“Huge spaces, soaring ceilings, and imposing works of art put everyday life on pause. This space is its own world. One wanders from work to work, responding to their size and character-which often means walking around them or even inside them-while wondering in the back one’s mind, What is beyond? The works and the spaces they inhabit are of a size that impact one’s body as well as eyes, mind, and emotions.” I. Michael Danoff
Since 2008, Mr. Margulies has personally welcomed over 1,000 FIU Honors College students to the Collection at the Warehouse.
Mr. Margulies is the chief benefactor to the Lotus House Women’s Shelter. “But Lotus Village’s chief benefactor, developer and art collector Martin Margulies, has just unveiled a new $19 million gift to the shelter project, bringing his total support to $44 million.” Andres Viglucci
THE MARGULIES COLLECTION AT THE WAREHOUSE
“The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse is a nonprofit institution located in a 50,000 square foot retro-fitted warehouse in the Wynwood Arts District of Miami. The Warehouse presents seasonal exhibitions from the collection of renowned collector Martin Z. Margulies as well as educational programs, special exhibitions and an international loan program. The Warehouse is operated and funded by the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation, a thirty-year resource for the study and enjoyment of the visual arts.”
https://www.margulieswarehouse.com/about
ACCESS
591 NW 27TH ST
Miami, FL 33127
Telephone: 305.576.1051
Email: mcollection@bellsouth.net
https://www.margulieswarehouse.com/
NOTE: Admission is free for Florida students with ID!
MISSION
“Our mission to serve the Miami community is fulfilled through educational programming such as lectures and regular tours with schools and museum groups given by Martin Margulies, longtime curator Katherine Hinds, and our team of dedicated associates. We place high importance on sharing the collection through gifts and generous loans to national and international museums and educational institutions.”
HISTORY
“In 1998, Martin Z. Margulies along with his longtime curator Katherine Hinds began looking for a suitable space to display the growing collection of photography, video and installation works, and sculpture of the Margulies Contemporary Art Collection. In 1999, the first phase of the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse opened to the public with an event to benefit the Lowe Museum at the University of Miami. After a series of expansions, the Warehouse now comprises 50,000 square feet of exhibition space with set hours each week. The Warehouse is open to the public October–April, during which time we welcome thousands of students and visitors from all over the world.” https://www.margulieswarehouse.com/about
PHOTOGRAPHY STUDY CENTER
“The Photography Study Center at The Margulies Collection is a center for the education and research of contemporary and vintage photography with a mission to further visual literacy in our community. The Photography Study Center expands our commitment to photography by having a dedicated space that gives visitors, scholars, and students the opportunity for hands-on viewing of the photographs. The archives include flat-file style storage, exhibition space, and a reading center to provide an immersive experience with the photography collection. The Study Center produces annual exhibition programs and provides open access to its library, as well as offering appointments for scholarly review of the flat files and artist films. Additionally, designed to serve multiple functions, is an adjacent café-style area accommodates reservations for conferences, meetings and gatherings.” https://www.margulieswarehouse.com/exhibitions/photography-study-center-at-the-margulies-collection-at-the-warehouse
SELECTED WORKS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
ELIASSON. YOUR NOW IS MY SURROUNDING, 2000.
“One of the first major installations we showed at the Warehouse was Olafur Eliasson’s Your now is my surroundings (2000). I saw the installation at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in Manhattan, and as I was leaving Tanya grabbed me and said, “Come back and look closely at this.” So I took a closer look. It was astonishing: a room with a raised floor had been specially built, and twelve-foot mirrors had been installed, generating an extraordinary effect. I realized that in order to accommodate the work, the gallery had to have a ceiling open to the sky above. We had just begun working on expanding our Warehouse in Miami by breaking through to an adjacent building, and in doing so we had discovered an abandoned alleyway. It occurred to me that we had the ideal site for this work. It has been almost seventeen years since the installation went on permanent view at the Warehouse, and thousands of young art students have seen it. Among all the art we have on view, this work renders the students speechless, as they see their reflections in the mirrors. This experience of “seeing themselves seeing” enables the students to talk and think about art in a new way, an outcome that is very gratifying for us.” Margulies Collection
KIEFER. SECRET OF THE FERNS, 2007.
“One of the strongest installations in the Collection is Geheimnis der Farne (Secret of the Ferns) (2007), titled after Celan’s poem of the same name. Kiefer believes that ferns could tell us a great deal about our beginnings; like forests, they may contain secret knowledge. There are forty-eight paintings in this them have actual ferns as well as broken terracotta, which recall the rubble of the playgrounds of his childhood. The towers in the center refer to the Tower of Jericho and evoke Nazi structures in World War II concentration camps. Kiefer created these structures in his atelier using shipping containers as forms. Each one weighs 25,000 pounds. Needless to say, this was a difficult installation. Just getting the necessary machinery into the building was difficult. The total Kiefer layout up 16,000 square feet of space; it is the largest permanent presentation of Kiefer’s work in the United States.” Margulies Collection
MCGEE. UNTITLED (TRUCK INSTALLATION WITH TVS), 2004.
“Barry McGee came out of the graffiti movement, which started in the early 1980s. The West Coast artist was among the notable few whose work was appropriated from its original urban setting to galleries and museums. The decontextualization of graffiti art which occurred when it was moved from the streets to institutions marked a point in United States history where counterculture became mainstream. Graffiti art has its roots in hip hop and urban culture and has served as a longtime platform for disenfranchised young creatives to have their messages seen and heard. Regarding his use of found objects, McGee compares his practice to curating and says “Someone’s probably made the most perfect thing I’m looking for if I look hard enough or close enough it’s already sitting out in the street or leaning up against something.” Margulies Collection
NETO. É Ô BICHO!, 2001.
Since the mid-1990s, Ernesto Neto has produced an influential body of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience. Drawing from Biomorphism and minimalist sculpture, along with Neo-concretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s & 70s, the artist both references and incorporates organic shapes and materials – spices, sand and shells among them—that engage all five senses, producing a new type of sensory perception that renegotiates boundaries between artwork and viewer, the organic and manmade, the natural, spiritual and social worlds.” Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Neto’s sculpture is made of Lycra that contains the spices black pepper, clove, and turmeric.
STEINKAMP. BLIND EYE 3, 2019.
“Blind Eye engages with one of the oldest themes in art history-nature and landscape. Blind Eye depicts the seasonal phases of a birch grove. The composition is a play on monocular perspective, an inter-exchange of a multiple gaze. I am fascinated by the recent discoveries that trees communicate through an underground chemical exchange…You can certainly sense the incorporeal in nature. If anything, this is a consistent current in my work. There is so much we can just barely sense and feel; I believe we are surrounded by sentience. I use the tangible invisible forces in air to communicate this, for example, an invisible wind is revealed by the trees movement in Blind Eye. The title Blind Eye is a play on words: it refers to a tree blind; it also conveys the singular eye scars left on birch trees after they lose their branches; it is seeing with one eye, or monocular vision; there are so many things we turn a blind eye to these days, Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement is among the most hideous. We are dumping carbon and methane gases into the atmosphere, changing the climate at exceeding rates.” Jennifer Steinkamp
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
EDITORS AND LAST UPDATE
John William Bailly 12 April 2023
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