Miami Art Museum. Between Here and There: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection

Permanent Exhibition

In preparation for the move to its new and expanded facility at Museum Park, Miami Art Museum (MAM) presents the first, long-term installation of its permanent collection in the museum’s largest exhibition space, the 9,000 square foot Upper Level Gallery. “Between Here and There: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection” will remain in place with periodic changes until MAM moves to the new museum, scheduled for completion in 2013. The exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to see the strides MAM has made in building a “Miami point of view” of developments in modern and contemporary art, while preparing for the collection’s permanent installation at Museum Park.

“Between Here and There” focuses on the cultures of the Atlantic Rim - the Americas, Europe and Africa - from which the vast majority of Miami residents hail. Included within this broader framework will be the work of a number of artists residing in South Florida, many of whom are paradigms of this intercultural dialogue.

The exhibition opens with an installation by Tomás Saraceno, the Argentine representative to this year’s Venice Biennale. Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008), is the prototype for Saraceno’s Venice installation; it was purchased last year by MAM’s Collectors Council and is being displayed at the museum for the first time. The installation will be the initial offering in the Anchor Gallery, a space that features regularly changing presentations of large-scale works from the collection.

A separate Focus Gallery, also changing every four to six months, presents mini-exhibitions of artists or themes considered cornerstones of MAM’s collecting goals and will be supplemented with borrowed works, primarily from area collections. The first Focus Gallery features single works by six historically influential artists who made vital contributions to the spread and evolution of modern art in the Americas: Joseph Albers, Alexander Calder, Hans Hofmann, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta and Joaquín Torres García.

The collection installation is divided into a series of thematically-oriented galleries, each devoted to diverse approaches to common themes, the “shared languages” of the Unconscious, Reason, Making, Experience and Daily Life. Among the artists represented are Carlos Alfonso, José Bedia, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wifredo Lam, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Regina Silveira, Lorna Simpson, Frank Stella, Rachel Whiteread and Kehinde Wiley.