Kat Lyons: Full Earth

An exploration of Florida’s ecological imagination anchors a new solo exhibition at Marquez Art Projects, where Kat Lyons examines how the state’s landscapes, both real and symbolic, shape our understanding of progress, memory and environmental change. Working through newly commissioned paintings, she brings together scientific research, natural history and lived experience to consider the complicated relationships between humans, animals and the wider ecosystems they inhabit.

Kat Lyons: Full Earth, on view from December 1 through April 30, draws on traditions of historical painting and still life while reworking them to probe the inner lives of non-human species. Lyons references naturalist illustration and the fantastical scenes of figures like Aloys Zötl and Albertus Seba, using these frameworks to question how stories about animals are constructed and how they endure or erode over time. Her subjects range from crocodiles rendered from memory to depictions of volcanoes that gesture toward planetary time scales, as well as the Rhesus macaques transplanted to Florida’s Silver River, whose escape and adaptation raise ongoing questions about control and coexistence.

The exhibition’s title underscores themes of abundance and interconnection, informed in part by Lyons’s engagement with Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s writings on the Everglades. That influence surfaces in her attention to the region’s layered histories and in her interest in what persists across cycles of change.

Presented at Marquez Art Projects in Allapattah, with extended hours during Miami Art Week (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and by appointment afterward, the exhibition offers a lens onto Lyons’s evolving practice and the complex environmental narratives embedded in Florida’s shifting terrain.