RIP: Miami Art Central

We are saddened to hear that Miami Art Central (MAC) on Red Road in South Miami is shuttering its doors. Barring a reversal by its wealthy benefactor, in a few months MAC will be gone.

In December, the Miami Herald reported on the impending alliance between MAC’s visual arts programming and the Miami Art Museum (and its ‘new’ planned bayfront home). We are doubtful.

MAC pushed into an empty space in Miami.

Art Basel whips into Miami and out of town like a dream you forget as soon as it is over: MAC provided endurance, bringing cutting edge visual artists to Miami from all over the world, even if most Miamians never grasped what they meant.

Ellen Fontanals-Cisneros poured millions into MAC without, apparently, taking into account the geography of Miami’s cultural landscape.

The few organizations that do cultivate connections, the Miami Light Project for instance, succeed in spite of Miami not because of it. In the visual arts, pioneers like the Snitzer Gallery stand out, precariously.

Proximity of the location to the University of Miami may have given MAC’s benefactor the idea that audiences would gather from the edges of Miami’s leading private university. But Miami does not cultivate its audiences for art: it builds coloseums.

MAC was the right project in the wrong place, proving that the urban landscape of Miami is as atomized as its culture.

It was right, because in its aspiration, MAC provided elegant resistance to the hit-and-run culture featured, for example, in the Sunday Style section of the New York Times: Romero Britto, “In Miami, Art Without Angst”, whose work “seems as ubiquitous in South Florida as pastel hotels and $15 mojitos”. We get it.

For the most part, our homegrown grand-poobahs celebrate Britto with the same gusto as building all-star monuments to culture, like the Performing Arts Center.

MAC occupies the former offices of an engineering company—Wolfberg Alvarez—that often perched in the midst of Miami-Dade County infrastructure projects that destroyed everything in the path of the real estate deal.

We are left with a city that seems never to be able to sink cultural connections deeper than the roots tethering our swaying banyan trees to the sandy earth.