MIAMI—Our correspondent in South Florida takes us for a tour through the most interesting museum and gallery shows on view in Miami and nearby Hollywood, Fla. Included are a trio of folkloric artists displayed at Bernice Steinbaum; a solo exhibition at Fredric Snitzer by a former graffiti tagger; and a group photography show in Hollywood that updates gender stereotypes using pint-size beauty queens, Israeli soldiers and stay-at-home moms.

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Bernice Steinbaum Gallery
Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Alejandro Aguilera and Tatiana Parcero
Through March 3

Bernice Steinbaum has a knack for combining solo shows that share a thread of artistic sensibility, whether topical or formal, and her latest crop is no exception. The paintings and drawings of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, carved-wood assemblages of Alejandro Aguilera and photographic body maps of Tatiana Parcero share a folkloric symbolism and primitive aesthetic. Yet they have each drawn upon distinct iconography and material techniques to develop their own vocabulary.

Arnaldo Roche-Rabell’s “Images from a Legendary Painting” fill the ground floor with vast canvases and drawings. His dense layering of paint strips lends a three-dimensional effect to compositions, which reference Rousseau’s jungles, Van Gogh’s sunflowers and Monet’s water lilies.

In Liars and Deceivers, a circle of dancing nudes (a la Matisse) surround a disembodied head amid a maelstrom of leaves, sharpening Roche’s quotation of an idyllic masterwork with a violent edge. Autumnal fronds and petals in vibrant shades of thick paint outline facial features in self-portraits titled I Assume I Have a Soul and I Assume I Can Fool the Sun. Another room contains haunting works on paper in which Roche has etched apocalyptic visions by scraping away blue oil paint to reveal the white gesso underneath.

In a project rooms upstairs, Tatiana Parcero traces a personal and universal history through celestial medallions and hieroglyphics imprinted behind transparencies of her fragmented face and limbs, so they too appear to have greater depth. Her inscriptions mimic henna tattoos and astronomical diagrams with a mystical ethos echoed in her meditative stare and hand gestures.

The next project room is inhabited by the spirits of revolutionary Che Guevara, Latin American artists Ana Albertina Delgado and Maria Izquierdo, and the patron saints of Cuba and suicide. The totemic silhouettes in Alejandro Aguilera’s installation, “A Brief History of Usage,” are carved from polychromed wood and appliquéd with metal, corn kernels, spices and packed red clay. Aguilera enhances the cubistic effect of his assembled forms with graphite images drawn directly onto the worn wood and onto manila paper inset in plexiglass boxes—windows to the soul, as it were.

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Fredric Snitzer Gallery
“Michael Vasquez: Family Jewels”
Through March 5

Michael Vasquez’s native artistic tongue as a graffiti artist (or “tagger”) is clearly evident into his schooled, expressionistic painting—aerosol marks mix with oil strokes, and the sparks and scribbles of graffiti erupt along the contours of shoulders and skylines. This rising star is able to craft his own visual language with a creative eye and a skillful swagger.

In his first solo show at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, the 23-year-old, Miami-based artist pays tribute to the extended family that raised him. He lavishes lavender brushstrokes on the cheeks of his single mother as she washes dishes, and dapples his childhood face with the gray, green and magenta shades of sunlight in the ironically titled Fishing with Father.

His absent father is abstracted as a sculpture of primary-colored Lego blocks in A Father That’s Always Around (I Always Wanted a Real Father) and imagined as a 1950s-style stereotype with hands cupped over his ears in the graphite drawing Father Didn’t Want Anything to Do with It.

These domestic images contrast with neighborhood scenes starring the menacing yet majestic homeboys who were his models of manhood. Individual portraits are painted from a perspective that forces the viewer to look up at these characters who rule the streets. In A Sign That They Really Cared, Vasquez depicts his own initiation as a Dionysian cherub drinking from a bottle of malt liquor.