Their story is legendary in Miami. Don and Mera Rubell began collecting art in 1967, when they lived in New York City. Their modest budget came from Mera’s salary as a Head Start teacher, and their acquisitions strategy consisted largely of purchasing work that excited their passions. The untimely passing of Don’s brother, Steve Rubell, in 1989, left them with a considerable inheritance with which to expand their collecting, and in 1996, they opened the Rubell Family Collection to the public in their adopted home, Miami.

The Rubell Family Collection pioneered a new institutional model of private art collections open to the public as small museums. Along with its museums and galleries, and a series of annual art fairs (of which Art Basel Miami Beach is the most prominent), the Miami area has benefited from the emergence of numerous private collections that have followed the Rubells’ example. Prominent collectors like Martin Margulies, Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, and Rosa De La Cruz have established variants of this new institutional model, through which they have provided an important source of patronage for contemporary artists. The result is a vital and stimulating art scene that is rapidly maturing, even as it creates new venues for experimentation and display, such as the miles of graffitied walls in the Wynwood district (many of which were curated by developer and arts patron Tony Goldman).

One of the Rubells’ most important contributions to contemporary art discourse was their early support for a number of Miami-area artists. They were among the first to collect work by Purvis Young, a brilliant painter and autodidact from the Liberty City neighborhood. José Bedia, Norberto (Bert) Rodriguez, Naomi Fisher, Pablo Cano, Mark Handforth, COOPER, Jiae Hwang, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez all found a national audience after the Rubells acquired their work. In many cases, the Rubells also provided the first public venue in Miami for artists from outside the region.

By the time Phaidon published the collection’s catalogue, Not Afraid, in 2004, the Rubells had amassed over 6,000 works of art. The collection includes videos, installations, photographs, paintings, and sculptures, and is famously heterodox in its breadth. The Rubells have collected work by many of the last half-century’s most significant figures, including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Thomas Struth, Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Charles Ray, David Salle, and Gregor Schneider. The Rubell Family Collection displays only work it owns, but it has produced at least seven traveling exhibitions.

Given the large scale of the Rubells’ holdings, it is only possible to display a small fraction of the collection at any given time. However, curator Mark Coetzee is able to tease out common themes among the materials on view. For example, the recently concluded exhibition How Soon Now juxtaposed El Anatsui’s Another Man’s Cloth (2006) alongside Mike and Doug Starn’s Yellow Rose (1982–86). The large wall hanging by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian-born artist who knits together metal bottle caps and foil strips into elaborate tapestries, and the collaged photograph by the Starns, New Jersey-born twin brothers who tape together large photographs from irregular fragments, share a concern with assemblage. In both cases, the conspicuous use of labor-intensive processes and surprisingly monumental scale transforms mundane scraps into luxurious objects of extraordinary beauty.

Mixed-media installations and assemblages are particularly well represented in the Rubell Family Collection. Some achieve striking elegance in works amassed from common materials, as in Tobias Madison’s engaging piece Hydrate and Perform (2010), an installation of large fish tanks filled with different flavors of energy drinks. The assorted colors of the liquids produce a range of transparency and translucency, while their different levels (along with the spacing of the tanks) invite viewers to walk among the containers in order to experience the visual play of reflection, refraction, and transmission generated by the varying surfaces and volumes of the fluids.

The Rubells take advantage of the sizable display spaces on the building’s ground floor to exhibit large-scale works. The recent exhibition, American Exuberance, included four spray-painted canvasses by Sterling Ruby. These abstract works, titled SP170, SP171, SP173, and SP177 (2011), are executed at such a scale (roughly fifteen by twenty feet each) that they begin to resemble landscapes when exhibited together in the Rubell Family Collection’s largest gallery. Installations like Cady Noland’s This Piece Has No Title Yet (1989), Kaari Upson’s The Grotto (2008–9), and Matthew Day Jackson’s Chariot (The Day After the End of Days) (2005–6) (all included in the two most recent exhibitions) are also given the space necessary to meet their diverse display requirements.

The Rubells’ process for discovering and acquiring new art involves spending considerable time visiting with artists in their studios. Often, the couple will buy large numbers of works from a single artist (they rarely purchase only one piece). The Rubells have always sought new work by emerging artists who have not yet found a broad audience. While established artists are also well represented, the Rubell Family Collection is noted for its interest in innovative practices. The Rubells are particularly intrigued by explicit art and provocative works that examine challenging subjects.

The publication of the Phaidon catalogue coincided with the opening of the Rubell Family Collection’s new building in Miami’s Wynwood district. Architect Allan Shulman (also an accomplished historian of local modern architecture, curator, and professor at the University of Miami) was tasked with converting the former warehouse into galleries, offices, a library, and residential spaces. (The term “former warehouse” buries the lede somewhat: the building had been used by the Drug Enforcement Administration to store confiscated materials. While no illegal substances were left behind, Shulman took care to preserve the varying finishes of the floor, which, in contrast to the neutral white of the gallery walls, is the one remaining trace of the building’s past.) Shulman’s minimalist intervention leaves the art plenty of room to breathe, while providing display spaces whose varying scales and lighting conditions accommodate the broad range of art exhibited. An outdoor area intended for sculpture doubles as a salon for public discussions during the week of Art Basel Miami Beach.

The annual Art Basel Miami Beach art fair and its numerous associated events (such as Design Miami) bring thousands of art and design enthusiasts to the city every December. The Rubell Family Collection programs public events to coincide with the festival, including lectures and discussions on themes that vary from year to year. Its most interesting contribution to Art Basel Miami Beach has been a series of edible breakfast installations by Mera and Don’s daughter, Jennifer, an artist and chef. In 2010, she transformed an abandoned house adjacent to the gallery into an elaborate buffet, where each room in the partially demolished structure offered visitors one component with which to assemble a bowl of oatmeal. Despite a title, Just Right, that reduced the project to a simplistic reference to the story of Goldilocks, the installation raised fascinating questions about the cycles of production, consumption, and waste common to architecture and cuisine. The 2011 installation, Incubation, explored the nearly alchemical processes of making yogurt and honey as analogs to human procreation.

The strengths and limitations of the Rubell Family Collection stem from the same source: its institutional independence. It has sufficient resources to collect, exhibit, and promote important new material that may be too difficult for South Florida’s public and university museums to tackle, and it can develop new exhibitions with much greater speed than the region’s larger arts institutions without having to satisfy the tastes and concerns of a diverse constituency. Yet its insistence on exhibiting only work from the collection limits the potential breadth of its shows, which in turn restricts their critical depth. In addition, the Rubells’ position as taste-setters and market-shapers can lead to the neglect of significant contemporary artists.

The success of the Rubell Family Collection also highlights the fragmentary nature of fine arts culture in Miami. Like the city’s other private collections (especially the Margulies, Fontanals-Cisneros, and De La Cruz galleries), its small museums (the Bass Museum of Art), and its university museums (the Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Lowe Art Museum), the Rubell Family Collection has the freedom to exhibit important new work. Yet its independence—and the Miami Art Museum’s limited resources—has resulted in a city with a fragmentary and uncoordinated institutional context for the visual arts. Miami’s nascent arts culture feels more like an archipelago of isolated patronage rather than a cohesive whole that exceeds the sum of its galleries. And while these institutions build on Miami’s status as a world city by drawing artists and audiences from across the globe, the transience of a metropolitan population of transplants, retirees, immigrants, and tourists leaves the city and its arts organizations searching for an overarching cultural identity. The Rubells and their peers have contributed greatly to Miami; their next step is to transform it.