REPORT FROM MIAMI: PART I
Museum Salsa
In the first of two articles on Miami's rapidly expanding art scene, the author
looks at the ways in which area museums now bid for international stature.
By Roni Feinstein
The last time an extended article on the Miami art scene appeared in the pages of this magazine was November 1986 with Peter Plagens's "Report from Florida: Miami Spice." While noting that Miami was in the midst of a massive growth spurt, with "real estate development up the wazoo" and an expanding, rapidly changing demographic profile, Plagens described Miami as a cultural backwater, its art world amorphous in structure and problematic in nature. Plagens considered certain aspects of the Miami art scene worthy of praise: its "unusually vigorous public art program"; the outdoor sculpture collection of realestate developer Martin Z.Margulies; a few "MFAtype" artists (Lynne Golub Gelfinan, Carol K. Brown and Barbara Neijna); and a contingent of Cuban-American artists (among those he mentioned were Carlos Alfonzo, Cesar Trasobares, Mario Bencomo, Marfa Brito-Avellana and Arturo Rodriguez) who were bringing a potent Latin ingredient and some measure of vigor to Miami's contemporary-art scene.
On the whole, however, Plagens found Miami's gallery scene "tepid" and its corporate collections uninspired. One of the city's biggest problems, he felt, was the absence of a single, sizable collecting institution. He found four small institutions lacking in distinction or "any real clout," at their "wit's end," competing against one another for audience and sup- port. Plagens concluded his article with the distinctly tourist's-view observation that life in Miami was too much a day at the beach (no competition or angst) for the city to produce great art, His final statement read: "Hothousing a major art culture in Miami may be possible, as, no doubt, is growing grapefruit in Alaska-but at what cost?"
While Alaskan citrus remains a dubious concept, there can be no question that today, some 13 years later, Miami has entered the mainstream. Its rise in stature owes in large part to the fact that it has become a major center for Latin American art. At the same time, albeit on a much smaller scale, Miami has begun to take part in the international contemporary-art world. The contemporary and Latin American art scenes, each with its own artists, galleries and collectors, may be distinguished from one another in that the latter tends to be more conservative, based in painting and sculpture rather than in alternative media (installation work, video, photography, etc.) and it tends to reference (and be influenced by) either modem or folk traditions rather than being conceptually oriented or involved with cultural critique. While the culture of cutting- edge contemporary art is still in its infancy, systems are in place to nurture it and help it grow. It is being shaped by perhaps a few dozen individuals, most of whom came to the city from elsewhere, who have dedicated themselves to making Miami a major center for contemporary art. Their efforts are paying off. Increasingly, Miami's museums, collectors and artists are drawing national and international attention. The scene is lively, the mood optimistic, and increasing numbers of younger artists who in the past would have left the city for bitter climes more hospitable to art are choosing to remain, hopeful that viable artistic careers can be formed beneath the hot South Florida sun. It is today evident that the decentralized nature of Miami's art world, seen by Plagens as a weakness, has worked to the city's advantage, providing variety for Miami audiences and support and exposure for larger numbers of artists. Although Miami has a distinct downtown, like Los Angeles, it is a metropolitan area of extreme lateral sprawl that comprises 30 cities as well as a large unincorporated area, Greater Miami now accommodates five (as against Plagens's four) primary art institutions: the Bass Art Museum in Miami Beach, the Miami Art Museum in the heart of downtown, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami in Coral Gables and the Art Museum at Florida International University, situated west of downtown. (The Wolfsonian-FIU, which is dedicated to the decorative arts and graphic design of the period 1885-1945, is in Miami Beach [seeA.iA., Jan. '96].) Each museum is in a different neighborhood and has its own constituency, while at the same time attracting the small but growing mobile art audience (no museum is more than 20 minutes by car from any other). That Miami is capable of sustaining multiple art centers is evidenced by the fact that four of the five (the exception being the already sizable Miami Art Museum or MAM) have recently undergone major expansion and reconstruction projects or are about to do so. All five of Miami's art museums exhibit and collect contemporary art. While the Bass, the Lowe and the Art Museum at FlU all have ethnographic collections and modest holdings of historical material (Renaissance and Baroque painting, for example), Miami is too young a city (its development dates to the 1920s and '30s) to have had major historical collections of the sort that grew in private hands elsewhere in the U.S. in the early years of the century and formed the basis of the country's leading museum collections. Further, Miami's art museums came into existence too late in the game to build major-or even minor-modern collections, and once again there were few local collections from which to draw. This left contemporary art and, for most of the museums, Latin American art as well, Latin culture being an essential part of the Miami milieu. The shared focus on contemporary and Latin American art often results in museum programs duplicating or running parallel to one another. An example is the plethora of exhibitions of contemporary American beadwork and that of other cultures on the 1998-99 exhibition schedules of the Miami, Bass and Lowe Art Museums; together, these exhibitions threaten to give observers of the Miami scene the erroneous impression that beadwork is the world's primary artistic medium.
Only one of the galleries and artist-run spaces mentioned by Plagens still exists. Galleries devoted to international contemporary art, in particular, have tended to open and close in rapid succession, largely because interested collectors generally prefer to conduct business in cities with more established art markets (such as New York, Los Angeles and Basel). Currently, however, four spaces that feature contemporary art are having an impact on the Miami art scene and its emerging profile: the commercial galleries of Fredric Snitzer and Genaro Ambrosino, located around the block from one another in a warehouse district in the Coral Gables section of Miami, and the nonprofit Wolfson Galleries at Miami-Dade Community College's downtown campus and the ArtCenter/South Florida on South Beach's Lincoln Road. On and around Ponce de Leon Boulevard in Coral Gables are dozens of elegantly appointed galleries specializing in Latin American art. Tending to financial stability and commercial success, they attract collectors from all over the world. The Miami offices of Sotheby's and Christie's, whose South Florida business is devoted largely to Latin American art, are nearby. Among the most prominent of these galleries are Meza Fine Art, Elite Fine Art, GaryNader Fine Arts, Quintana Gallery and the Americas Collection. They feature work by established masters such as Botero....
