Tara Long: La Esquinita

Locust Projects presents “La Esquinita (Little Corner)”, the first major solo exhibition by Miami artist and musician Tara Long. In an all-encompassing installation, Long transforms the organisation’s exterior and lobby into a surreal “Sweets & Souvenirs” shop filled with more than 500 miniature sculptures for sale. As part of Locust Projects’ commitment to experimental practice, the space is handed over to the artist’s expansive creative vision.

Part corner store, part dreamscape, “La Esquinita” becomes a sugar-coated parable about power, pleasure and decay. From the building’s colourful façade to a towering, crumbling cake inside, Long reveals the hidden costs of sweetness—how sugar shaped Miami’s land, bodies and myths. Visitors move through three acts developed with collaborating artists and performers: a seductive storefront, a collapsing “cake hall” where sound and performance fracture the fantasy, and a secret speakeasy where nature begins to return. What starts as a bodega becomes a stage, a confession booth and, finally, a swamp reclaiming its ground.

Fusing Miami’s candy-coloured surfaces with buried histories, Long links the exploitation of land to the conditioning of desire. “La Esquinita” asks what it costs to stay sweet when indulgence becomes survival.