CARLOS AND Rosa de la Cruz at home with Rotten Renaissance Rita by Albert Oehlen (left wall) and Dr. No’s Verdun by Jonathan Meese (right wall). (Photograph by CM Guerrero.)

THE VIEW from Martin Margulies’ Wynwood showcase shows Jorge by Vik Muniz in the foreground. (Photograph by Malcolm Varon, NYC.)

A MURAL by Jose Bedia on the back of the Latin Grammy’s Miami office building is part of Miami’s Open Air Museum project.

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.

Last year her Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation opened Miami Art Central (MAC), a 33,000-square-foot space in the Kendall neighborhood near the University of Miami, as a venue for these activities. Cisneros paid $4.5 million five years ago for the 1940s MAC building and invested a further $5 million in renovations. Cisneros married into one of Venezuela’s leading business dynasties, with soft-drinks, media and other holdings, and ran a gallery in Caracas in the 1970s. She sees MAC’s focus on Latin-American artists complementing Miami’s ethnic diversity.

IN FRONT, Ernesto Neto’s fabric-and-fragrant-spice sculpture É Ô Bicho (It Is the Animal!), a prized work in the Margulies collection. (Photograph by Malcolm Varon, NYC.)

Space Invaders
The cost of Cisneros’s exhibition space illustrates how the influx of collectors has pushed real estate prices upward. The Rubells bought the former DEA contraband depot more than a decade ago for the price of a one-bedroom condo, Mera says. Since then they have added 10,000 square feet to better accommodate a collection of several thousand works, including popular artists such as Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and Richard Prince.

Not all local residents and artists are happy about these changes. Dana Murphy, a community activist who has organized a local homeowners’ association, says the art frenzy is a cover for those looking to promote sales and inflate prices. New condos are being snapped up by so many speculators that locals fear their neighborhood will be commandeered by them. They worry that this type of development could price them out, leaving the district, like New York’s SoHo, a mere retail center for tourists, rather than a place to create and display art.

The future of the neighborhood, and Miami as a whole, as either an art capital for the ages or a fleeting place in the sun will largely be determined by how these new de Medicis eventually decide to dispose of their treasures. The legacy depends on whether they will support the area’s local museums or endow their private exhibition spaces for public access—or whether their heirs will simply put the collections on the block.

Ernest Beck has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. ecbeck1@yahoo.com