Photography by Zaire Aranguren (@zairephoto). Image courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach.
THE BASS X BAKEHOUSE ART COMPLEX WINDOWS PROJECT
Located at 23rd Street and Collins Avenue in the Walgreens storefront.
Blue Magick is a site-specific installation that brings together personal experience, history, and collective memory to consider how cultural identity is shaped within everyday spaces. Interdisciplinary artist Shayla Marshall draws from her ongoing interest in “third spaces,” sites of gathering and belonging beyond home and work. Here, Shayla transforms familiar environments into extraordinary worlds where haircare aisles and living rooms merge into a shared space of communal care.
The installation features two distinct yet deeply interconnected scenes: The Blue Room and The Red Room. In The Blue Room, located along the 23rd Street windows, a moment of intimacy and care unfolds: a figure carved from wood and painted with chessboard tiles takes the form of a mother tending to her daughter’s hair. This intimate scene exists within a similarly intimate setting—the walls are a shade of deep blue, exuding a sense of warmth and domesticity that reinforces the tenderness of the moment. An original tintype portrait hung in the background recalls the familiar sight of family photos displayed at home, a tender affirmation of Black visibility and communal care. Along the adjacent walls, Black haircare products reflect a broader journey towards equity for the Black community, reframing rituals of hair care both as practices of intergenerational connection and as acts of cultural preservation.
On Collins Avenue, The Red Room reimagines a Walgreens aisle as a dream-like experience. Shelves stacked with braiding hair and beauty products line one wall, while a vast collection of hair combs adorn the other. Here, one of the chessboard-painted figures reappears, this time as a woman holding up a hairstyling product. The same young figure from The Blue Room returns, now older, reflecting the artist’s own journey towards developing a sense of pride in her natural hair. While the scene draws from personal experience, its historical and social implications anchor this moment within broader practices of resilience and representation. At the same time, a small sign points towards the store’s actual haircare aisle, ultimately blurring the boundaries between the real and imagined.
Throughout Blue Magick, motifs of checkered patterns and hair products function as symbols of strategy and resistance. The checkered paintings consider the game of chess as something more than a means of entertainment. In the artist’s words, “chess, with its ties to strategy and colonization, becomes reimagined here as an act of reclamation, a way of ‘playing the game back’. ” At the same time, the checkered pattern evokes outdated decor from a previous era. By blending aesthetics from different generations, Shayla disrupts the linear understanding of time, suggesting that history is cyclical and that liberation is an ongoing, evolving process. In this context, hair functions as both material and metaphor: a marker of identity, a form of artistry, and a tool of empowerment.
In the artist’s words:
“I grew up in a time when natural Black hair was not widely celebrated, and safe products were hard to find. Over time, that changed… this installation reflects that journey from absence to visibility, from erasure to representation.”
Blue Magick transforms this consumer space into a site of healing and visibility. By merging interpersonal moments with commercial imagery, Shayla honors the everyday rituals by which identity is affirmed and history is rewritten. Blue Magick ultimately stands as a monument to care, community, and the ongoing act of self-determination—a reminder that empowerment is never fixed or settled, but continually re-enacted through the ordinary gestures that shape how we see ourselves and one another.
About the artist
Shayla Marshall (b. 1999, Miami, FL) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice uses world-building as a tool for liberation, challenging linear notions of time to explore the complexities of history and identity. Working across sculpture, photography, painting, writing, and archiving, she creates immersive environments that reimagine Black American experiences and possibilities for healing and transformation. Rooted in her upbringing as an African American woman, Marshall’s work emphasizes storytelling, cultural preservation, and the redefinition of past and future. She holds a BFA from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Los Angeles and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London, and has exhibited at institutions including Saatchi Gallery and Tate Modern.
Instagram: @shaylamonii
About The Bass x Bakehouse Art Complex Windows Project
The Walgreens Windows Project is a collaboration between The Bass and Bakehouse. Featuring site-specific projects by emerging and local artists on a rotating basis, the projects represent the shared missions of the Miami-based arts organizations to support art that engages, challenges, and educates. The project is supported by Walgreens.
About The Bass
The Bass is Miami Beach’s contemporary art museum. Focusing on exhibitions of international contemporary art, The Bass presents mid-career and established artists reflecting the spirit and international character of Miami Beach. The Bass seeks to expand the interpretation of contemporary art by incorporating disciplines of contemporary culture, such as design, fashion, and architecture, into the exhibition program. The exhibition program encompasses a wide range of media and artistic points of view that bring new thought to the diverse cultural context of Miami Beach.
