Art collector Gary Nader has been in talks with Miami-Dade College to take over their prime Biscayne Boulevard-facing land on which he wants to build a museum to house his world-renowned Latin American art collection, a hotel, facilities for the college, a theater, a sculpture garden, and two luxury residential towers where units will be designed with art collectors in mind Mr. Nader has just revealed to Miami Modern Luxury Magazine that the 1,600 seat theater is being designed by the great Emilio Estefan.
Tag: Arts & Culture
In the 1970s, Andy Sweet Photographed the Kitschy Vibrance of a ‘Fading’ Miami Beach
Photographer Andrew John Sweet was a boy from Miami who returned home after receiving his MFA to capture Miami Beach’s fading, but still vibrant old world Jewish culture of the late 1970s and early ’80s, from the unrestored art deco apartment buildings full of retirees that proliferated around South Beach, to the big hotels and their snowbirds up the beach.
Auberge Residences About to Launch With Batch of New Renders
The Related Group’s Auberge Residences, planned for the 1400 block of Biscayne Boulevard, has unveiled its first big batch of renderings to real estate agents, who have waisted no time in sharing them with all their friends/ clients/ impressionable fellow agents on Facebook. According to those agents the project will launch sales in about two weeks, and contains a collection of 2, 3, and 4 bedroom units in one 328 unit, 60-story tower.
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Sick of Rising Rents, Gentrification, Some Miami Art Galleries Are Buying Their Own Spaces
Some Miami gallerists and even artists are bucking the traditional pattern of art district gentrification, where artists and galleries find big, cheap places to rent, move in, jazz up a neighborhood, then move out when their rent is inevitably increased beyond affordability. These people are now buying their next spaces. Three of Miami’s leading galleries, Emerson Dorsch, Gallery Diet, and &gallery purchased spaces along one street, NW 2nd Avenue in Little River/Little Haiti, and are transforming that drag into a new and permanent arts neighborhood.
Miami’s Most Iconic Architectural Style and the Annual Art Deco Weekend Poster
Art Deco Weekend, the annual festival celebrating that eponymous architectural style, Miami Beach’s (and Miami’s) great collection of deco architecture, and a lot of kitschy Miami history, is here again.
The deco love fest runs through the weekend, complete as always, with an official poster, a street fair on Ocean Drive, lectures, events, and lots of loud, retro clothing making rare appearances from the backs of closets across Miami. The festival’s deco-inspired posters, which are always original artistic creations, show just how much Miami’s perception of its own unique variety of 1930s and ’40s art deco has changed over the years, and even year to year… in effect showing how versatile and ingenious those old designs — think of the Coast Guard Station in Lummus Park or a streamline modernist house designed for indoor-outdoor subtropical living — are themselves.
Grand Central, a Ninety Five Year Old Railroad Depot-Turned-Nightclub, Has Been Demolished
Grand Central, the well-known local music venue, nightclub, and event space that occupied a ninety five year old Florida East Coast Railway freight depot, has been demolished to make way for a portion of the Miami Worldcenter megaproject. Phillip Pessar photographed the building as bulldozers on Tuesday, the 29th of December, as bulldozers and dump trucks hauled slabs and chunks of it away.
The Founder of the Wolfsonian has Another Museum in His Apartment
When Micky Wolfson, Jr. still lived at “his parents house” in Miami Beach, at the family manor on 5030 North Bay Road, I spent a day shopping with him, starting with an early Cuban breakfast at a greasy spoon in Little Haiti and ending at John “Jakey” Astor V’s vast estate sale on Pinetree Drive. It was on the Miami River, at Micky’s favorite hunting ground, Stone Age Antiques, an outpost of nautical treasure one might call a junkyard, that he turned to me and said in his distinct sing-songy storyteller voice: “Nobody gets it. This is what I want the museum to look like!”, meaning the museum he was currently in the midst of creating, the Wolfsonian.
Good thing he didn’t get his way. Good thing his architect Mark Hampton did. And, therein lies the rub, the wacky dynamic of the galloping decorative propaganda collector and his modest modernist architect, the tug of war between The Serial Supershopper vs. The Minimalist Perfectionist. Yet, it seemed to work. Mark’s sensible yang tempered Micky’s excessive yin. A visit to Hampton’s masterwork, Wolfson’s FIU-Wolfsonian Museum, is testament to his keen attention to detail — the intricate symmetry and placement of every plug, air vent and light fixture so as not to interfere with the beauty of the room.
Not so much at the iconic Palm Bay Tower, where Micky has kept a bachelor pad since 1972. There’s more evidence of Micky here than Mark, though the architect’s interior transformation of the original three bedroom into a lofty home for his favorite client and his favorite things is perfect — a princely perch for the merry magnate to look out on his turf — Miami Beach to the east; Miami to the west.
You’d expect the lair of a man who’s constantly collecting historical eclectica all over the world to come home to a staid private museum, but, no, Micky’s pied a terre (he has three — one in New York, one in Paris) is more like an antiquarium filled with fond objects from his past — Mother’s Thirties cabinets, a geometric glass table designed by nephew Michael, a ceramic platter fired by childhood friend, artist Michele Oka Doner, a nomadic secret cabinet of keepsakes, and the key to Micky’s madness, his first collection as a boy — a wall of hotel key souvenirs brought home by globetrotting mom and dad, Colonel Mitchell & Frances Wolfson, Sr.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
Photo copyright Cyn. Zarco.
