Skipping the glossy facades of the fashion boutiques of the Miami Design District, the multi-national crowd is rushing to Paradise Plaza for a different kind of luxury: books. These aren't your average coffee table tomes: the displayed works at Tropic Bound fair, Miami’s premier artists’ books exhibition, bridge the worlds of art, craft, and literature, conveying multicultural stories through book-binding, paper-making, marbling, letterpress printing, and other techniques.
Tropic Bound | Explore the full list of 2025 exhibitors here
The inaugural Tropic Bound happened in February 2023 and now is scheduled for February 6-9, 2025. Alongside co-directors Cristina Favretto and Sarah Michelle Rupert, Ingrid Schindal, a printmaker and co-founder of Tropic Bound, aims to showcase aspects of Miami that the media often neglect.
“Miami's not just book bans and alligators; there's more here, and people are doing things; you have allies, all of these good things,” Ingrid says.
The second edition of Tropic Bound will feature over 90 exhibitors from 12 countries. The 2025 edition has expanded to include a new section: Addendum at Palm Court, highlighting the important work being created by independent book, magazine and art publishers who help widen and contextualize the conversations around books and art.
“I like people that like books; I like people that like learning about perspectives other than their own,” Ingrid says. “I like people that like learning about history, critical theory, and all of the things that are deemed so dangerous.”
Ingrid Schindal, Sarah Michelle Rupert & Cristina Favretto
Ingrid’s inspiration came from conversations at the FATVillage ArtWalk, a monthly showcase for local artists.
“I kept having people come through the studio and say, Oh my gosh, a printmaking studio. This is amazing. I'm a printmaker. I have a press in my garage. Nobody does this down here. They'd be so adamant about how nobody in South Florida does printmaking,” Ingrid notes. “I had probably 50 people come in saying exactly this, and I’m like, y'all are here, you just don't know each other.”
Ingrid discovered that many South Florida artists, especially those involved in printmaking, needed the community that she had in Baltimore, where she began her printmaking career. In partnership with Sarah, she started Small Press Fair (SPF) to allow local printmakers to display their works. She also began Existent Books at IS Projects, to experience fine art printmaking and letterpress printing.
Ingrid and Cristina also attended Codex Fair, a San Francisco-based show for artists’ books, and began to wonder about bringing such a fair to Miami.
“There are a lot of art book fairs throughout the country, fairs that specialize in books about art, or books that are artistic or books that contain writing about art or exhibition catalogs. But an artists’ book is a different thing. An artists’ book is a book that is a work of art on its own,” Ingrid says.
Within the book world, people like Ingrid and fairs like Tropic Bound are preserving the art of printmaking and bookbinding. Miami also has a thriving community of small publishing houses: Suburbano Ediciones amplifies the voices of Spanish language authors that may otherwise go unrecognized. Letter16 Press focuses on photojournalism as an art form. Jitney Books publishes local authors featuring artwork by South Florida artists. O, Miami is a publishing house and community organization focusing on poetry. Dale Zine introduced themselves as a zine-collaboration-turned-independent-publisher with a store in Little River.
Mass production of books is less expensive and more convenient for major publishing companies, but independent presses keep traditional methods alive.
“If we don't continually refresh ourselves with this knowledge, it will be lost,” Ingrid says. “As a printmaking studio specializing in these old-school techniques, that's another part of what we're doing, right? We're preserving history.”
By maintaining this knowledge, small printmaking enterprises contribute to the flow of knowledge and information that books can create.
“You don't have to own a giant warehouse full of printing equipment that can produce thousands of books to be able to share your ideas through printed matter,” Ingrid said. “A fair like Tropic Bound shows folks who come that you can make your own books.”
The Tropic Bound opening stood in stark contrast with Florida’s political landscape amidst a wave of book bans and educational restrictions.
“A lot of our exhibitors had never been to Miami before. We knew that people were going to be coming in and seeing Don't Say Gay and all these book bans going on, and they were going to have a specific sort of mental picture of South Florida,” Ingrid states.
Tropic Bound is Ingrid’s way of protecting Miami’s diverse cultures and ideas, sharing these with visitors from around the world. The fair also establishes safe third places that foster idea exchange rather than restrict it.
“I don't want locals to feel like they have to take their children to a different state in order to get an education that is complete,” Ingrid adds. “We will continue to make artists books about whatever topics we want. We will continue to do that, no matter what.”
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