The new Rubell museum opens in Miami.
The inauguration of the private museum took place just in time for the opening of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair.
The Rubell Museum, formerly known as the Rubell Family Collection, which houses the collection of 7,200 works by Don and Mera Rubell, opened to the public on December 4 in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood. Previously the collection was presented in another building located in the Wynwood district, still in Miami.
The collection is now displayed in a site composed of six old warehouses renovated by the German architect Annabelle Selldorf, living in New York and who worked for the LUMA Foundation in Arles. The private museum is spread out on one level, without elevators or stairs. It has forty rooms, a space to play performances, a library, a bookstore, and a restaurant.
The opening of the museum coincided - and this is no coincidence - with the premiere VIP day of the Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair.
The inaugural exhibition includes 300 works by a hundred artists from the Rubell collection, including works by George Condo, Keith Haring, and Cindy Sherman. Paintings by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, two immersive works by Yayoi Kusama, contemporary works by Los Angeles artists as well as many Chinese artists are also on view. "For more than 50 years, we have embarked on an incredible mission: to search for new art and art that has been neglected," says Mera Rubell on the museum's website.
The Rubell Museum is not the only one to relocate to Allapattah. In October, Jorge Pérez, the billionaire founder of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, announced that he planned to open El Espacio 23 to house his collection. Bordered by the airport highway to the north and the Miami River to the south, Allapattah was occupied in the 1850s by farmers before hosting several waves of immigration from the 1950s. African-American communities, Cuban, Haitian, and especially Dominican who settled there earned him the nickname Little Santo Domingo.
In the past two decades, promoters have displaced many communities and encouraged artists to move into the area, transforming the area into a very fashionable and expensive area. Allapattah and its neighbor, Little Haiti, are experiencing the same phenomenon of gentrification as Wynwood, which became a major urban art hub in the 1990s.
Le Journal des Arts
