With three world-class art fairs, Florida’s biggest city has secured its place on the cultural map – now buyers are vying not just for the artworks, but for an address to go with them
Contemporary art is a tried-and-tested way of transforming a home, but how about a whole city? Step forward Miami – a one-time beacon of glitzy beach-focused hedonism has become one of the world’s premier contemporary art destinations.
Things kick-started two decades ago with Art Miami – a fledgling art fair that saw pioneering dealers including Fredric Snitzer, Gary Nader, Dora Valdes-Fauli, Jorge Sori, and Virginia Miller using art spaces to bring new life to areas like Coral Gables.
Meanwhile, Design Miami weighed in on the local scene in 2005, arguably becoming the world’s leading showcase for museum-quality 20th- and 21st-century furniture and other decor objets under the banner of “collectible design”.
The game-changer, though, was the 2002 arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach, a transatlantic winter offshoot of the prestigious art fair held in Switzerland each June. This cultural extravaganza is the most important art show in the US, bringing over 250 key global galleries and dealers, alongside major collectors, to Miami each December. Its presence, however, lasts far longer than the duration of the fair. “Every gallery and institution plans their best shows during Art Basel,” notes Terence Riley, former director of the Miami Art Museum, “but they generally stay up for months afterwards. It’s a time to see international, museum-quality art.”
Such prestigious art fairs, as well as a corresponding influx of cultured high-spenders, have been the catalyst for Miami’s cultural makeover. “Art Basel revived Miami,” says Rick Moeser, Senior Vice President of Southeastern USA, Caribbean & Latin America for Christie’s International Real Estate. “It encouraged new developments and the restoration of historical properties.”
STREETS AHEAD
Take Wynwood. In the past decade, empty spaces and cheap rents in this former industrial district have attracted around 70 galleries, from alternative spots like the tiny Spinello with its “street cool” focus on graffiti and graphic artists to international names like Emmanuel Perrotin, an offshoot of the renowned Paris gallery, housed in a former refrigerator warehouse. Wynwood’s Second Saturday evening gallery walk has become a monthly Miami must-do, with hundreds of happy aesthetes taking in the latest exhibitions while refueling at the gourmet food carts clustered by the outdoor street-art showcase, Wynwood Walls.
Wynwood is also home to two of the major private collections that are unique selling points of the Miami artscape – the Rubell Family Collection, with its ever-expanding post-Warhol overview, and the world-class collection of modern photography, video, installation, and sculpture on show at The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse. Just to the south, meanwhile, philanthropist Ella Cisneros’s CIFO gallery includes a globally renowned Latin American collection, while a few blocks north, the de la Cruz Collection is a jewel of the Design District.
Like Wynwood, the Design District is a barometer of the power of contemporary art at work in Miami. Over the past 10 years, the coolness quotient of these Midtown blocks has risen steadily, transforming the area from the epitome of urban decay to a spectacular confluence of chic art and luxe design, where dozens of galleries mingle with high-end showrooms for the likes of Vitra, Louboutin, Hermès, and Dior.
Crucially, many of the collectors behind Miami’s superb private galleries – Martin Margulies, Rosa de la Cruz, Don and Mera Rubell – are also in the property business, and therefore hyper-aware of the synergies between a vibrant art community and neighborhood desirability. “Contemporary art is the new glamour” is how de la Cruz put it in The New York Times in 2008, and as well as her eponymous gallery, she has provided free space in vacant offices and shops where young artists can make new work, and small galleries – such as her low-key but influential Moore Space – can show it.
Though Wynwood and the Design District hog the present-day spotlight, other areas began the trend. Miami-born developer Craig Robins and his company, Dacra, led the way with the late 1980s sprucing-up of South Beach’s Art Deco gems, followed by similar image-bolstering around Lincoln Road using a proven method – buy up rundown buildings then invite in the creative set to change the neighborhood vibe. And the small, cutting-edge galleries have been followed by major venues, with the 2011 opening of Frank Gehry’s New World Symphony building providing grand icing on the Lincoln Road cake.
The appearance in 2006 of the $470 million Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Miami, meanwhile, served as another centerpiece for growth spurred by culture, kick-starting redevelopment of a nearby 56-acre rail yard and industrial area, which had previously lain desolate for years.
THE PRICE OF PRIME
Such arts-led regeneration hugely improves real estate as well as the cultural estate. Condos around the Design District now command upwards of $400 per square foot – more than double their 2007 level. In nearby Wynwood and the neighboring East Biscayne Boulevard corridor, prime new-builds are at similar price levels, though buyers still keen to get into the area can snap up bargains east of Biscayne Boulevard, where older buildings are still available for much less.
While Miami’s art hotspots have shown excellent gains, they remain a bargain compared to established prime locations such as Miami Beach. Here, top-price houses can be as much as $2,200 per square foot and more, while the best condos command up to $3,200 per square foot – though average prices in both categories for the area are between $600-$700 per square foot.
The citywide market has also been bolstered by Miami’s new cultural sheen, showing healthy rises, especially comparted to the rest of the US in the years following the recession. Latin American influences have played a central role in the city’s renaissance, and commentators now dub Miami the art capital of Latin America on US soil. A plethora of local galleries focus year-round on artists from the region, while exhibitors at Art Basel Miami Beach often set out their stalls with top work from Latin America. Leading Paris-based dealer Chantal Crousel went so far as saying Latin American collectors were “the reason we come to this fair.” Important collectors such as Argentina’s Juan Vergez and Patricia Pearson-Vergez are frequent attendees at the December fairs, along with buyers from other regional booming economies such as Brazil.
Miami’s new-found prestige as a cultural powerhouse is reflected in the prices commanded by the art it sells. Notable sales over the past few years have included a $1.5 million sculpture by Lynn Chadwick for London’s Osborne Samuel Gallery; $1.2 million for a Keith Haring work for Munich-based Galerie Terminus; and a Gerhard Richter painting for $2.5 million at Galerie Michael Schultz.
THE ARTISTIC DISTRICT
Again, property money has followed art money. “It’s no coincidence that record numbers of internationals have been purchasing real estate at the same time that Miami has been rapidly developing as a world-class cultural center,” says Ron Shuffield, president of EWM Realty International, an exclusive affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate. “International buyers now represent almost 40 percent of every Miami home and condo sale.” In 2009, 17 percent of international buyers in the Miami area were from Venezuela alone.
Its two-decade transformation has seen contemporary art spread throughout Miami, weaving into the very fabric of the city. The streets of Wynwood, for example, have become a globally renowned hotspot for world-class graffiti work, complementing the more widespread Pop Art pieces of Brazilian artist Romero Britto, which have become familiar landmarks on the city streets since his arrival in 1988. Meanwhile, Argentina-born, Miami-based architect and artist duo Roberto Behar & Rosario Marquardt’s 42-foot-tall, 2001 installation The Living Room on the corner of North Miami Avenue and 40th Street has become an iconic spot at the heart of the Design District.
Art hotels have become another unique part of Miami’s cultural revolution. Sagamore and The Betsy present regular exhibitions by rising stars, while W South Beach hosts a string of events during Art Basel alongside its own $40m art collection, including works by Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Following the Miami trend, the W has also successfully hitched a property wagon to its visual-arts kudos, selling more than $300m worth of condo-hotel residences since 2009.
If you wanted a final sign of how much contemporary art has become part of Miami’s DNA, head along to the city’s newest major sports arena. Marlins Park comes adorned with works by Joan Miró, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry River, among others, while an eye-popping sculpture by multimedia artist Red Grooms lights up the left field with giant pink flamingos and bright leaping fish every time a Marlins baseball star slugs a homer.
Miami isn’t resting on its contemporary-art laurels though. A dramatic Herzog & de Meuron-designed pavilion has risen on Biscayne Bay to provide a new expanded home for the Miami Art Museum. Built on land provided by the City of Miami, this new cultural beacon has been paid for by a combination of the ordinary citizens of Miami-Dade County and wealthy art patrons, including an individual donation of $35m by leading Latin American art collector Jorge M Pérez, which bagged him the naming rights. The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is an anchor of a landmark new Museum Park on the shoreline, a glorious oceanside 29 acres that includes sculpture-dotted public gardens – yet another marker in Miami’s reinvention as America’s seaside art paradise.
Christie’s International Real Estate is proud to return for the fourth consecutive year as the exclusive real estate sponsor of Art Miami.
