Mad @ MAM

MIAMI—Miami may be the most contrary city in America, so there’s a certain logic to the fact that Marty Margulies, the contemporary-art collector who has his own acclaimed museum in town, is leading a campaign against the Miami Art Museum’s plans for a $220 million Herzog & de Meuron building in the waterfront Bicentennial Park. Next month, during Art Basel Miami Beach, MAM and its director, Terry Riley—the former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—will unveil the design for the new 120,000-square-foot building and public sculpture park, hoping to join in the golden age of American museums. This epoch is, of course, epitomized by Yoshio Taniguchi’s $858 million recasting of MoMA, a massive effort that Riley presided over until 2006.

Margulies, a local developer, became expert in public battles when he built a towering condominium complex on a nature refuge years ago. He escalated his private war against the new MAM structure this past summer by writing a letter to the Miami City Commission shortly before it decided to give the museum $2 million in bond money to keep the project moving. MAM, now housed in a terminally pedestrian Philip Johnson building in downtown Miami, lacks the kind of permanent collection, to Margulies’s mind, that warrants an expensive new building. The collector also questioned MAM’s ability to raise $120 million from private sources, money that will be matched by Miami-Dade County’s $100 million in bond money. Margulies wrapped up his letter with “I urge heart—standing for Health care, Education, Affordable housing, Refuge for the homeless and Transportation/infrastructure—before Art.”

The collector then entered the court of public opinion, telling Miami Herald reporter Daniel Chang in August: “Do you need to build a $200 million museum on public land?” As the Herald noted, Margulies’s war against MAM is rife, as these things often are, with ironies, starting with the fact that much of the collection and the building that houses his museum was donated to his family foundation to avoid property taxes. Margulies—whose collection was profiled by Art & Auction in December 2003—declined to comment for this story.

MAM’s response to Margulies’s campaign has been surprisingly muted. An architect by training, Riley believes in the redemptive value of great architecture: If you build it, they will come. “I don’t look forward to disagreements with anyone in Miami,” he says. “But more than 16,000 schoolkids come through MAM every year, and the new facility will have even more.” He says the museum has already raised $35 million in private pledges. MAM’s board chairman, Aaron Podhurst, an attorney and longtime friend of Margulies’s, adds, “Marty is entitled to his own opinion, but I’m optimistic he’ll come to understand the important educational function of MAM.”

Since 2000, city officials have envisioned transforming Bicentennial Park, home to soccer leagues and rock concerts, into a cultural complex called Museum Park. Curiously, Margulies is not against spending some $175 million in public funds to construct a new science museum on the site. In the Herald, he argued that such an institution, equipped with an aquarium, would attract a broad audience, while MAM would fail to appeal to inner-city kids. To several art world insiders in Miami, this observation came off as uncomfortably elitist.

Margulies’s fight against MAM began in 2003, when he hosted two “town meetings” at his museum about the advisability of the new project. Even then, it was easy to see that MAM would have trouble putting together a permanent collection by enlisting the usual Miami suspects, most of whom, like Margulies, have their own private museums. No collector is as vehement about MAM as Margulies, but the general feeling seems to be that someone else should step up and donate their collection first. MAM has partnered with Ella Cisneros and her museum in presenting work from her collection as part of the mac@MAM series. It also has strong support from such local collectors as Dennis and Debra Scholl. “It’s an unusual situation for a collector of Marty’s caliber to argue against building a museum, but it doesn’t surprise me,” says Dennis Scholl. “He’s very passionate, and just because you’re a collector doesn’t mean you have to believe in a particular project.”