Jaguar in Concept at Miami Art Week
Car Culture on Display at Miami Art Basel
Jaguar Type 00 makes its debut at Miami Art Week, Dec. 2, 2024. Photo: Tamara Warren
While the formidable traffic gridlock was the topic of casual conversation at Miami Art Basel, imaginative car design was on full display on all sides of the Biscayne Bay. Car brands and auto adjacent companies showed up at Miami Art Week in full force, attracted to the headiness of contemporary art and expensive tastes of collector crowds. Car-meets-art mashups gained traction over the past two decades as the city, buoyed by art week’s success, became a year-round destination for art and, in 2022, a host city for glitzy Formula 1 racing. Cars and art are now synonymous with Miami Beach culture. Limited edition models, car-brand collabs, and even an entire car brand relaunch were held at a dozen cultural venues across Miami.
In this year’s splashiest automotive moment, the Jaguar brand landed on Miami Art Week as the setting for its brand relaunch and the full reveal of its look and new persona. Under cotton-candy lights, Jaguar chief creative officer Gerry McGovern described how Jaguar was once the brand that Enzo Ferrari praised for the 1961 Jaguar E-type, what Ferrari called the most beautiful car of all time. McGovern mused that Jaguar founder William Lyons would approve of the total reset, and with that, two versions of the Jaguar Type 00 concept rolled out for the Monday evening world premiere. The new distinctive shape, characterized by a long bonnet that tapers into a horizontal-lined hood completely foregoes a rear window and slinks into a slatted rearend. Type 00 also removes the iconic leaper hood ornament and reimagines the feline iconography embossed in metal plating. The impact of this departure from its classic heritage and unusual form resonated far beyond Art Basel — the whole premise for why cars are shown first in concept. Cast in “Miami Pink” and “London Blue,” Jaguar wanted to make a statement distinct from the typical sports car, and in that category, it met its mark.
“ You’ve got to make a car people will desire.”
The Jaguar Type 00 Vision represents the brand’s hard pivot into electric vehicles, a period its describing as “exuberant modernism” as this car boasts a potential range of 430 miles. “Making EVs isn’t enough,” said Rawdon Crawford, Jaguar’s Managing Director, in an interview. “You’ve got to make a car people will desire.” The production version of this two-door coupe will be a four-door GT that will go on sale in 2026 and the brand’s reentry to the market. Jaguar will open its first brand store in Paris to set the tone on its fashion forward approach. Jaguar brought several designers from the UK over to dig into the new Jaguar philosophy, who emphasized the use of natural materials as a cloak for its digital capabilities. One example: sound designers played gongs and harps to extract tones from the brass fixtures and travertine stone materials used from the car’s interior to produce a suite of in-car tones.
“One of the things that is unusual inside Jaguar is that design has a very strong voice, together with engineering,” said Constantino Segui Gilabert, chief exterior designer in an interview. “As we are moving into the production car, we have basically created a car from scratch, from the structure to the proportions, where we’ve been a part of the decision making that will manifest into the car.” The Type 00 — pronounced zero-zero — was on display at Art Miami, where Jaguar was a fair sponsor. Jaguar also built out a site-specific exhibit of emerging artists at the reveal, highlighting connections to the light and dark contours it hopes to convey in its new branding.
The connection between automotive design and the arts was woven into numerous art fairs during Miami Art Week. An Infiniti QX80 parked on the beach beckoned guests to the Untitled Art fair, where a site-specific installation by Amor Muñoz, presented by bitforms gallery, demonstrated the connection between touch and sensors in the car in a meditative reflection. At Design Miami, Land Rover showed off the limited-edition Range Rover SV Candeo, encrusted with recycle 18-karat gold badging, inspired by the Miami skyline.
BMW, the longtime Art Basel sponsor, introduced the third part of an ongoing collaboration with designer Ronnie Feig and his brand Kith at the Herzog and de Meuron designed parking garage at 1111 Lincoln Road. Feig painted a 1981 BMW M1 E26 in techno violet, a historic BMW shade and paid homage to the M motorsports series in a production version of the BMW XM Kith collaboration made in an edition of 47 cars offered in frozen techno violet and frozen black.
Photo courtesy of BMW
Other brands supported, Miami’s institutions. Lexus commissioned Liminal Cycles for an immersive installation at the ICA Museum and introduced a capsule collection of objects created by Germane Barnes, Michaell Bennett for Studio Kër, Suchi Reddy, and Tara Sakhi for T SAKHI. Proceeds from the collection support the museum.
Some brands inserted pure automotive messaging in the art week backdrop to push out enthusiast-oriented news. At a beachside property, Lamborghini showed off a graphic Miami-inspired Ad Personam Urus SE, a plug-in hybrid SUV that required 230 hours to paint. Ducati launched a limited-edition motorcycle, the Panigale V4 Tricolore, as a tribute to Italian moto culture. The car connections continued through the weekend, as Bentley partnered with tattoo artist Keith ‘Bang Bang’ McCurdy, employing reactive UV technology that mirrors the tattoo ink that McCurdy uses on clients to change patterns on the skin. The collaborative one-off wrapped digital ink Bentley Bentayga EWB was on display at the brand’s party.
Morning Car Club, a California car collective, hosted a cars and coffee meetup at Imperial Moto, where LA artist and car enthusiast Paris Brosnan painted the hood of a BMWE30 that was later displayed at Acqua Art Miami. “We thought it would be a great idea to put the two communities together,” said Aldo Lihiang, a founder of the LA-based Morning Car Club. “Cars and art were everywhere in Miami.”
One of the most delightful car sightings of the week was at the Miami Art Basel fair where Jeffrey Deitch gallery showed a stunning monochromatic 2009 Robert Longo painting “Untitled (Daddy’s Caddy).” The painting presented a clear representation of how an artist’s perspective captures and recasts objects in the most unexpected ways.