Kat Lyons: Full Earth
Marquez Art Projects
Ongoing
One hour’s drive from the air-conditioned Miami Beach Convention Center lies Everglades National Park, a vast, protected ecosystem of 6,105 sq. km. A wetland where freshwater and saltwater meet, it shelters species found nowhere else and serves as South Florida’s natural infrastructure, filtering drinking water, buffering floods and shoring up ecological resilience in a climate increasingly under duress from the bustling metropolises not so far away.
These two worlds collide in Kat Lyons’s Full Earth at Marquez Art Projects (MAP) in Miami Beach, the Kentucky-born painter’s first US institutional solo show. Lyons uses the Everglades’ past and present as scaffolding for large-scale oil paintings that unfold as part Leonora Carrington, part John James Audubon and part Frans Snyders.
Lyons’s relationship to the wetland is both personal and literary. “There’s a feeling of playfulness, secrecy and mysticism that I attribute to the Everglades,” she says. Members of her partner’s extended family are Gladespeople, a loose term for those who live in and around the ecosystem. Additionally, the conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) functions as a lodestar for Lyons, whose canvases similarly hover between the beauty and the caution in Douglas’s elegiac writings.
Yet Lyons rarely depicts human figures, making animals the protagonists of her visual drama. They range from native species, such as the American crocodile and anhinga, to interlopers like rhesus macaques—primates introduced for tourism that subsequently established thriving colonies. Lyons often paints her animals from memory, giving her menagerie an intentional malleability that mirrors the subjective depictions of the animal world found in everything from folklore to modern media.
“I’m acutely aware of my material and visual relationships with animals; I worked on a livestock farm for two years, but I’m also eating them, raising them, training them, positioning them,” she says. “Then there’s a less tangible aspect of how we’ve changed animals to fit human culture, as caricatures, cartoons, advertisements and fables.”
From city to country
The works are also laden with personal symbolism. Lyons began work on the series after she moved to the woodlands of upstate New York in 2025. “I was immersed in life happening all around me and learning to live with others and with animals in a way I hadn’t in the city,” she says. Even the show’s title, Full Earth, comes from a doorknob on a painted cabinet in her home.
This merging of the personal and the public enables Lyons to create canvases that can be read as public parables. One, Double Country (2025), shows a stag with its antlers snagged in a tree; a factory looms on one side and a volcano on the other. Lyons describes the work as a commentary on Miami Art Week, describing it as reflecting “the commonality of experience, the succumbing to larger forces at work while embroiled in smaller, more individual conflict”.
“Kat’s passionate interest in the Florida Everglades led naturally to this collaboration,” says MAP founder John Marquez. All the works on view are newly commissioned, a choice he calls “one of the important ways MAP champions emerging artists”. According to Alex Gartenfeld, a curatorial adviser for MAP and the artistic director at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the suite explores “how we define what is human and non-human, and what value we ascribe to each”.
Full Earth ultimately collapses time and taxonomy, melding the Everglades with the human histories that press upon the ecosystem. “Florida feels so emblematic of our larger environmental concerns, of how we manipulate the landscape, the animals living in it, and how we humans position ourselves within it,” Lyons says. Like the wetlands themselves, her paintings are in a state of flux, toggling between the commercial velocity of the art industry and the slower geological time of the ecosystem it borders.
