If MOCA always seemed like the sort of pairing that might result from a shotgun wedding-part international arts destination for the wealthy, part community center for a town of 61,000, where the average salary is $37,353 a year and 32 percent of the population white-that’s because its origin lies in two real marriages, those of Lou Anne and Mike Colodny and William and Joan Lehman. One might even say that the ICA’s creation has shown it to be, already and in every sense, the contemporary art museum of the moment. With all these elements in its favor-the ICA will also start its collection with many significant works from MOCA, following the November settlement of the board’s lawsuit-the ICA is poised to be one of the more influential museums in the art world, and has already distinguished itself from Miami’s other museums with the unique way it came about. In two years they will be joined by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the MOCA board members’ new museum in the chic Design District, which will feature 20,000 square feet of exhibition space, courtesy of the billionaire collectors Norman and Irma Braman, who will pay for the construction, and of real-estate developer Craig Robins, who donated the land. Though Miami’s population is smaller than Omaha’s, it boasts six museums in its orbit-MOCA, the Bass, the Frost, the Lowe, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (formerly the Miami Art Museum, the name change following a 2013 move to a massive new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron), and the Wolfsonian. (The lawsuit, as filed by the board of MOCA North Miami against the City of North Miami, was a breach of contract lawsuit over services the city was contractually obligated to provide to the museum and allegedly did not provide.) In response, the city tapped M’Bow for the director position. In April 2014, MOCA’S 27-member board sued North Miami for the right to move, with its impressive 709-piece collection, and merge with the Bass Museum, which is located in Miami Beach, a few blocks from the convention center that hosts Art Basel Miami Beach each year. The far-fetched scenario was born of the acrimony between the museum’s well-heeled backers and the working-class suburban city of North Miami, MOCA’s landlord and supporter since its founding three decades ago (MOCA’s plant happens to be right next door to City Hall). M’Bow is a 60-year-old scholar born in Dakar, an intellectual specializing in the African diaspora who speaks of fighting in Guinea-Bissau as a teenager, and calls people “my brother” in the style of Cornell West.īut six months later Gartenfeld and M’Bow had something in common: they both claimed to be director of MOCA. He served stints as an editor at Art in America and Interview and mounted shows in an apartment gallery along Manhattan’s West Side Highway, cultivating a taste that walked the perfect line between known and soon to be known. Gartenfeld, 28, made his name in New York as an independent curator with an interest in the super contemporary. You would be hard pressed to find two men more dissimilar. That same week, across town, the locally based Senegalese academic Babacar M’Bow was opening a more modest exhibition, a show of Caribbean artists, at his Multitudes contemporary art gallery. The Vanity Fair-sponsored party included among its attendees all the art world royalty in town for Art Basel Miami beach, and even celebrities like Kevin Spacey. In late November 2013, Alex Gartenfeld, curator and interim director of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, opened the outgoing director Bonnie Clearwater’s last show at the museum, a survey of neons by British artist Tracey Emin.
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