The Rubells Took Their Art Collection to Allapattah. So Long, Wynwood!
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VISUAL ARTS The Rubells took their art collection to Allapattah. So long, Wynwood! BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI DECEMBER 01, 2019 06:00 AM SHARE Rubell Museum opens its new Allapattah space with Keith Haring for Miami Art Basel. BY CARL JUSTE Long before Wynwood Walls, Mana Wynwood and the late, lamented Wynwood Yard began drawing multitudes to a dicey and decrepit old industrial district in inner-city Miami, there was the Rubell Family Collection. Don and Mera Rubell, owners of what’s widely regarded as one of the leading collections of contemporary art in America, first came to Wynwood looking for the same thing that had drawn a small legion of artists and galleries to the neighborhood — cheap digs in which to show art. They famously found it in a fittingly secure fortress, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency evidence warehouse, which they picked up for a now comical $450,000. It was their 1993 conversion of the windowless warren into a showcase for some of the sharpest art of the times that first put Wynwood on the international map. Now the Rubells are bidding goodbye to the neighborhood they helped create 26 years ago. Local News at Your Fingertips Get unlimited digital access for just $3.99 a month to #ReadLocal anytime, on any device. GET OFFER They have decamped with their collection to another industrial zone barely a mile to the west, but otherwise worlds away from the Wynwood of today, with its frolicking tourists and Gen Z-ers, its nightlife and shops and fine restaurants and those big new apartment buildings. On Dec. 4, in one of the most anticipated events of this year’s Art Basel week, the Rubells and their art-collecting son and collaborator, Jason Rubell, will open the doors to their resplendent new exhibition space, housed in — what else? — a converted warehouse complex in the working- class barrio of Allapattah. The new real estate is in every way an upgrade over the Wynwood original — not only much bigger, but brighter, more open and polished to a near-sheen in a sophisticated, understated retrofit by New York architect Annabelle Selldorf, a prodigious museum and art-gallery designer, and Allapattah-based contractor McKenzie Construction. The larger space and its 40-odd galleries will allow the Rubells to show much more of their collection, which numbers around 7,200 pieces by 1,000 artists, as well as large-scale works rarely before exhibited, including a stunning painting by Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley that’s the size of a semi-truck container. Art collector Mera Rubell stands before Kehinde Wiley’s oil on canvas painting “Sleep,” from 2008, as the new Rubell Museum in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood prepares for its opening during Art Basel week. Carl Juste [email protected] The Wiley piece is only one of multiple showstoppers in a blockbuster inaugural exhibit of 300 pieces that trace the arc of the Rubells’ nearly 60 years of collecting art. Included are works by household names of late 20th Century art, along with some of the couple’s most recent career- making discoveries. Some popular favorites will be on permanent display, including the room-size beer-can installation by Cady Noland, “This Piece Has No Title Yet,” with generous space allotted to rotating other pieces and temporary exhibits; all are drawn exclusively from the family’s ever- growing collection. Moreover, they will no longer need to close to change out exhibitions, as they did at the old place. The new home also comes with an upgrade in the name, to Rubell Museum — a nod, Mera Rubell says, to its public and democratic role, something she said was sometimes lost under the old rubric. Having “Family Collection” in the name, with its suggestion of privacy and exclusivity, meant that sometimes people thought they needed a formal invite to visit, she said. “The word ‘museum’ indicates a public space,” a tired but enthusiastic Mera Rubell said as a small hive of workers put the finishing touches on the complex in November. “We wanted everyone to understand it’s a public space, and people know exactly what a museum is. If you walk like a duck and talk like a duck, maybe you are a duck, right? “We see this as taking on a bigger role that we’ve been growing into.” BUSTLING AND GRIMY The setting, just north of the Jackson Memorial medical complex, is as incongruous as the Wynwood original once seemed. Its neighbors present a frisson of urban contrast: blocks and blocks of mostly bustling, sometimes grimy warehouses and distribution centers for everything from fresh produce to construction materials. The streets are rutted and the railroad crossings bone-rattling. The new location does have one distinct advantage: It’s a short walk from the Santa Clara Metrorail stop, one of three stations in Allapattah. The new Rubell Museum occupies a former warehouse complex on a full city block in Miami’s working-class Allapattah neighborhood. Carl Juste [email protected] Because the working neighborhood offers relatively little in the way of amenities, come January the Rubell Museum will have a Basque restaurant, LEKU, and a garden bar. The idea, Mera Rubell said, is to have the museum serve as a social gathering spot as much as to encourage visitors to prolong their stay. “At night there is nowhere to go,” she said. “But the place has the flavor of old Miami. This could be the SoHo of Miami, or the Chelsea of Miami.” In a poignant parallel to what happened in those two Manhattan neighborhoods, where once- numerous galleries have been driven out by rising rents, the Rubells’ departure from Wynwood marks a milestone in that neighborhood’s accelerating transformation into a place where art is no longer the calling card. Developer Martin Margulies, whose art collection rivals that of the Rubells’ in quality and prominence, still maintains his own exhibition space at a cavernous Wynwood warehouse he set up in 1999. The massively popular Wynwood Walls, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, carries on its tradition of commissioning fresh graffiti murals by street artists that are painted in the days leading up to Miami Art Week. But most art galleries have moved out, many to the Little Haiti/Little River corridor to the north of Wynwood. New apartments and commercial development arriving on the heels of Wynwood’s expanded dining and nightlife scene are remaking it as a living, working neighborhood. Other departures include O Cinema, another early cultural player in Wynwood that sat across Northwest 29th Street from the Rubell Collection, and the neighboring Wynwood Yard. They will be replaced by new residential development. The Rubells plan to sell the Wynwood warehouse and the home they built behind it, likely for redevelopment. The properties, which sprawl over several lots, are assessed by Miami-Dade County in the millions of dollars. The family intends to sink much of the proceeds into maintaining and running the new museum, a hefty tab, Mera Rubell said. They also have to find a new place to live, she said. “We’re making ourselves homeless!” Rubell said. Less clear is what the Rubells’ arrival in Allapattah means for that neighborhood, which has been the subject of increasing speculation, financial and otherwise, as Miami’s next potential hot spot. That’s in part because of its physical if not psychological proximity to Wynwood, which sits just on the other side of the formidable barrier that is Interstate 95. Art collector Mera Rubell sits in front of Keith Haring’s “Untitled,” an acrylic on vinyl tarpaulin that she and husband Don acquired in 1982, as their new Rubell Museum in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood prepares for its opening during Art Basel week. Carl Juste [email protected] A cluster of entrepreneurs have made the leap just over Interstate 95, mostly to the faded commercial corridor of Northwest Seventh Avenue. They include Cesar Rosas, owner of Wynwood’s ever popular Wood Tavern, who opened a neighborhood tavern called Las Rosas on the street, and gallerist Anthony Spinello, who moved his Spinello Projects from Little Haiti to a building steps away from the bar. Allapattah also boasts an abundance of old warehouses in an industrial belt that bisects the neighborhood from Miami International Airport east along the freight train tracks to Wynwood. Unlike Wynwood when it was discovered by artists, though, Allapattah’s warehouses are still the site of thriving industrial and commercial enterprises. Those include a colorful and long- established district of discount clothing wholesalers along Northwest 20th Street, the city’s largest open-air produce market just a block from the Rubell Museum, and old Miami stalwarts like Berkeley Florist Supply. INVESTOR INTEREST It’s the industrial district that has drawn big investors. Developer Robert Wennett, best known for the dramatic 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage in South Beach, earlier this year won city approval for a massive plan to redevelop the 8-acre Miami Produce Market, which sits across the elevated Metrorail tracks on Northwest 12th Avenue and a block down from the Rubell Museum. Wennett’s blueprint, drawn up by Danish star architect Bjarke Ingels and by far the most consequential project destined for Allapattah, envisions thousands of apartments in towers on stilts floating over the market buildings. Those would be converted to retail, though the developer has indicated the project won’t break ground for several years. Wennett, who opened the much lauded Hometown Barbecue at the market earlier this year, paid $16 million for the property. Across the street, Miami Beach restaurateur Tonino Doino last year sold a 100,000-square-foot warehouse to CenturyLink, a telecommunications company that plans to install a data center in the building, for $18.75 million, a record for Allapattah.