PAMM Reopened in Miami’s Museum Park with Astounding Exhibitions

The new Herzog & de Meuron-designed facility will strengthen the Museum’s role as a vital cultural and educational center. The Museum will continue to serve one of the most diverse populations in one of the fastest growing regions in the country, where a confluence of Caribbean, North American, and South American cultures adds vibrancy and variety to civic activity. The new PAMM announced that will promote progressive arts education, build community cohesiveness, and catalyze the continued revitalization of downtown. With its opening, and that of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science in 2015, Museum Park—previously known as Bicentennial Park—will be transformed into a central destination on Miami’s cultural map.

The Museum’s collection now numbers over 1,300 works. Through its capital campaign, momentum and enthusiasm for the continued expansion of the collection has steadily increased. In 2013 the Museum acquired approximately 300 works from the collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl, which range from painting and sculpture to video, photography, and installation by such artists as Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Nathan Carter, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, Dennis Oppenheim, Pipilotti Rist, and Carolee Schneeman. As part of his gift to the Museum’s capital campaign in 2011, Jorge M. Pérez, for whom the new Museum is named, gifted a portion of his collection to its permanent collection. Among the 110 works are masterpieces by some of history’s most important Latin American artists, including José Bedia, Beatriz González, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta Echaurren, Diego Rivera, and Joaquín Torres-Garcia, among others.

Pérez Art Museum Miami’s exhibition program has included important single-artist surveys on the work of Cuban artist José Bedia (2012), Latin American artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (2010), and Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca (2009), as well successful group exhibitions such as the New Work Miami series (2010 and 2012), which explored the innovative work of local Miami artists, and an exploration of masterworks from the collection of Jorge Pérez (2013). Building on its robust exhibition history, PAMM’s inaugural lineup included Ai Weiwei: According to What?, the first major international survey of this artist’s multifaceted artistic oeuvre. The exhibition design was also specially conceived by the artist and Herzog & de Meuron to be in dialogue with the new building architecture. Caribbean: Crossroads of the World examines the exchange of people, goods, ideas, and information between the Caribbean basin, Europe, and North America through 400 works; as well as smaller, focused presentations of the work of Cuban painter Amelia Peláez and Haitian born, Miami-based artist, Edouard Duval-Carrié.

The Museum’s permanent collection will be displayed thematically within six Overview Galleries that are positioned throughout the first two floors of the building. Collectively titled AMERICANA, these six galleries will present artwork produced by artists working in North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean. Special emphasis has been placed on the presentation of artworks by artists currently living in Miami.

The museum will be organizing a thematic presentation of the Cowles Collection with works chosen from the more than one hundred photographs promised to PAMM by collector Charles Cowles. Installed in one of the museum’s Focus Galleries, the selection includes important and iconic works by 20th century photographers such as Eugene Atget, Bernice Abbott, Weegee, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Alfredo Jaar.

In its Focus Gallery the museum is presenting Selections from the Collection of Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Founded in 1979, the Sackner collection, known as an "archive of archives," initially focused on concrete and visual poetry—including rare manuscripts and published works by international luminaries such as Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Öyvind Fahlström, and Eugen Gomringer. The collection subsequently grew to encompass a broader array of historic and contemporary works that synthesize word and image. The installation will open with a rare, 1897 publication of "Un Coup de des" (A Throw of the Dice), by Stéphane Mallarmé, which is considered one of the first true examples of concrete poetry, and include hundreds of objects spanning more than a century. In the Project Gallery visitors are able to see For Those in Peril on the Sea, 2011, is an installation by Hew Locke (b. 1959), a British artist of Guyanese descent. The museum is also presenting Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972), She is one of the most celebrated Eastern European artists of her generation. Furthermore, PAMM has commissioned artist Yael Bartana, to create a new film or video work. For her project at PAMM, Bouchra Khalili has created a new film or video work based on research and investigations undertaken in New York.

The wide-ranging roster of exhibitions examines the interpretation and appropriation of cultural and political identities, economic structures, and commodities generated by Miami’s diverse population and its position as a cross-cultural hub.