This Miami Installation Offers A Tribute To The Ndebele Tribe

It was a year of milestones for the week-long affair collectively known as Art Basel Miami Beach/Design Miami. The latter celebrated its 20th anniversary, featuring some 45 international galleries under the theme Blue Sky, emphasizing imaginative concepts. Outside the convention center where it’s held, a jewelry-themed installation did just that. It was part of “Pearl Jam” by 34-year-old architectural and urban designer Nicole Nomsa Moyo, the cluster of interactive, boldly hued pearl trees a tribute to the Ndebele, a tribe in South Africa, where she was raised, and the winner of the Miami Design District’s Design Commission, itself in its 10th edition. “Pearl Jam,” Nomsa Moyo says of the title, “symbolizes a fusion of heritage and artistic evolution, the ‘pearl’ representing women like me in Ndebele culture and their timeless artistry in jewelry, clothing, and architecture, the ‘jam’ conveying a dynamic re­imagining that yields a new form of cultural art.” Those new forms appear all over town: in Paradise Plaza as giant pearls of recycled aluminum, as earrings of South African–sourced glass beads dangling from trees, and as a large de-constructable necklace, aka a modular bench, in the Palm Court that stands near the site’s iconic Buckminster Fuller dome. “The installations,” adds Nomsa Moyo, who’s now based in Toronto, where she moved after earning her master’s in architecture from Carleton University in Ottawa, “reflect the power of art to transform spaces and connect people.”