QUEER ATLANTICS
BEX McCHAREN
Dic 2 - 7, 2025 - Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach
BEX McCHAREN
Dot Fiftyone Gallery participated in the Special Projects section of Untitled Art Miami Beach 2025, presenting “Queer Atlantics,” a new body of work by Bex McCharen (they/them), in partnership with Oolite Arts, where the artist was an artist-in-residence.
This presentation marked a major moment in McCharen’s evolving creative practice, following the recent closing of their groundbreaking fashion label Chromat, which for 15 years reshaped the fields of fashion, performance, and body politics. With Queer Atlantics, McCharen moved beyond the runway to introduce a deeply personal series of quilts, photography, and watercolor works, offering a renewed language of intimacy, kinship, and connection to Miami’s waterways and coastal ecologies.
Rooted in South Florida’s aquatic environments, the works on view served as visual archives of queer and trans life and gathering, meditating on the ocean as a site of care, ceremony, and collective belonging.
“The ocean is where my queer and trans community in Miami gathers to feel accepted, held, and whole,” McCharen said. “I saw quilts as an extension of this oceanic embrace; textiles that carried a warm, loving energy, enveloping the body with care.”
Through quiltmaking and textile processes tied to familial heritage in Virginia, McCharen interwove ancestral and chosen histories, framing artmaking as a practice of healing, remembrance, and resistance to erasure. The booth reflected a wider commitment to community-rooted work that defined McCharen’s artistic ethos and ongoing engagement with Miami’s cultural landscape..
About the Artist
Bex McCharen is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and founder of Chromat, the internationally recognized fashion label celebrated for championing inclusivity and reimagining beauty in fashion. Their practice spans textiles, cyanotype, photography, watercolor, and social practice, grounding creative work in collective dreaming, queer ritual, and embodied belonging.
McCharen is a Smithsonian National Design Award recipient (2021), has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and OUT100, and has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal. Their collaborations include Beyoncé, Intel, Disney, and Reebok. Their work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and they have presented talks at TED, Harvard, MIT, Parsons, and SXSW.
Currently based in Miami, McCharen is an artist-in-residence at Oolite Arts and the Miami Cancer Institute, and teaches and leads community workshops across South Florida.