The Season

The Storm as a Picture

A show at Tunnel Projects treats the hurricane as an image before it is ever weather. It closes September 5.

The Editors · August 30, 2026

Every Miamian carries two hurricanes. There is the one that arrives, and there is the one that lives in the mind for the week before it, assembled out of forecast cones, grocery lines, and the particular light that comes before a storm. "Preliminary Structure for a Hurricane Forum," at Tunnel Projects on Southwest 12th Avenue, is a show about the second one. Curated by Rivers Plasketes, it opened August 8 and comes down September 5, which gives it one more week.

The framing is the interesting part. The exhibition treats the hurricane not only as a meteorological event but as an image, a prediction, a memory, and a political event. Anyone who has lived a season here recognizes that list immediately, because the storm is experienced as media long before it is experienced as wind. The cone of uncertainty is a graphic design decision. The evacuation zone is a map someone drew. By the time the thing itself arrives, a city has already spent days living inside its representation.

That is a genuinely Miami subject, and it is worth noticing how rarely it gets treated as one. The city exports images of itself constantly, and almost all of them are of good weather. A show that takes the other image seriously, the one made of radar sweeps and boarded glass and the strange civic intimacy of a shared forecast, is doing something the postcard version cannot.

There is history under this. The storm has been shaping the physical city for longer than most people think about, and not only through damage. After Andrew in 1992, Florida rewrote its building code into one of the strictest in the country, and the result is visible in every impact window and hurricane strap in South Florida construction today. An enormous amount of what a Miami building looks like, and what it costs, is an argument with a storm that happened over thirty years ago. The memory is not metaphorical. It is structural, and it is load-bearing.

For anyone who collects, the season has a practical face too. Late August through October is when work on paper and unsealed canvas is most at risk, and the danger is rarely the wind. It is the humidity that follows a power cut, when the air conditioning stops and a closed house climbs past seventy percent relative humidity for a few days. Anything valuable should be off the floor, off exterior walls, and out of a room whose windows face the water. If a generator only runs a few circuits, the one keeping air moving through the room where the work lives deserves to be among them.

The show is free and open to the public, and it has a week left. Take the afternoon.

Sources and further reading: Miami New Times on the August exhibitions.