Alchemist Art Café—Featuring Collabs with Futura—Opens in Miami
Alchemist Art Café—a one week pop-up coffee shop from Miami Beach’s Alchemist label—opens today in Miami’s Design District, just in time for the inflow of Art Basel crowds. (The exact address is 172 NE 40th Street.)
The café stands with a sort of buy-what-you-see premise: visitors may purchase a coffee (provided by La Colombe) between browsing the Design District’s boutiques, yet they may also buy the chair they’re sitting on. There’s a hook: much of the Alchemist Art Café’s merch has been designed in collaboration with the graffiti artist Futura, née Leonard McGurr.
Everything from napkins and paper coffee cups to mid-century modern seating, produced by Modernica, feature Futura’s alien motifs in smoke-like, floating pen strokes. Naturally, the characters appear to be enjoying lattes. The artist will be on site this coming weekend for a signing of his monograph “Full Frame.”
Alchemist, run by Roma and Erika Cohen, has transformed over the past few years from being one of the Miami area’s leading multi-brand boutiques to becoming its own global fashion label (a rarity in the 305).
The Alchemist aesthetic is tropical-relaxed, known for sun-faded dyes on hoodies and sweatpants, as well as a ultra-soft t-shirts with clever, creative graphics applied.
Yet Roma Cohen has often bolstered and complemented Alchemist’s core offering with a number of innovative experiential activations, including the permitting of his store—located at 1111 Lincoln Road, the hyper-modern parking garage in Miami Beach—as a sort of modular retail experimentation platform. At one point, he let the musician G-Dragon wrap the venue in cellophane. Cohen has even previously hosted a pop-up Alchemist café, in Paris circa 2017. That location, called Café Corraza 1782, also had plenty of covetible site-specific merch on hand.
The Alchemist Art Café, which will also be selling pieces from the Keith Haring Foundation, prints from the artist André Saraiva, and skateboard decks (also from Futura), is located adjacent to Colette’s Sara Andelman’s temporary market “Hello Miami,” which includes a number of art-retail ideas come to life. Cohen and Andelman are close friends and collaborators.
