Rubell Museum

Our Glenn Ligon painting "Gold Nobody Knew Me #1" is featured in ’s great "Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now" exhibition which closes this Monday. After its time at the Met, Ligon's painting will be back on view at our Washington DC museum.

"Gold Nobody Knew Me #1", 2008
Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 32 x 32 in.
acquired in 2008

Juanita McNeely 1936 - 2023. Rest in peace.

"You go for a long time where you’re trying to say something, and if they don’t want to let you say it, you just keep going."

“Self,” 1968, oil on linen, 48 x 36 in., acquired in 2022.

On the left, "The Struggle" a 1973-74 painting by Miami’s own Purvis Young at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Untitled" from 1982 on the right. We’re in Washington DC this week working with our colleagues at our DC museum as we prepare for our Wednesday evening, November 1st, members only preview and opening reception there. We hope you can join us. You can become a member in person or via our website.

Our members only preview in Miami will be on Tuesday evening, December 5th.

Given the extensive time that Young spent researching artists he may have been considering Francisco Goya's "Fight with Cudgels" (last image) when he made this painting.

Was Neo Rauch thinking about Tiepolo's "The Triumph of Marius" (1729) when he composed his painting currently on view here, "Demos [Demonstration]" (2004)? Probably not, but it's nice to have echoes here in Miami, in a renovated warehouse, of a painting made nearly 300 years prior that's held pride of place for decades at the top of the Metropolitan Museum's grand central staircase.

Both artists included self-portraits within their processions and Tiepolo's military banners and flags have been replaced with protest signs in Rauch's painting. Tiepolo's principal, magisterial figure with a red cloak is a shackled African king who could easily be mistaken for the painting's victor, while Rauch proffers a su***de bomber in the center with a naked captive in the foreground.

Occasionally, august institutions such as the Metropolitan have echoes of newer institutions, such as ours. In 2005 we presented four of Rauch’s paintings, including "Demos," in our exhibition of Leipzig artists and in 2007 the Met mounted a solo exhibition of Rauch’s work. The Met’s curator, Gary Tinterow, kindly shared with us that he first saw Rauch’s paintings in Miami, in our exhibition.

Details of the self-portraits, shackled King, and bound captive are above.

The youngest person we know.

Paintings within paintings that reference other paintings: details from Tesfaya Urgessa's works currently on view.

"Let Go Of Your Claim on Me 1," 2022, oil on canvas, 98 3/8 x 236 1/4 in, acquired in 2022

"Two Twins," 2022, oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in., acquired in 2022

"The Strange Host," 2022, oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in., acquired in 2022

1988. Don and Mera Rubell with Thomas Ruff in his Düsseldorf studio. Today marks 59 years of marriage and innumerable studio visits for this young couple.

Keen to see a capybara swim through Yayoi Kusama's "Narcissus Garden"? If so, you'll have to visit Japan's Naoshima island. Our iteration of "Narcissus Garden" (fourth image) is currently indoors and only traversed by one species, humans, but we have seen iguanas, foxes, opossums and raccoons in our museum's garden. Perhaps, in the future, Kusama's installation will join them.

Lest we take ourselves too seriously.

In Miami we tend to think of art fairs as a relatively recent invention. They're not. Working in our archives yesterday we found this 1986 photograph of Mera Rubell at Art Basel in Switzerland with a Thomas Schütte sculpture titled, “The School.” The Rubells acquired this work at the fair from gallerist Jean Bernier of Athens, Greece.

From start to finish. Alexandre Diop working in our museum’s studio last year.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense [Shame be (to him) who thinks evil of it],” 2022, mixed media on wood, 60 x 120 in.,
acquired in 2022.

If you were in Tallahassee in 1982 and visited the University Gallery at Florida State University you would have seen a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the group exhibition "New New York." That same year, had you visited the Metropolitan Art Gallery in Coral Gables, Florida you would have seen another painting by Basquiat. The same is true for the following year at the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina ("County" is misspelled as "Country" in his catalogs).

"Meteoric rise," is often used to describe the initial career path of a select few artists. A catalog in our research library from Basquiat's 1984 exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York reminded us of just how steep this rise was.

1980: Zero exhibitions

1981: One group exhibition and two solo exhibitions

1982: Eleven group exhibitions (including Documenta) and eight solo exhibitions (of which four were in New York City)

1983: Twenty-one group exhibitions (including the Whitney Biennial and nine others in New York) and three solo exhibitions