The Endless Renaissance at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach pairs the evocative and eclectic work of contemporary artists with the museum's classic Renaissance era collection.

Convention at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami explores through an assemblage of installations and video the culture of how we convene in modern times.

And the downtown Miami Art Museum is rotating new works into its Recent Acquisitions exhibit, including must-see pieces by Miami artists Pablo Cano and Cristina Lei Rodríguez.

The highlights:

BASS MUSEUM OF ART

I won't tell you what's inside the white refrigerator -- a work titled Life's Good -- because that would be akin to giving away the end of a novel. But Nova Scotia-based Thierry Delva uses the square, cold appliance to reference the Carrera marble block from which Michelangelo sculpted his David.

Delva found the magnet on the fridge, a silhouette of David, at the Academia in Florence. But the artist cleverly placed his sculpture -- also made of white Carrera marble -- inside. Classic museum rules would forbid you to touch the art, but the label explains that it's OK to open the refrigerator.

Enjoy the find.

Delva is one of two contemporary artists who reference Michelangelo's David and the universal concept of rebirth in The Endless Renaissance, a surprisingly lively show and an example of how a long-held permanent collection like the Bass' can be re-energized.

Twenty-eight contemporary works are shown alongside 14 Renaissance-era pieces -- including a stunningly ornate 17th century bishop's mitre and vestments -- from the permanent collection. Read the labels. Guest curator Steven Holmes provides thought-provoking parallels.

``There are lots of contemporary artists who are looking way back at art history and studying very hard,'' says Silvia Karman Cubiñá, the Bass' executive director.

The other David-inspired artist is Miami's Bert Rodríguez, who sculpts Self Portrait (Sinister David), a self-likeness in a swimsuit and sunglasses and posed as the most famous male figure in art history, a sculpture made from fiberglass, plastic, glass and paint. Rodríguez took a risk spoofing the master, but it works.

One wall is devoted to the similarities in the portraiture of artists centuries apart -- European royalty by John Hoppner and Hyacinthe Rigaud in the 17th and 18th centuries and Pieter Hugo's photographic series from Liberia, Botswana and Nigeria. All the characters in the paintings and photographs denote power through pose and the use of uniforms and wigs. Collector Martin Margulies loaned the Hugo photographs.

Another wall of ``art about art'' features two large-scale C-print photographs of people captured viewing classical art at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Musée D'Orsay in Paris. Two large gouache-on-paper works by Sol LeWitt use colors that reference Giotto and his frescos at Capella Scrovegni -- the Arena Chapel -- in Padua. (LeWitt, who died in 2007, once said that his career was devoted to making a single work that he would not be ashamed to show Giotto.)

There's plenty of religious iconography in the Bass collection and in the contemporary works -- none more reverential than Confessional, a cocoon-like sculpture of wire mesh, tar and wood by the incomparable Martin Puryear.

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