The Bass Activates Collins Park for Art Week 2026 with Amalia Pica's 'Between Tides'

Collins Park is one of the most underused public spaces in Miami Beach — a green corridor between the Bass Museum and the ocean that most Art Week visitors walk through without stopping. Amalia Pica's 'Between Tides' is designed to change that.

The Public Art Fund is presenting 'Between Tides' at Collins Park from November 29 through December 6, 2026 — opening before Art Basel and running through the final public day. The installation consists of six interactive, marine-inspired stone ping-pong tables sculpted by Argentine artist Amalia Pica. The tables are functional — you can play on them — and they're designed to function as social sculptures, creating the kind of spontaneous human interaction that public art at its best enables.

Pica's work has always been interested in communication, connection, and the social dimensions of objects. Ping-pong tables are inherently social — they require two people, they create a game, they generate an audience. Making them from stone, giving them a marine quality, siting them in a park between a museum and the ocean — these are deliberate choices about what kind of social space Collins Park should be during Art Week.

During Art Week, the park will host a special celebrity tournament featuring global curators and collectors. The tournament is part of the installation's programming — a way of activating the tables beyond passive viewing and creating a specific kind of Art Week moment that doesn't happen inside the Convention Center or the satellite fairs. It's free to watch. The tables are free to use outside tournament hours.

Collins Park sits between the Bass and the ocean, adjacent to the Miami Beach Bandshell and the Colony Hotel. During Art Week, it becomes a natural gathering point for people moving between the Convention Center and the beach hotels. 'Between Tides' turns that transitional space into a destination. It's free, it's public, and it's the kind of work that rewards the people who find it on their own rather than following a map.