Interview

The great museums have always reflected the enthusiasm and taste of individual collectors. Often the connections are obvious, as in the case of the Whitney Museum of American Art founded on the collection of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney or the Guggenheim Museum founded by Solomon Guggenheim, but even the Metropolitan Museum of Art was created by wealthy collectors who wanted to share their visions. The Met's original collection was the gift of a railroad man John Taylor Johnston. For New York's Museum of Modern Art we have three New York society ladies to thank, Miss Lillie Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller.

Museums are still being built the old fashioned way, through the energy of serious individual collectors, and one of the best stories in contemporary art is the Rubell Family Collection, a wonderful museum in Miami created by a New York family, Donald and Mera Rubell, and their children, Jennifer and Jason. Don was an obstetrician, a successful one, but the principal source of the wealth that built the collection was the estate of Uncle Steve, the delightful character who, with Ian Schrager, created Studio 54. It's fitting that a fortune based on an innovative creative concept that captured the imagination of a generation would be spent on art. Not a few of the artists in the Rubell collection spent time in that club, where artists like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat could be found regularly.

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (Negro Sunshine), 2006; Malcom X, Sun, Frederick Douglass, Boy with Bubbles # 3 (version 2), 2001, courtesy Regen Projects and the Rubell Family Collection

Great collectors are there at the beginning and the Rubells were there, investigating and buying when the new wave of American artists arrived. Many of the artists in the collection were unheralded beginners when the Rubells bought their work. In the mid-nineties the family acquired a 45,000 square foot warehouse in an unglam Miami neighborhood that had been a storage facility for the Drug Enforcement Agency-think of all that Miami Vice-type stuff collected by Scarface types, then confiscated-and they converted it into an exhibition space, opened to the public in 1996.