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The Miami Medicis
Ernest Beck
08/01/2005
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Margulies also hails from the north. He grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and after
studying at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved south in the early 1960s
and launched a successful real estate development business. He built houses,
then larger residential buildings—including the high-rise condo he lives in on
Key Biscayne and the adjacent Ritz-Carlton resort. Margulies says he became
interested in art when, about 40 years ago, a girlfriend said to him, “You
should be looking at art instead of sports and girls.” He began teaching himself
about art and artists, befriending many—including Isamu Noguchi and George
Segal—and acquiring a huge 20th-century collection, with only occasional help
from advisors.
 | | CRAIG ROBINS with Helicopter XVI by Franz Ackermann. (Photograph by Iran Issa-Kahn.) |
By the late 1990s, with prices for paintings soaring,
Margulies developed an interest in more reasonably priced photography and
amassed a vast collection. He then acquired large-scale installations and video
works. His growing collection posed the problem of where to store such huge
pieces. He purchased his 45,000-square-foot warehouse five years ago in Wynwood,
which at the time was a district filled with gang violence, clothing factories,
crack dealers and discount stores. But beneath the brutish surface, Wynwood was
affordable, and thus a neighborhood many artists called home. Margulies spent
more than $2.5 million on the warehouse—which he calls “an unplanned step that
just happened”—and a recent renovation.
With Friends Like These
Like other collectors worldwide, such as London’s
Charles Saatchi, who shows his vast collection in a large private space near the
Tate Modern, members of the Miami group compete to greater or lesser extents
with each other and with the city’s museums. “We don’t have collectors’
dinners—or lunches or breakfasts,” Mera Rubell notes. While some of the
collectors are close friends and collaborate on projects, each tends to chart
his or her own course in art collecting and display.
 | | INSTALLATIONS BY Felix Gonzales-Torres at the de la Cruz’s home. (Photograph by David De Armas.) |
Miami has six
relatively small art museums. The Miami Art Museum opened as the Center for Fine
Arts 21 years ago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is only nine years
old. Neither contain strong permanent contemporary art collections, and
endowments are shallow. Corporate sponsors have been slow to come forward,
although there has been progress in public funding. Last year voters approved a
$2.9 billion bond program that includes an allocation of $100 million toward the
funding of the Miami Art Museum’s $175 million new building.
Kevin Bruk, a
gallery owner in Wynwood who has observed the growth of the art scene, wishes
the collectors would lead by example and start giving more to the local
institutions that will endure long after the end of the current gilded age. Many
of the collectors are “involved but not involved” with the museums, Bruk
contends, compared with more supportive collectors and patrons in cities such as
New York, where the Museum of Modern Art recently raised more than $700 million
for its new building. Bruk describes the Miami attitude as “a self-serving
generosity, because the collectors are promoting their own collections and
prestige, rather than the community.” Rubell disagrees. “We cooperate and
collaborate with museums in Miami and elsewhere,” she notes. “We loan works and
work with them. I wouldn’t say we are competing; everyone gains from private
instincts.”
TOP VIEW
United by a fascination for up-and-coming artists and their
eagerness to share their collections with the public, a group of prominent
aficionados have made Miami the art spot of the moment. The city’s future as a
cultural Mecca rests largely in their hands. |
Margulies has loaned 50 large sculptural works to Florida
International University. Of his ultimate plans for dispensation, he says: “A
lot of the work will go to some universities, as I’m into the student aspect of
art, in terms of learning and getting students more interested in it.” However,
he has no lofty pretensions regarding his collection and its primary
beneficiary. “I’m not an altruistic individual out to benefit society,” he
admits. Collecting is a selfish pursuit, he says. “I’m involved emotionally and
spiritually with my collection, and that to me is the bottom line.” If visitors
enjoy seeing the collection, Margulies adds, any gratification he feels is only
a happy by-product of collecting.
Despite the criticism of Bruk and others, a
number of leading Miami collectors are actively involved in supporting the local
museums. Collector Irma Braman is chairman of the board of MOCA and Ella
Cisneros, a Cuban-born Venezuelan collector and philanthropist, serves on the
Miami Art Museum board. Cisneros has focused her attention in Miami on public
programs such as education, traveling exhibitions and exchange programs for
Latin-American artists.
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