Museum Review: 10 To The First Power - Celebrating Miami Art Museum's 10th Year Acquisitions - Page 3

Tamayo is gone from Miami, but wherever the show lands next, I hope you get to see it. If not, dive into a mound of art books and pull some of the images out to imprint in the galleries of your mind.

Ten to the first power at MAM. Yes, MAM. The show at the Miami Art Museum is called the Power of Ten. This one runs through October 23rd and you can still get there to celebrate gifts the museum has received during the first 10 years of its life as a “collecting institution.” Are they all good? Are they equal in vision in quality? They are gifts, mind you, and we all have a closet with some ties that didn't make the grade, a pair of multi-colored golfing slacks along with the treasures without which our life would be lessened. So it must be with museums.

MAM held planning meetings and made its plan for the future way back in the pre-cultural Florida days of 1995. It was the Center For Fine Arts back then and decided it should become more than just an “exhibiting organization” - one that only presented collections from other institutions with no collection of its own.

The decision was to aim for five goals: to collect international 20th and 21st century art, to build its own collection, to reflect these goals with a new name (MAM like the “yes, ma'am” I was taught as a southern boy), to emphasize education - especially for children, and to find itself a site for a free-standing new museum with outdoor sculpture space.

In '96 they mounted the first show of their gifts, Dream Collection, with 14 gifts for the new collection. They included a lot of my favorites: Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Al Held, and Gene Davis, along with artists with Miami and Florida connections. Since then the collection has been growing at about 25 new works a year. A George Segal was added, as well as a group of six by Joseph Cornell with his boxes of memories, reflections and dreams.

This show, reasonably well-presented and lighted (where lighting is appropriate) mixes the masters of the post-war world with Miami the masters of American-Latin culture clashes and fusions. There is a “photographic” triptych, “Waterlillies (After Monet)” that creates an astounding allusion and illusion of walking into that once wonderful gallery in New York's MOMA with the Monet Waterlillies, the sculptural benches to sit entranced for hours with near-sighted Monet's aged peek into the heaven of his water garden's collage of floating colors.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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