Artist Jaye Alison Explores Memory, Place, and Transformation at CONTEXT Art Miami with Steidel Gallery During Miami Art Week 2026

Contemporary artist Jaye Alison will present her work with Steidel Gallery at CONTEXT Art Miami, Booth # ( ), taking place December 1–6, 2026 at the CONTEXT Art Miami Pavilion at One Herald Plaza in Downtown Miami. During Miami Art Week, collectors and art enthusiasts will have an opportunity to discover Alison’s distinctive approach to contemporary painting, informed by personal history, cultural memory, and the emotional significance of place. Based in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the artist draws upon a lifetime of creative exploration and lived experience, translating recollections, observations, and broader cultural narratives into compositions that move between abstraction and representation, personal reflection and collective experience.

Jaye Alison’s artistic journey has been shaped by a lifelong engagement with art, literature, history, and the emotional significance of place. She developed an early appreciation for visual storytelling through the hand-printed gouache plates in her father’s European art books, brought home following his service in World War II. Her subsequent experiences living and working in California, including the profound personal challenges associated with the region’s wildfires and the eventual relocation of her family to the East Coast, further informed her relationship with memory, displacement, and belonging. The rediscovery of personal artifacts and memories became an important catalyst for her Abstracted Memories body of work. Through layered compositions and a tactile visual language, Alison explores what she describes as “envisioning emotional connections,” bringing together recollections, objects, and the passage of time in visual narratives that invite viewers to consider their own relationships with memory and identity.

Her practice also reflects an ongoing dialogue between individual experience and broader historical and political realities. In Territories Blue, Alison drew upon personal connections to regions affected by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, using abstract forms, geometric arrangements, and earth-toned palettes to evoke landscapes, archaeological sites, and places altered by conflict. As she explained in an interview with Art New England, her work “comes from within as I experience the world, and works its way outward, yet it’s always informed by what is happening in the world.” This relationship between personal experience and the wider world connects her interest in ancestry, migration, history, and the human consequences of political events, demonstrating how abstraction can offer a means of engaging with complex realities while leaving room for individual interpretation.

In her separate series Energetic Interventions, Alison takes this inquiry in a more materially experimental direction. Emerging from profound civic anxiety and concerns about the erosion of constitutional protections, civil liberties, and voting rights, the series began with an unconventional act: cutting apart paintings she had previously created and cherished. Rather than treating the destruction of these works as an ending, she transformed their fragments into new compositions, bringing disparate pieces together on canvas and cradled wooden panels. The assembled surfaces are then sealed beneath layers of encaustic wax, applied with heat. Through this process, Alison examines whether beauty can emerge from chaos, whether fragmentation can produce more complex wholes, and how transformation can create the possibility of renewed meaning. The resulting works reflect an approach in which material experimentation becomes inseparable from the ideas and experiences that motivate the artist.

Alison’s multidisciplinary background encompasses painting, printmaking, writing, and documentary work. She earned an MFA through Transart Institute, with studies in Berlin and New York, and has continued to develop an extensive exhibition history spanning the United States and international venues. Her work has been presented at institutions and exhibitions including the Mark Rothko Museum in Daugavpils, Latvia, and the Art Complex Museum in Massachusetts. Her honors include recognition as an Arts Champion by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors in 2019 and participation in the Mark Rothko Painting Symposium in 2024. Her work is also represented in collections including the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Mark Rothko Museum, and the Five Points Center for Visual Arts. These accomplishments reflect the breadth of a practice that continues to engage with artistic, historical, and cultural ideas across different mediums and exhibition contexts.

Art lovers and collectors are invited to experience the work of Jaye Alison at CONTEXT Art Miami with Steidel Gallery Booth # ( ), offering Miami Art Week audiences an opportunity to encounter an artist whose work moves between personal memory, cultural history, and the possibilities of artistic transformation. Her work offers multiple points of entry, from the intimate recollections and personal histories informing Abstracted Memories to the broader cultural questions explored in Territories Blue and the transformative material processes of Energetic Interventions. Together, these explorations reveal an artist continually examining how experience shapes perception, how the past informs the present, and how new meaning can emerge through the act of making. Her participation in CONTEXT Art Miami provides collectors, curators, and art enthusiasts an opportunity to engage with the work and discover the ideas informing her contemporary practice.

For more information visit www.jayesplacegallery.com

Follow Jaye Alison on Instagram @jayealison

Fair Hours

Platinum VIP Preview
Tuesday, December 1 | 11 am – 1 pm
Access for CONTEXT + Art Miami First View VIP Passholders

VIP Preview
Tuesday, December 1 | 1 pm – 4 pm
Access for CONTEXT + Art Miami VIP Passholders & Press Benefiting the Pérez Art Museum Miami

Public Fair Hours

CONTEXT EXTENDED HOURS ON TUESDAY!
Tuesday, December 1                         4 pm – 9:30 pm
Wednesday, December 2                  11 am – 7 pm
Thursday, December 3                      11 am – 7 pm
Friday, December 4                            11 am – 7 pm
Saturday, December 5                       11 am – 7 pm
Sunday, December 6                          11 am – 6 pm