When collectors Don and Mera Rubell began buying art in 1964, they spent $25 on contemporary art for every $100 Mera earned as a teacher in New York. More than 40 years later, the Rubells' passion is a family affair that includes their adult children, Jennifer and Jason.
Today, a visit to Miami's Wynwood art district wouldn't be complete without a stop at the Rubell Family Collection (RFC), a 45,000-square-foot former DEA warehouse converted to a sleek art space, complete with glass-paneled research library and over two dozen galleries. It's a temple to the family's love of collecting, though there's nothing overly sacred about what goes on inside. (Through the end of May, a first-floor installation by Paul McCarthy reconstructs his 1995 piece, "Painter," a performance video and accompanying set that was destroyed — seemingly through reckless handling by RFC staff — en route to the 2000 Sydney Biennial. Scathing correspondence from the artist to the Rubells about who is at fault and subsequent compensation for the piece's reconstruction are blown up onto huge panels and displayed against one wall as part of the installation.)
Count the Rubells among a growing group of collectors nationally who have opted to open their own collections rather than, or in addition to, donating to museums. In Miami, they're part of a cadre of collectors and foundations who have created free or low-cost art destinations in Wynwood: Others include the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation and MOCA at Goldman Warehouse, a space donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami by a local collector/developer until 2009.
By charging nominal admission and developing products like Phaidon books and postcards to accompany their exhibits, the Rubells have taken a slightly more commercial approach — or boldly sought to make art more accessible, depending on your perspective.
A taste of the Rubell experience arrives at the Tampa Museum of Art this month in the form of three exhibits. Two are temporary loans: paintings by German hyperrealist Eberhard Havekost and a group of works in video and animation collectively dubbed Memorials of Identity. A third exhibit, which I won't go into here, opens Friday: Purvis Young: Painted Protests, showcases 25 paintings drawn from a 2004 Rubell gift to the museum of 91 paintings by the self-taught Miami artist.
The Havekost paintings have top billing, but Memorials of Identity provides at least as rich an encounter. The video reel of nine works by seven international artists challenges visitors to cool their heels for more than an hour and a half in a gallery-turned-theater space for the exhibit. (The average time a museum visitor spends on an artwork? Anywhere from two to 30 seconds, according to various studies.)
New media is part of TMA's collecting mandate, though for the moment it owns no video works of its own. A black-box theater designed to facilitate more displays like Memorials is slated for the second phase of construction of the new museum, said Elaine Gustafson, director of exhibitions and curator of contemporary art.
Three short animations by South African artist William Kentridge kick off the reel, and rightfully so: The Museum of Modern Art (New York) acquired three of his works last year. Kentridge's use of stop-motion animation to bring his charcoal and pastel drawings to life creates a poignantly personal platform for a troubling theme: the brutal legacy of Apartheid, as filtered through the experience of Felix Teitelbaum, a melancholic Kentridge altar ego, and Soho Eckstein, an ethically-challenged land developer.
The artist's skill at combining image with sound has not gone unnoticed in another medium: Kentridge's recent production of Mozart's The Magic Flute for the Brooklyn Academy of Music earned positive reviews, and in 2010 he'll unveil his take on Shostakovich's The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera.
Other highlights include Israeli artist Sigalit Landau's cringe-inducing performance "Barbed Hula"; an ethereal underwater race between young men pulling and riding bicycle rickshaws staged by Japanese-born, American-schooled, Vietnam-based Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba; and a gently ironic piece by Anri Sala, a young Albanian film student who recovers a filmed interview documenting his mother's militantly communist political past.
The Havekost paintings also have a lot to say about visual technologies, though in an entirely different way. Havekost paints from found footage and imagery (advertisements, news media, travel brochures) and personal photos in a way that showcases their artificiality: the blue glow of monitor light in a woman's eye; the fisheye distortion of a wide-angle lens; the grain of video texture in a landscape or portrait — all emphasized to suggest a global homogeneity of visual experience.
While Havekost's sterile style sometimes frustrates expectations of an emotional connection with the work, as a group his paintings are deeply jarring, precisely because of their play between connect and disconnect with reality and with each other.
Maybe you're several years behind the Rubells in terms of collecting — hell, maybe you weren't even born yet in 1964 — but an innovative fundraiser at TMA on May 12 could give you a chance to bulk up your own collection of original artworks. "From Our Wall to Your Wall" promises a unique experience for guests willing to pay $500 to take home one of many artworks donated by local collectors, corporations, galleries and artists.
The catch is that you and every other ticketholder must pick a random number (1-160) upon entry to the museum and compete to select artworks in two-minute rounds.
Starting with numbers 1-5, groups of five per round will choose from an array of donated prints, paintings, sculptures (and more), all vetted by museum staff as worth at least $500. A one-hour preview prior to the mad dash lets visitors take a look at the works — some are already on display in the museum's lecture room and in a corridor. They'll be on view the Friday before the event as well.
Just keep in mind what $500 buys in terms of art — or rather, what it doesn't buy. (With a few exceptions, don't expect to come away with a large-scale painting or a work by someone famous.) That said, some gems among the donations amassed so far might make buying-in worth the gamble: a Rauschenberg photogravure from his red-ink series on China; five of Theo Wujcik's etchings of famous artists (Albers, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, et al.) and a lovely Calder litho.
The combination of an open beer-and-wine bar and a basketball referee, complete with striped jersey and whistle, furnished by the museum to keep people from coming to blows, might be worth the price of admission.
Of course, volunteering to help out during the event will get you in for free, too.
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 1, 2007.