Big Appetite for Contemporary Art
MIAMI — Building a new contemporary art museum in Miami is easy. Just ask Irma Braman, a co- chairwoman of the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which opened on December 1 in the Design District.
“Norm was having lunch with Craig one day and said, ‘I’d love to have a museum.’ Craig said, ‘I have this piece of land,’ ” Mrs. Braman recalled. “It was that simple,” she said. Of course, if you want to start an art museum in Miami, it helps if the “Norm” in question is Mrs. Braman’s husband, Norman, a Miami auto dealership magnate and fixture on the Forbes 400 list with a net worth estimated at $2.5 billion. And “Craig” is Craig Robins, a prominent developer. Three years after that lunch, and $75 million in cash and land later, the ICA Miami is a reality.
Miami, the major metropolitan area with the second-highest poverty rate in America, cannot pay the bill for this artsy largess — especially with the costs of the rising sea and regularly flooded streets. Mr. and Mrs. Braman funded ICA Miami’s design and construction themselves. And admission to the museum is free.
“We have all kinds of difficulties and problems here,” Mr. Braman said, “and I’ve always felt public tax dollars should be utilized for the needs of the community first.”
Here, hardly a season goes by without the announcement of a new art museum or expansion — all fueled by the excitement surrounding the Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December, and all primarily focused on contemporary art. A private museum like the ICA Miami must compete for philanthropic funding alongside the city’s public museums, as well as its university- owned museums. Are there enough donors to go around? And how many contemporary art museums does it need?
“We’re all looking at the same piles of dollars, we’re all looking at the same corporate sponsors,” said Silvia Karman Cubiñá, the executive director at the Bass Museum of Art, which reopened in Miami Beach in October after a $12 million expansion, and renamed just the Bass. “In 20 years, maybe we’ll all look back and say, we bit off more than we can chew, but we’re all still doing it.”
The Bass joins two other public art museums founded by a municipality, relying on a mix of tax dollars and private donations: North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, from which the ICA Miami’s board split in 2014, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, known locally as PAMM. Ostensibly PAMM covers the cultural waterfront, but its director, Franklin Sirmans, told the Brooklyn Rail in June, “We are, ultimately, a museum dedicated to international contemporary art.”
And not to be forgotten are Miami’s four collector-run private museums, each focused on their owner’s contemporary acquisitions: the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the de la Cruz Collection, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse and the Rubell Family Collection. (A fifth is in the works, courtesy of Bruce Berkowitz, the hedge fund owner.)
The ICA Miami would seem perfectly primed to pick up on the challenge of moving beyond the narrow confines of the contemporary milieu and showing the full history of art. After all, its main patrons, the Bramans, own masterworks spanning the last century, from Joan Miró to Mark Rothko.
But beyond a few token nods, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, Alex Gartenfeld, appears largely uninterested in taking a deep dive into earlier eras of art.
And Mr. Braman says he won’t force the issue — for the same reason his own name isn’t on the museum’s facade. “We don’t want the museum to be construed as ours, it’s the community’s museum,” he said. “It’s just not our style to put our names on the philanthropy we’ve done.”
The ICA Miami holds its own within the contemporary sphere, introducing lesser- known talents to a wider audience. A highlight is a room of massive abstract paintings by Tomm El- Saieh, whom Mr. Gartenfeld praised as “one of the leading artists working in Miami today” for drawing upon expressionist and Haitian folkloric traditions.
At PAMM, Mr. Sirmans insisted he would always make room for an informed dose of art history. He pointed out the museum’s current pairing of two early-20th- century paintings by Joaquín Torres- García with a fresh- out- of-the- studio work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby — all three canvases exploring kindred issues of identity. But was he daunted by his fund-raising competitors, the new museums sprouting up?
“We’re a city that values culture,” he said. “What better way to demonstrate that than to make temples to culture?”
Rising seas and floods don’t deter museum builders in Miami.