Art Basel Miami Beach 2026

Jane Benson

Nova Sector | Booth N7

Miami Beach Convention Center

December 2–6, 2026

Sargent’s Daughters will present a major new series of monumental, mixed-media works by acclaimed conceptual artist Jane Benson at Art Basel Miami Beach. Benson’s acclaimed practice spans drawing, sound, new media, and sculpture, often appropriating and unraveling existing literature, artwork, or objects. The presentation features a new series of text-based drawings that reconfigure Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a lyrical exploration of womanhood and rage. Particularly urgent in the current moment, the work fragments and distorts legibility while amplifying Shelley’s personal voice.

The presentation marks the gallery’s participation in ABMB, following an acclaimed presentation at Art Basel Qatar earlier this year. Benson will also have a solo exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters in Autumn 2026, the result of nearly two years of collaboration and dialogue.

In layered and contemplative works, Benson splits, fractures, and skews received sources and structures, only to reassemble them through her investigative practice. Her approach to art-making is methodical, repetitive, and rigorous, requiring the artist’s time and labor to gradually erode entrenched frameworks, revealing novel interpretations and interventions. She returns to themes of patriarchy, displacement, and environmental collapse, exploring the deep historical roots of these processes.

Made specifically for ABMB, this new body of work centers the portions of Frankenstein narrated by the monster himself, reframing his narrative of self-creation and isolation as Mary’s own and placing the text within a larger feminist discourse. Monumentally scaled drawings produced on layers of translucent paper rework Shelley’s original manuscript in various ways. Benson creates poetic interventions by reproducing only certain words on a page, meticulously copying Shelley’s hand. In others, Benson reproduces only the “counters”—the open spaces within letters—creating a rhythmic after-image. In still more, she excises syllables of the musical scale—do, re, mi—to reveal a found score embedded within the text, transforming prose into music. Audio will be accessible via QR codes presented alongside these works. Each work is then mounted on radiant iridescent Plexi in variant shades of yellow, which Benson selects through devised processes that produce a Pantone shade from the text.

While these mechanistic transformations abstract Shelley’s text, they also inspire deeper engagement and reconsideration, demanding that viewers encounter powerful lines and images afresh. Central to this work is the idea of the voice—both Shelley’s and the monster’s—as a thing of profound value and a site of potential political intervention. Shelley was often overshadowed by and understood through her relationships with men, and her seminal work is frequently reduced to a horror story, overlooking its existential complexities and contribution to the Romantic movement. For Benson, the text reveals not only the feminist struggle, but also environmental concerns and insights into the role of technological innovation in the human experience. These themes are more potent than ever, and Benson’s subtle and profound works offer nuanced ways of looking at the future through engagement with the past.

Benson’s recent solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, OH), Boca Raton Museum of Art (Boca Raton, FL), Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY), and Henry Street Settlement: Abrons Art Center (New York, NY). Benson has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Fulbright Scholarship, the Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency, and a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs commission. Her work is included in public collections such as Manchester Art Gallery, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Soros Foundations. Benson’s first monograph, A Place for Infinite Tuning, was published by Skira and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, in 2019.