to generations of quilters in their Virginia family while honoring contemporary rituals of queer gathering and resilience. These works envision artmaking as healing, collective dreaming, and an act of resistance against erasure.
Click here to watch “Queer Atlantics” exhibition walkthrough
Bex McCharen (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and founder of the inclusive fashion label Chromat. Their work spans quilting, cyanotype printmaking, photography, watercolor painting, and social practice, grounded in processes of mutual dreaming, collective reimagining, and ancestral connection. McCharen explores queer and trans community ritual while imagining new systems of belonging through art and design.
McCharen was awarded the Smithsonian National Design Award in 2021 and was recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 as one of the “People Who Are Reinventing the World,” as well as honored in the OUT 100 as one of the LGBTQ community’s brightest voices. Their work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Elle. Collaborations include Beyoncé, Intel, Disney, and Reebok.
They have delivered a TED Talk on inclusive design and have spoken at SXSW, Harvard, Parsons, MIT, CFDA, Pratt Institute, Fashion Institute of Technology, and Tulane University. McCharen has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, The Studios of Key West, Santa Fe Art Institute, and is currently an artist-in-residence at Oolite Arts and the Miami Cancer Institute.
McCharen curated Queer Joy at MoMA PS1, and their work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They studied at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and are based in Miami, FL. Locally, McCharen facilitates workshops at the Perez Art Museum Miami, Lotus House Women’s Shelter, the Miami Workers Center, and the Alliance for LGBTQ Youth.