Explore Downtown Miami's Vibrant Arts Scene

In Downtown Miami, you’ll find art and culture nearly everywhere. Explore waterfront museums, discover public art in parks and plazas, catch a live performance or dine in spaces where design takes center stage. Whether you’re wandering through a gallery or stumbling upon creativity in unexpected places, Downtown Miami makes it easy to dive into inspiring cultural experiences.

Downtown Miami’s Art Museums

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)

The visual arts are celebrated at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), a stunning three-story, 200,000 square-foot structure occupying the heart of Downtown Miami on Biscayne Bay. The museum has a broad veranda and a roof supported by slender pillars resembling mangrove prop roots or the stilts that once supported the Stiltsville houses out in the bay. The museum showcases international art from the 20th and 21st centuries, with special emphasis on the Americas.

An example of PAMM’s commitment is an ongoing exhibition commissioned by the museum, Como Semillas en el Viento (“Like Seeds in the Wind” in English). The augmented-reality sculpture by Alfredo Salazar-Caro, the Mexico-born co-founder of the Digital Museum of Digital Art, combines 3D-scanned artifacts with 3D-scanned portraits of workers in the U.S. who are immigrants from Central and South America. A recorded voice reads poetry inspired by each person in the work.

Museum of Ice Cream

The Museum of Ice Cream is a unique experience that’s fun for all ages. Learn all about the fascinating history of ice cream while discovering a variety of installations based on the beloved treat. This 1.5-hour experience includes a Sprinkle Pool filled with thousands of colorful sprinkles. When the experience concludes, feel free to indulge in a milkshake or specialty cocktail at Dunky’s Diner. This experience is cashless, but credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay are accepted.

Public Art

Since its inception, the Miami-Dade Art in Public Places has been adding to the beauty and meaning of public spaces with more than 1,000 pieces of art through one of the oldest public-art programs in the country. More than 100 of these works are in Downtown Miami's parks and public buildings.

Standouts include the following:

• Isamu Noguchi’s Slide Mantra in Bayfront Park, a 29-ton, 10-foot-tall work in Carrara marble carved into a spiral slide, with steps accessed through an opening in the back.
• Joan Lehman’s Rhythm of the Train, featuring arches of brushed stainless steel reaching 17 feet high and spanning nearly 30 feet in the open plaza at 155 NW 3rd St.
• Ronald Bladen’s 23-foot-tall, painted-aluminum Minimalist construction, The X at 300 NE 2nd Avenue on Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus.
• Miami artist Jose Bedia’s untitled graphic design in epoxy terrazzo floor and balcony railings in the Adrienne Arsht Center
• Ed Ruscha’s murals in the Main Library.

To explore the art of the built environment, the Miami Center for Architecture & Design organizes events and architecture walking tours overflowing with information about the buildings of Downtown Miami.

Would You Like Art With That?

Some restaurants don’t leave art to the museums. One example is Sexy Fish in Brickell, which serves Japanese-inspired food in an art-filled setting designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio and decorated with the works of Damien Hirst, Frank Gehry and Michael Roberts.

Art You Can Sleep With

Some of Miami’s fine hotels have more than fountains in their lobbies. The InterContinental Miami on Biscayne Bay is perhaps the only hotel in the world with a lobby built around a sculpture. The semi-abstract Spindle, by British sculptor Henry Moore, is 15 feet tall and about 70 tons of travertine marble. Several smaller versions of the work, in bronze, are on display in museums around the world, but this is the only one of this size and rendered in stone. 

The twisting, flowing form, pierced by a hole and with points thrusting out each side was carved in 1981 in Italy, where it was dropped and required significant repair before it was shipped to the U.S. It was bought by Theodore Gould, developer of the hotel, and lowered by a helicopter into the lobby space, with the rest of the structure then built around it. 

In 2024, the hotel unveiled Miami’s Icon by Noel Santiesteban. The 20-foot-long, 6-foot-high piece was commissioned by the hotel and placed outside the property adjacent to the pedestrian path overlooking the bay. The hotel also has monthly residencies featuring a single artist’s work and celebrating events such as Black History Month, International Women’s Month and Pride Month.

The Art of Performance In Downtown Miami

Music and dance are everywhere in Miami, but here are the major spaces devoted to performance in Downtown Miami.

The Adrienne Arsht Center

The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts is Miami’s foremost venue for live performances. The Arsht annually presents more than 300 professional shows, from Broadway musicals to jazz and classical music concerts, a flamenco festival and free events such as a LGBTQ Pride celebration and other events for families. 

Opened in 2006 at a cost of $470 million, the Arsht has three theaters: the Ziff Ballet Opera House, with 2,400 seats; the John S. and James L. Knight Concert Hall, with 2,200 seats; and the Carnival Studio Theater, a flexible black-box space that can seat 300. 

The Arsht, designed by internationally known Argentine architect César Pelli, occupies two sites straddling Biscayne Boulevard that are connected by a pedestrian bridge. The area linking the two buildings includes the Parker and Vann Thomson Plaza for the Arts, an outdoor social and performance space.

The Kaseya Center

The Kaseya Center is a multi-purpose arena on Biscayne Bay in Downtown Miami. Home court for the NBA’s Miami Heat, the arena presents more than 80 non-basketball events annually. Among them are concerts by major recording artists, many of them Latin. 

The arena’s capacity is 19,500 people, including club seats, luxury suites and private boxes. Also in the Kaseya complex is the Waterfront Theatre, the largest indoor theater in Florida, with capacity of up to 5,800. The center was designed by Arquitectonica, headquartered in Miami, and 360 Architecture. 

The Silverspot Cinema

The Silverspot Cinema presents first-run movies in a luxurious setting, but it also regularly shows live and encore opera performances as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series. Examples in the summer of 2025 were The Metropolitan Opera: Salome and The Metropolitan Opera: Il Barbiere di Siviglia. The modern movie palace is also one of the venues for the annual Miami Film Festival.