Join us on September 2, 2026, at 6pm for a conversation between artist and DV Co-founding Director Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova and Gean Moreno, the Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami. The conversation will be held off-site at Soho Beach House located at 4385 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140.
For this discussion, Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova is joined by Gean Moreno to consider State of Transition, Rodríguez-Casanova’s recent solo project at Dimensions Variable, which draws on the material systems of migration and displacement—the gates, hardware, and mass-produced domestic objects that trace the threshold between restraint and protection. Their conversation moves from the work itself to the conditions that make such work possible, situating the exhibition within Rodríguez-Casanova’s role as co-founder of DV and the artist-run model he has built alongside Frances Trombly.
The exchange is grounded in a shared history. For over two decades, both Rodríguez-Casanova and Moreno have helped shape Miami’s art ecosystem from within its artist-run and nonprofit spaces—as makers, organizers, and advocates for a culture that supports experimental practice outside the logic of the market. Their conversation reflects that long vantage, turning a solo exhibition into an occasion to think about how artists build and sustain the infrastructure their work depends on.
Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova
Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova (b. 1973 in Havana, Cuba) is an artist, curator, and co-founding director of Dimensions Variable (DV), operating between Miami and Lyndhurst. He attended the Ringling School of Art and Design and the New World School of the Arts. Rodríguez-Casanova has received several prestigious awards, including the Cintas Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts, two South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowships, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Visiting Artist Grant at FIU, and Ville de Paris-Culturesfrance in Paris. He has also been nominated for the Joan Mitchell and United States Artists Fellowships. His projects have garnered support from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Miami-Dade County, and the State of Florida. He has been recognized multiple times as a Knight Foundation award winner, honored as a Knight Arts Champion, and received an Ellies Creator Award.
His work has been exhibited widely at prestigious venues, including the Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Arts Center, Anina Nosie Gallery, and White Box, all in New York. Internationally, his work has been displayed at the Museo de Bellas Artes and Factoria Habana in Havana, Cuba; ZONA MACO Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, Mexico; Capri Palace and Villa Lena in Italy; and Prosjektrom Normanns in Stavanger, Norway. Additionally, he has exhibited at Shoshanna Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, Casa Riegner in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as several renowned spaces in Miami, such as PAMM, Frost Museum FIU, The Bass, MOCA, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, David Castillo Gallery, Emerson Dorsch, Locust Projects, Untitled Art, and Dimensions Variable.
His work is included in various public and private collections, such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Frost Museum of Art, the CIFO Collection, the Cintas Foundation, the Sayago Collection, the Tonino Cacace Collection, the Villa Lena Foundation, and The Bass. His projects have been featured in several notable publications, including The New York Times, The Miami Herald, Art Nexus, Arte al Dia, Artforum, Artsy, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Miami Rail, and Miami Magazine. His work has appeared in select publications, including “Fortunate Objects”, published by CIFO and Edizioni Chart in Milan, and “Remains-Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction”, published by the Sayago Collection and Hatje Cantz in Berlin. Since co-founding DV in 2009, he has organized and curated numerous projects featuring both local and international emerging artists.
Gean Moreno
Gean Moreno is a curator, writer, and artist who has helped shape Miami’s contemporary art community for over two decades. As Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami—a platform he established for interdisciplinary scholarship, publishing, and public programming—he has advanced new scholarship and sustained critical dialogue within the institution. Before ICA Miami he served as artistic director of the nonprofit Cannonball and as programming director at Locust Projects, giving him a long vantage on the artist-run and nonprofit ecosystems that shape the region. He served on the advisory committee for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and he is the founder and co-director of [NAME] Publications, a press dedicated to art and design theory.
As a writer, his texts have appeared in numerous catalogues and anthologies as well as publications including e-flux journal, Art in America, Kaleidoscope, and MONU–Magazine for Urbanism. His own practice as an artist has been shown in Miami, Cleveland, and New York, a range of making, writing, and curating that informs the rigor he brings to institutional programming.
