Miami Heat

When the new home of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, opens this month, the city will finally have the cutting edge museum it deserves.

- Arthur Lubow

To many in the art world, Miami means one thing: Art Basel Miami Beach, the art fair that, for a week in early December, grips the metropolitan area in a spasm of commerce, parties, and kibitzing. Miami is renowned as a place to buy and sell contemporary art, and the city is also home to marquee-name collectors, some of whom—notably, the Rubell, Margulies, de la Cruz, and Fontanals-Cisneros families— have opened their private collections to the public. Compared to these cutting-edge private collections, the Miami museums can seem a bit dull, but the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which opens this month in a new building in the Design District, aims to rectify that imbalance. “In an ecology that is not crowded with museums, we want to be specific and focus on the important connection between postwar and contemporary art,” says Alex Gartenfeld, the deputy director and chief curator of ICA Miami.