Innovative exhibit explores black contemporary art
In their 50 years of shopping the international contemporary art scene, collectors Mera and Don Rubell of Miami never made a purchase on which they didn’t agree. Their art holdings and their marriage are entwined.
One would not last without the other, they said during a recent lecture at the Arkansas Arts Center.
Their son, Jason, also has a say in purchases, thus the name Rubell Family Collection. A daughter, Jennifer, and a third generation of Rubells also have ownership.
The Rubell Family Collection — more than 6,500 pieces strong — is said to be one of the largest private contemporary art collections in the world and the basis for “30 Americans,” the first comprehensive exhibition of contemporary works by black artists to be presented by the Arts Center. The show, on display through June 21, arrived in Arkansas after stops in Washington; Nashville, Tenn.; New Orleans and other major art hubs.
Since its inception seven years ago, more than 1 million people have seen “30 Americans.”
The couple were joined at the lecture by Juan Roselione-Valadez, the collection’s original curator, who is director of the Rubell Family Collection and Contemporary Arts Foundation.
The 40 paintings, photographs, video presentations, installations and sculptures in the Little Rock rendition of “30 Americans” explore, push and sometimes break down boundaries of race, sex, pop culture and socioeconomics.
The Rubells were highly entertaining — him with his kind wit and her interrupting on occasion to correct or refute a detail in a story he was telling. It was like taking in a tennis match — each gave up a point here and there.
“I think how we met is relevant because it sets the tone,” Mera Rubell said, sporting a black, blousy cotton T-shirt
and straw fedora. He donned a blue blazer, black shirt with jeans and black sneakers for the visit.
She was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College and he had just graduated from Cornell University when they met in a library in 1961. They sat opposite each other for three months without speaking until one day he asked her out.
“No sooner do we walk out of the building and he stops and says, ‘Um … will you marry me?’” Mera recalled.
“I said, ‘Yes.’ And as irrational as that may sound, it’s interesting how much you know by being in the presence of a human being for three months, even without words,” she added.
“I feel that way about artwork. It doesn’t really talk to you, but you can really, really have an intimate encounter with art.”
Said Don: “Sometimes when art is not disguised by a lot of verbiage, you can actually end up feeling more than if someone was telling why you should like it and how you should like it.”
They started collecting at Don’s insistence in 1964, the year they married. The couple bought their first piece on $5 weekly installments.
“Anyone can be a collector. It’s about giving up something else,” Don said. A later piece — a work by Carl Andre that they bought through renowned dealer Konrad Fischer — took six years to pay off.
“We really just follow the art,” Mera said. “We don’t collect women, we don’t collect black, African art or American art. We just follow what is absolutely compelling.” They patronize galleries, but the studio visits are “absolutely essential.”
Artist Kehinde Wiley had a cookout in Miami with the Rubells and artist Hank Willis Thomas in attendance, and from that gathering the idea for “30 Americans” was born. The Rubells were drawn to young, emerging black artists and realized they already had a lot of older works by black artists — Robert Colescott, David Hammons, Rashid Johnson and John-Michel Basquiat, among others.
“Based with the conversations we had with the artists, it turns out that they were admiring the artists in our collection,” Mera said.
Still, the show took three years to get off the ground.
“Every single white person said, ‘Don’t do it. You will embarrass yourself, you will destroy the reputation of the collection and this is a weird thing — white collectors doing a black show,’” Mera said. Opinions changed on the day the show opened — the day Barack Obama was elected president.
In an interview before their lecture, the Rubells talked
about collecting and their changing perspective on the works they bought.
“You don’t fall out of love [with the works],” Don said. “Every time you go back and look at them, you find more context.”
When they started collecting contemporary art, “it was all abstract,” he said. In 1960s New York, there were fewer than a dozen galleries that housed contemporary art and only a handful of contemporary artists were able to make a living. Their sentiment: that all art is contemporary at the time it is created.
“We try to buy art by artists that will be contemporary 100 years from now,” Don said.
The Rubells don’t sell off their holdings.
“The minute we let go, we’d have to like let go of each other,” Mera said.
“The difficulty with selling is you lose your history,” Don added. “Every piece we look at now is influenced by 100 pieces we saw before.”
The Rubells moved the collection to a 45,000-square-foot former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse at 95 N.W. 29th St. in Miami when the works no longer fit in their home. The pair of New York expatriates moved to Miami in 1993 after son Jason opened a gallery there. The couple and Jason created the Contemporary Arts Foundation in 1994 to expand the family collection’s public mission within the contemporary art museum paradigm.
The DEA warehouse, in the then-crime-ridden Wynwood Arts District, had two vaults, they said: one for money and one for drugs. They also have developed a research library with some 40,000 tomes. Buying and refurbishing the facility still cost them less per month than if they’d had to put the art in storage in New York, they said.
Don commuted between New York and Miami for five years while working as an obstetrician. She had retired from teaching and later, a career as a real estate broker with her own company. They live in a dwelling attached to the collection. Mera cooks lunch for the collection’s staff of five nearly every day she’s in town.
Never retired, the couple and Jason refurbish old hotels under the name Rubell Hotels. They’re proudest of their latest conquest, the circa 1928 Lord Baltimore, said to be one of the city’s oldest hotels.
In addition to “30 Americans,” the Rubells also have art in another traveling exhibition, “28 Chinese,” scheduled June 5-Aug. 16 at San Antonio Museum of Art. The show is the culmination of the Rubells’ six research trips to China between 2001 and 2012 where they visited 100 artist studios in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Xian.