It was just an offhand remark by an art-loving high schooler, but it was enough to set a major Miami art museum on a quest for a new identity.
In 1994, the Miami Art Museum of Dade County, then known as the Center for the Fine Arts, was a full-time Kunsthalle _ a space that hosts traveling art exhibitions. At a discussion gathering of 200 Miami citizens, a student stood up and suggested that Miami’s downtown museum was in need of “some roots of its own” _ namely, a permanent collection.
That was the start of MAM’s still-nascent evolution into a collecting institution, instead of a just a stop on the traveling art-show circuit.
Response to this new initiative, in the form of donations by MAM’s collector-patrons and board members, was swift but scarce. The quality of bequests, however, partially made up for their paucity, with paintings by American heavyweights Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottleib, Al Held and James Rosenquist. They were unveiled in the October 1996 exhibition “Dream Collection: Gifts and Just a Few Hidden Desires _ Part One.”
The latest installment, “Dream Collection _ Part Two,” on display through April 26, showcases 22 new acquisitions among a total of 50 pieces, including works by by Luis Azaceta, Jose Bedia, Gene Davis, Louise Nevelson, Alfredo Jaar and Ruben Torres-Llorca. Also on display is MAM’s first purchase, Lorna Simpson’s Still (1997). The mural-sized serigraph on felt panels was obtained through the financial support of patrons Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz and Nedra and Mark Oren.
Acquisitions aside, the rest of the works in the current show make up the “hidden desires” _ items MAM director Suzanne Delehanty fantasizes might one day be donated to the museum. Among them are privately owned sculptures by Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Cornell and Joseph Bueys, and paintings by Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Wifredo Lam, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.
They are just a small portion of Delehanty’s vision, which encompasses a permanent collection so extensive it would call for a new building _ located on prime parcel of waterfront real estate, no less.
That’s the long-range dream of the director. For now, she’s dealing with a 35,000-square-foot facility on West Flagler Street, part of the Mediterranean-style, stucco-and-tile downtown triumvirate that includes the Historical Museum of Southern Florida and Miami’s Main Library.
Designed by architect Philip Johnson, the Miami Art Museum opened in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, a non-collecting Kunsthalle. The inaugural exhibition, “In Quest of Excellence,” showcased an array of masterworks spanning five centuries lent by American museums. That was followed by a decade of visiting exhibitions, from surveys of Latin American and Haitian art to intimate showcases of photographs and smaller objects.
The board of trustees’ plan to redefine the Center as a collecting museum did not sit well with director Mark Ormond, who resigned late in 1994. Following some months of interim management, Delehanty was hired. A former director of the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., and Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, she came with considerable experience in overseeing permanent collections and handling loan shows.
Under Delehanty’s auspices, the Center changed its name to the Miami Art Museum of Dade County and outlined its mission to amass a collection. Its outlook would be different from that of other Dade museums owning artworks _ less eclectic, more unified.
Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art, for instance, has Renaissance paintings and medieval artifacts of varying quality, a world-class Rubens oil, fine tapestries and an intriguing cache of 19th century European pictures. In Coral Gables, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami has the distinguished Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque artworks, some excellent 19th and 20th century masters, Native American items and a smattering of antiquities.
But MAM, starting from scratch, wants to “collect, exhibit and interpret international art, with an emphasis on the Western Hemisphere from the World War II era to the present.”
“Our collecting goals necessarily embody different perspectives; we are trying not to isolate the scope of collections,” Delehanty says. “The focus will be wide-ranging. We want to examine new connections among works of art created from Vancouver to Buenos Aires, as well as from Paris, New York and Rome. And we will not exclude art from Africa. The entire Atlantic rim, as it were, is involved. Our acquisitions policy naturally will involve the highest quality works _ it’s like adopting a child.”
The director also stresses that every work in the slowly evolving permanent collection will be allowed to travel, since the museum has benefited so much from loans.
The Miami Art Museum, with an annual operating budget of $3.3 million, offers three major exhibition areas. The first floor has 2,500 square feet for new works; it also serves as a forum for South Florida artists and international figures. There is another 3,500 square feet of galleries earmarked for the permanent collection and pieces related to it. The upper galleries, encompassing 10,000 square feet, are for exhibitions MAM will originate or obtain as loans.
For the 21st century, Delehanty imagines a new complex on Biscayne Bay that would be comparable to the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale. The latter features 65,000 square feet and generally employs every niche to accommodate traveling exhibitions and to mount its collections of contemporary Cuban art, enthnographic items, post-World War II expressionistic CoBrA art and paintings by American modernist William Glackens.
A new, bigger museum is just a blue-sky prospect amid Delehanty’s list of not-so-hidden desires. No plans are on the drawing board, and there is no speculation as to how such a move might be financed, assuming the perfect Miami waterfront setting could be found. The director has enough to do, negotiating with potential benefactors, offering sneak previews of acquisitions and continuing to bring in loan shows.
And there seems to be no private collection out there ready to enter
itl>en bloc to burst the seams of the downtown building.
Meanwhile, short-range efforts are being concentrated on MAM’s major mid-season exhibition, “Triumph of the Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo, A Survey 1976-1991,” opening Dec. 18, and on next December’s traveling retrospective of cast-plaster sculptures by George Segal.
Amid clouds in her coffee, Delehanty also hopes to add more “Dream Collection” displays to the schedule.
