Design Miami's Curios Are the Secret Program

The Curios section at Design Miami is not a gallery program. It is an immersive installation platform — a series of environments that you walk into, rather than booths that you walk past. Most people at the fair treat it as a secondary attraction. That is a mistake.

This year's Curios include some of the most formally ambitious work in the entire program. Four presentations in particular are worth your time.

HOMA works in glass, metal, mirror, and stone — materials that the studio describes as caught between states. The central question of their presentation is whether stone can flow and glass can hold the movement of molten heat. These are not rhetorical questions. They are the actual subject of the work, which uses material transformation as a way of thinking about what objects are and what they can become.

KAMEH by Nikita Erokhin presents black sculptural mirrors inspired by Desert Rose crystal formations — the mineral structures that form in arid environments when sand particles become trapped in gypsum crystals. The mirrors are large, dark, and formally precise. They reflect the room back at you in a way that makes the room feel different.

klove fills a room with hand-blown glass mushrooms and blossoms arranged as a forest-floor light installation. The Indian studio has been working with glass and light for over two decades, and this presentation is among their most immersive. The effect is quiet and strange — a room that feels like it belongs somewhere else entirely.

Marcela Cure presents Color in Suspension — seven mirrors, six sculptural vessels, and two tables cast individually in resin. Each piece is unique. The resin captures color in a state of suspension, neither solid nor liquid, neither transparent nor opaque. The work is about the moment before a material becomes what it is going to be.

The Curios are the reason to arrive early and stay late. They reward attention in a way that gallery booths, by their nature, cannot. Design Miami 2026 runs December 1-6 at Convention Center Drive & 19th Street, Miami Beach.