Miami’s Private Museums Now

The 2002 arrival of Art Basel generally receives the lion’s share of credit for Miami’s transformation from a cultural sleeper into one of the nation’s leading contemporary art cities. Going on its twenty-third year this December, Art Basel Miami Beach has indeed played a pivotal role, including fostering the emergence of a new base of contemporary art collectors, many of whom now support the area’s leading public museums. But the presence of top-tier private collections in Miami prior to Art Basel’s arrival is part of what, in the first place, convinced the fair’s management that the move was viable.

As these private collections grew, so too did the drive to share them with a broader public. In 1993, Mera and Don Rubell, along with their son Jason, opened the Rubell Family Collection (now the Rubell Museum) in the Wynwood neighborhood in a building formerly used by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1999, Martin Margulies founded the Warehouse a few blocks farther west in two former Wynwood manufacturing buildings. A short distance north, in the Design District, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz launched their three-story, purpose-built collection space in 2009, after years of welcoming visitors to their home.¹

Other collectors who opened their private holdings to the public included the Scholl Collection at World Class Boxing, which ran from 2004 to 2016;² the Craig Robins collection, displayed at his DACRA headquarters since 2003 and open to the public during Art Basel Miami Beach; and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, which ran from 2006 to 2018.³ This trend of the 1990s and 2000s has continued more recently with the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection, opened in the Design District in 2016 and, in the Allapattah neighborhood, Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23, opened in 2019, and Marquez Art Projects, opened in 2023.

These private-collections-made-public have contributed immensely to Miami’s art ecosystem. Their proliferation has occurred alongside and intertwined with the expansion of Miami’s commercial gallery scene and the growth of its collectives, residencies, and alternative spaces, among them Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, Fountainhead, and Bakehouse Art Complex. During this same time, several public museums—including the ICA, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Bass Museum of Art⁴ —have also come into existence, expanded, and/or undergone substantial maturation. With all this art-centric growth, what’s not to love?

In the 1890s, when Isabella Stewart Gardner was building her collection of European Old Masters toward her vision of opening a permanent museum in Gilded Age Boston, stiff new tariffs on the private purchase of art led her to delay bringing her acquisitions home. While awaiting a change in the law, she sometimes resorted to smuggling, though other times she reconciled herself to paying the steep fees. At the urging of her lawyers, she also formed a nonprofit corporation, which as a charitable educational institution was exempt from import tariffs and local taxes. This required allowing public access for a reasonable if unspecified number of days during the year—an accommodation Gardner grew to regret, as the museum was also still her home.⁵

Founding a private museum is also the go-to business model for many contemporary collectors, especially during a time marked by rapid growth in the ranks of the super-wealthy, the skyrocketing value of art, and a growing number of collectors buying as investment.⁶ A 2006 tax law change may have accelerated this trend, once collectors were no longer able to claim deductions on fractional donations of art to museums while continuing to retain possession of the works during their lifetimes.⁷ Many collectors found that establishing their own exhibition spaces with some degree of public access allowed them to keep their art close to home while still benefiting from the favorable tax rates enjoyed by foundations and nonprofits.

In addition, this arrangement allows for continued control over how, when, and where the works are displayed, unlike with gifts to a public museum, where a collector’s donated prize may languish in storage. It’s no wonder that some 80 percent of existing private museums have opened since the beginning of the twenty-first century and that one quarter of these have opened in just the past ten years. With its fifty-nine private museums, the United States ranks second in the world, just behind Germany.⁸

In 2015, inspired by a New York Times article,⁹ the Senate Finance Committee, led by Orrin Hatch, sent letters to eleven private museums to investigate their compliance with US tax laws. While acknowledging the museums’ contributions to the cultural landscape, the committee also identified problems, including limited operating hours, restrictive reservation practices, and remote locations. The report also cited as issues of concern the proximity of some of the museums to founders’ private homes and the founders’ retention of control over both the future disposition of the artworks and the museums’ operations. They concluded that while the private museums generally met the standards to receive federal tax exemptions, some collectors were taking advantage of the loose laws.¹⁰

Private museums well beyond those named in the report took notice, and today many (though not all) are less outwardly different from public institutions.¹¹ They offer varied education programs, regular visiting hours, accessible admission policies, changing special exhibitions, active art lending, robust websites, social media presences, publications, reference libraries, and memberships. But tax law still favors these collectors by allowing substantial reductions when transferring ownership of artworks to foundations or museums that they may still largely control. And once a nonprofit foundation is set up, it can write off the costs of conserving, caring for, and insuring the art, as well as designing and building exhibition and storage facilities.¹²

Concern about private museums has also involved the outsize role these initiatives play in the art market, for instance receiving special access to select works and influencing how artists are valued. Unlike the vetting by curators, directors, and committees that guides public museum acquisitions, all with an eye toward ensuring an artwork’s long-term cultural value, private collectors generally decide for themselves, based principally on their own tastes. Their private museums can amplify their predilections, shaping public opinion, and even the wider art canon, through institutional legitimization. It is a convergence of economic and cultural capital that underscores private museums as prime sites of elite influence and power.¹³

The closure in March 2024 of the de la Cruz Collection, just days after the death of Rosa, took many by surprise.¹⁴ But the de la Cruzes never intended for the museum to be permanent, as they had said in public and private.¹⁵ Unlike many other private museums, the de la Cruz Collection was not a foundation and did not benefit from government support, a fact noted prominently on their website. It did, however, receive individual and foundation support, including from the Knight Foundation, for educational programs, which included sending high school and college students to New York, Europe, and East Asia for exposure to art and artists.

In May 2024, a series of auctions at Christie’s began for some two hundred of the de la Cruz artworks.¹⁶ Numerous pieces from the collection had previously been donated to local museums, including the Bass, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and especially NSU Art Museum, Nova Southeastern, Fort Lauderdale. But the potential removal of a substantial part of the collection from the Miami area felt to some like a stunning loss. Many of the artworks that had long been identified with the region—if not through the artists’ own Miami connections, then through the presence of these pieces in a highly visible local collection—were set for national or international dispersal. But one Miami museum director noted that the loss of blue-chip artworks in a collection-rich area troubles her less than the disappearance of the educational programs. “The de la Cruz Collection had such a positive impact on students. Now something critical is gone, leaving a gap, a disruption,” remarked Jill Deupi of the Lowe Art Museum.¹⁷

Martin Margulies also intends to sunset his collection.¹⁸ Although the exact time frame is left open,¹⁹ Margulies describes his involvement with the Warehouse as a lifetime passion. Over the course of four renovations and expansions, the Warehouse has grown to 55,000 square feet of exhibition and storage space. Once Margulies is gone, the art will be sold to benefit his children and his philanthropic foundation, which currently funds the Warehouse and other arts institutions, along with organizations that improve food security and aid the poor, the homeless, marginalized children, and veterans.²⁰ Margulies says he isn’t troubled by the loss of private collections from the Miami area. He notes that Miami has matured, with many new collectors and institutions, a trend he feels will continue.²¹

Margulies was a vocal critic in the 2000s of the then-named Miami Art Museum’s plans for a new building.²² In a public-private partnership between the museum, the City of Miami, and Miami-Dade County, voters approved a $100 million bond and the city donated a prime waterfront location on Biscayne Bay.²³ Margulies felt that the public funds allocated to the project would be better spent on schools, health care, urban parks, and public housing, and that museums should rely on private funds.²⁴ He also noted that none of Miami’s top contemporary collectors were on the museum’s board at the time, suggesting a lack of private interest.

That observation, however, could also support the common perception that private museums necessarily compete with their public counterparts, drawing away much-needed private philanthropy and often outstripping them in their capacity to finance acquisitions, exhibitions, and expansions. But what about when a private museum takes steps toward becoming permanent, and potentially public? The Louvre, British Museum, and Uffizi began as private collections. So did the Frick Collection, the Phillips Collection, and Barnes Collection. In 2019, the Rubell Family Collection moved from its 40,000-square-foot Wynwood building to a new 100,000-square-foot facility in Allapattah and rebranded itself the Rubell Museum. Mera Rubell made clear, “We wanted everyone to understand it’s a public space, and people know exactly what a museum is.”²⁵

When opening their original space in Wynwood, the Rubells had been motivated in part by the practical concern of escaping the Northeast’s high storage costs. They also found inspiration in the European private museums they had seen, where collectors simultaneously lived with their art and shared it with the public. But even once joined by the Margulies Warehouse, the Rubells felt isolated in Wynwood, having missed their chance to seed the neighborhood with other arts organizations by acquiring real estate when they could afford it.²⁶ In their move to Allapattah, they were more intentional in their planning. Beyond the seven former warehouses that they linked to create their new museum, they acquired some half a dozen additional buildings in the neighborhood and invited other arts organizations to join them.²⁷ Since then, new galleries have appeared nearby, some in Rubell buildings and some not. Unlike other private museums, the Rubell Museum operates entirely on earned income derived from its event rentals, restaurant, book sales, memberships, and traveling exhibitions. Its exhibition 30 Americans, originating in 2008 and featuring works by important African American artists of the last three decades, has since traveled to more than twenty venues. And while all operating decisions remain the purview of the family and the executive director, questions of sustainability and succession are top of mind.²⁸

So what, in the end, distinguishes a private museum from a public one? In 2014, Rosa de la Cruz said, “Miami is not like other places, we don’t really define private and public. Private and public for us are the same.”²⁹ While this sentiment reflects the de la Cruzes’ legendary generosity in opening their home to the public and making their museum feel like an extension of their home, it also exemplifies the very situation the Hatch Report denounced. And yet, on further consideration, it also points to conditions, nationally and locally, that bolster de la Cruz’s point. Miami’s collectors have stepped into the breach created by historically meager US support for the arts and culture.

Over the past twenty years, federal spending on the arts has averaged forty-seven cents per person annually.³⁰ In this context, private philanthropy is essential, unlike, for instance, in Europe, where annual government spending on arts and culture per person ranges from a low of US$111 (Greece) to a high of US$936 (Iceland).³¹ There, substantial government support for the arts is justified by a belief in their intrinsic value as public goods and their integral place in sustaining national identity and social cohesion. Miami’s major collectors, in contrast, have responded in a way that mirrors American values of individualism and private enterprise.

The importance of private philanthropy in Miami was thrown into even starker relief in June 2024, when governor Ron DeSantis vetoed more than $32 million of arts and culture funding from the 2025 budget, eliminating the state’s entire grant package.³² While making up just .027% of the state’s annual spending, the grants—ranging the prior year from $5,000 to $500,000—made a material difference to the recipient organizations and for some were crucial to their operations, leaving them scrambling to fill gaps or cut programs and staff. DeSantis’s cutback also sent a symbolic message about the low value his administration places on the arts, whether for their educational role or as economic engines of employment and tourism.

Miami’s proliferation of private museums, then, emerges as one outgrowth of the widely held American belief in minimizing government involvement in the arts and culture. At the same time, it feels particular to Miami’s concentration of wealth and contemporary art—even earning the sobriquet “the Miami model” for its echoes of Gilded Age practices.³³ It may also reflect Miami’s relative youth as a city. Compared to New York or Philadelphia, Boston or Chicago, Miami is an adolescent—or, to invoke organizational life cycle terms, it has moved past start-up and into a growth phase, but isn’t yet at maturity.³⁴ The openings, closings, collection dispersals, and competition among Miami’s private museums may be the way this phase of growth looks in the twenty-first century, as art provides one lever for a city to pull itself up by the bootstraps and then rapidly move forward.

The late museum director Terence Riley, who launched the Pérez Art Museum’s expansion in the mid-2000s, remarked, “If you are trying to define the essence of a museum, there is no precise definition. But to the extent that you act in a public manner, treat all members of the public in a similar fashion, respect artists and rarely sell any of the collection, I think you can call yourself a museum if you adhere to that. Longevity matters as well.”³⁵ Others have added that, rather than compete with public institutions, private museums offer an alternative model—taking more risks, sometimes making mistakes, and clearly displaying the passion of individual collectors in a way rarely visible in public museums.³⁶

As another Miami art museum director, Silvia Karman Cubiñá of the Bass, noted about the “Miami model,” some in the community may at first have politely paid lip service to the cliché that a rising tide lifts all boats, but now, two or more decades on, the proof is in.³⁷ Public museums may hold an edge in their commitment to longevity and stability, their more developed curatorial and educational programs, the influence and reputation fostered by their professional staffs, and their adherence to industry best practices, among other values of legacy institutions. And private museums may still seem focused mostly on the present and near future, leaving largely unanswered the question of institution building and permanence while their founders retain control of the reins. But there’s no question, at least in Miami, that the private museums have brought more art, more variety, and more energy to the scene while also offering ambitious models for other collectors and for the public museums, too, who have had to step up their game in response.