Over a dozen artist studios in Miami’s design district will be demolished at the end of the year to make way for a new retail complex. But the artists, many of whom have worked at their 38th and 39th street studios rent-free for over half a decade due to the generosity of Craig Robins’s real estate development company DACRA, aren’t leaving quietly. Before they splinter off to more affordable parts of the city, artists including Bhakti Baxter, Jim Drain, and Martin Oppel will open their studios for a kind of art block party this Thursday, December 1.
The studios were all part of Robins’s original vision for the design district, a neighborhood the Miami Herald once described as a “sketchy retirement village” that is now becoming a high-end shopping and tourist mecca, thanks in large part to Robins. “We always give space to the cultural community,” Robins told ARTINFO. When an old warehouse building opened up in 2002, Robins offered it as short-term studio space to artists “in a point of transition.” Somehow, their one-year contracts kept getting extended. “They were doing such good work, we just kept renewing it,” said Robins.
Now, he’s decided finally to do away with the program. “It’s important for them to evolve into something that’s more independent and self-sustaining,” Robins said of the studios. They will be torn down as part of a push to bring fashion houses like Louis Vuitton and Hermes, as well as a boutique hotel, to the neighborhood. Robins still plans to keep art as a central focus: he has even toyed with the idea of opening a single institution that can bring together works from the many private collections that have spaces in the area — chief among them the Rubell Family Collection, the de la Cruz Collection, and the Margulies Collection — and his own personal holdings. “If we take ours and add to theirs, it could really add to that infrastructure,” he said, optimistically.
For their part, the artists don’t seem to fault Robins or his development company for kicking them out. “It comes with the territory that you are there to change the place and ultimately that place will push you out,” said Baxter, who has worked at the design district studios for over five years. “Everybody thought they were crazy to buy property there 10 years ago, but now it has become a serious part of the city.” He said he and some of his studiomates will look for inexpensive spaces further north.
Wherever they end up, they’ll certainly go out with a bang. When several of these artists left their Miami studios in Edgerwater in 2003, the final performance involved breaking down the walls with a sledgehammer. While Baxter promises this event will be “less aggressive,” he acknowledges that there is bound to be a certain element of spontaneity and abandon in a display that nobody has to worry about cleaning up.
For the December 1 event, Baxter will team up with artist Jason Hedges to build a functional BBQ sculpture, while the local Nektar De Stagni Shop will host a VIP reception for its exhibition “Hard Poems in Space,” on view through December 24. The exhibition will feature new works by Agathe Snow, Hernan Bas, and Rene Gonzalez, among others. De Stagni and Gallery Diet, which is copresenting the show, also invited designers Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza to install new cement tiles and architect Rene Gonzalez to create a ceiling mural in the space. All this is possible, according to Gallery Diet’s Nina Johnson, because of the impending demolition. “We don’t have to worry about returning the space to its original condition,” she said.