Take the opulent elevator up to the seventh floor of the Wolfsonian, and as the doors clink open, you first encounter a Futurist bust of Mussolini. It’s all profile, all of the way around, a panoptic visage that sees and controls all, but strangely dodges the gaze of the viewer, a peculiar denial of dictatorial hero worship. The bust is bronze, emphasizing the connections between modern man and the missile, but closer examination reveals that it is actually painted ceramic, an unexpected allegory for the exhibition (and period) in toto.

The added f derails the title’s cliché, sending it tumbling into a hidden space a good deal off the tracks. This exhibition, a collaboration between two artists, is grounded visually in the language of the homestead—stained glass, stained wood, stained fabric. Thematically, it is equal parts transcendental and trance occult.

Cristina García Rodero, a Magnum photographer and winner of the W. Eugene Smith Prize in 1989, is one of the great photojournalists—an artist/explorer who uses the camera’s democratic potential to reveal the hidden workings of the world, or to cast the visible in a new light. She has long been concerned with ritual, that physical manifestation of belief, and has such documented many facets of contemporary spirituality, be it a body of work about Spanish cults, or one about Burning Man.

Into the Rainbow Vein, the debut solo exhibition of Magnus Sodamin, features a series of paintings monumental and psychedelic. Reaching up to 15 feet in height, they appear on the barren floating walls of Primary Project’s new space like totems from a gigantic pipedream. The bright and varied palette that Sodamin brings to these compositions—acrylic mainly, and house paint—ramrods the eye, creating a retinal buzz that seeps into the inner ear. An impressive debut, but with paintings this big, how could it not be?

Here, Guillaume Désanges, who was PAMM’s first Researcher-in-Residence, teamed up with the Barcelona-based Dora García to create a temporary curatorial experiment, “an exhibition, or a diagram for an exhibition, something between the actual show, its catalogue, and its working notes.” At least that’s how the wall text has it.

It’s been twelve long years since James Spader bent Maggie Gyllenhaal over a desk in Secretary, but bureaucracy still has the power to titillate. Artists are out, curators and registrars in. Last October was that sexy panel at the Bass Museum accompanied by Cultured Magazine’s photospread “Curator Culture.” Before that, both Documenta and Venice ran sleek white-gloved fingers through the archive’s dust, as did CIFO’s recent Deferred Archive. Now there is this traveling exhibition, which presents an enthralling assortment of strategies for nomadic, extra-institutional art- and exhibition-making. Man, look at those hyphens.

A few nights before opening night, Alan Gutierrez took me to Locust Projects storage room to mix up a batch of his newly invented Locustinis. The drink depends on LP’s drink sponsors at the time. On that cool January evening, it was a creamy brown swamp of Vita Coco coconut water, Tito’s vodka, and iced tea.

Beatriz Monteavaro is a visual artist and plays drum in the local drone metal band Holly Hunt, and as much as it is possible, her art looks like her music sounds. Those are the two ends of that hungry snake, and this, her first Miami exhibition in five years, is their salivating fusion.

Flat or round, round or flat? At times, Betty Woodman seems like Magellan, sailing toward the edge, but sure that a curve will appear soon. For over half a century, the artist has explored ceramics’ boundaries and borders, not just the formal ones—as in how could this also be a painting?, but how the vessel reappears around the globe, from Italy to the Yucatan to Japan. The vase is the starting point, the destinations far flung.

There is a scene in Midnight Cowboy where wannabe cockslinger Joe Buck finds himself at a big city party. The hallucinatory shindig, obviously inspired by Warhol’s Factory, alienates the young hayseed who isn’t sure he wants to be part of this scene. But he is, his ranch-hand manners now branded as camp. I bring this up not only because the party looks similar to Overhead, but because it shows how wholesomeness and deviation are one in the same, because Midnight Cowboy is the only x-rated movie in history to win Best Picture, and because Ratso Rizzo dies on the bus somewhere between Hollywood, Florida and Miami. Kevin Arrow told me that.