Two Enterprising Collectors Make a Bid to Mix Art and Urban Renewal
WASHINGTON D.C.—Behind every great art exhibition is a larger story, and for a drama that involves celebrity collectors, the Miami art scene, top black artists, and Washington D.C.’s top art school, the “30 Americans” exhibition is tale worth telling.
This week the Corcoran Gallery of Art, just a block from the White House, began packing up the 76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos that made up a rare and stunning show. It was titled simply “30 Americans” to say something new about African American artists, who usually organize under a “black" American art banner.
The traveling exhibition, which began at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh last year, has just finished its four month run in D.C. Now it heads for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., opening March 16.
Significantly, the show was designed by the collector couple Donald and Mera Rubell of Miami. They drew upon their own private collection to gather the works by, actually, 31 black artists. Since the Rubells settled in Miami 20 years ago, their family fortune—derived from New York clubs and Florida real estate—has allowed them to become hotel developers and avid collectors of contemporary art.
Now they are buying real estate in Washington D.C., hoping to shape its art scene, and this is why, in the view of some, the Corcoran show was more that a splendid art event. It was part of the Rubell family’s bid to become players in the local arts of the nation’s capitol.
“We decided to call [the exhibition] ‘30 Americans,’” the Rubells said of their traveling exhibit, launched in March 2011. “‘Americans,’ rather than ‘African Americans’ or ‘Black Americans’ because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all.” The works by the 31 artists bear this out. Each artist has reflected differently on the American black experience from the 1970s onward (see next week’s column for this topic).
In this sense, the Rubells are shaping the art discourse in America. Their generosity also has bolstered a good number of young artists, whose work they buy, store in their large warehouse galleries in Miami, or loan for exhibitions. As real estate developers, they are also thinking about urban art scenes. That is how they made their mark in Miami, and it seems to be their ambition in Washington D.C. as well.
In Miami, besides owning a few luxury beach hotels, they bought large warehouses in the downtrodden east Miami art district, the Wynwood neighborhood. By dint of their local collection, they have become, over the years, unofficial hosts of the annual Art Basel Miami Beach festivities, boosting their global celebrity. The Rubells’ first venture in Washington D.C. was to buy a dilapidated Best Western hotel, now called the “Capitol Skyline Hotel,” in the city’s declining southwest, a section currently being gentrified by developers. Thanks to the Rubells, the three-star Capitol Skyline has become a modest art scene, a place of artist gatherings and displays of contemporary artworks.
Eventually in D.C., the venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art and its Corcoran College of Art + Design crossed paths with the Rubells, now doing business in the capital city. The Corcoran complex is a classic museum-art school arrangement. While the school is financially stable, the museum—housed in a massive but old beaux arts building—struggles to keep up repairs and raise millions for operation costs each year.
Everything at the historic Corcoran art complex was looking pretty good in the first decade of the 2000s. The college enrollment, ranging between 500 and 1,000, was doing well enough. The Corcoran had land next door to lease and it ran a satellite campus in prestigious Georgetown. In 2006, it also bought from the D.C. government, for $6.2 million, the defunct Randall Junior High School in southwest D.C. as an ideal setting in which to create a new and larger Corcoran College of Art campus.
Then came the stock market crash in 2008.
Today, the Corcoran has an annual deficit of a few million, is trying to sell its Georgetown campus, and was lucky to find at least one source of financial relief—the Rubell family. The Corcoran could no longer finance the Randall school campus. So last year, the savvy Rebells bought the boarded-up property for about the same price.
The Rubells are in partnership with a local developer, Telesis, to turn the school and its playing fields into a cultural hub, much as they had done in Miami’s warehouse district. According to the plan, which may be completed in 2014, the vintage school building will become a Rubell Art Museum and a restaurant. Mixed-price apartments and perhaps a hotel will be built on the school yards.
The Rubell story adds credence to the recent Wall Street Journal headline that private collectors are now eclipsing galleries and museums, using their independent wealth and considerable art holdings to set up new art scenes at will. Logically, the Rubells see it as urban renewal, an idea that city planners everywhere can agree with.
“We want to create a lot of life here,” Mera Rubell told the Washington Post last year. “We want to make an important place. This city does a crappy job of selling itself. It’s amazing that people come here because the promotion is so awful. They just show men in suits in front of marble buildings. This could be the social hearth of the country. It’s enticing to come to a desert and do something big.”
Such big moves always raise eyebrows and question motives. Some have said the Corcoran Gallery hosted the Rubells’ “30 Americans” show because it came to the financial rescue, a quid pro quo that the Corcoran denied. Some locals also believe the Rubells muscled in on the school as if at a fire sale, getting the real estate at a price four times lower than its true worth, since it is in a gentrifying area.
Either way, the collectors and the galleries make their moves and the art world charts its future. Meanwhile, the splendid “30 Americans” exhibit heads to Virginia, a topic worth looking at in the next column.
Next week: the “30 Americans” exhibit.
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