Photos by David Almeida
The Wolfsonian-FIU, on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, is known for its extensive holdings in decorative arts, graphic and industrial design, propaganda arts, world’s fair materials, and other cultural artifacts — mostly of North American and European origin, and dating from the period between 1885 and 1945 — that piqued the interest of the institution’s founder, the collector Mitchell Wolfson Jr., who is better known as Micky.
An inveterate accumulator, Wolfson — after donating the Wolfsonian’s building and original collections (of about 125,000 objects) to Florida International University in 1997 — kept right on collecting. He bought space in a downtown Miami office condominium to use as an office, but it soon became crowded with his acquisitions, and — to make a long story short — he donated three floors of the building, totaling 20,000 square feet, and the approximately 25,000 objects, rare books, works on paper, and archives that are housed there, to the Wolfsonian, which will use the spaces and their contents as a study center.
Lest you think that the Wolfsonian has acquired a Citizen-Kane-style warehouse strewn willy-nilly with piles of stuff, rest assured that Wolfson himself orchestrated the placement of every object on display. The Wolfsonian’s director, Cathy Leff, calls the spaces “a way for people to see inside Micky’s head as a collector.”
And a fascinating head it is. A group of journalists who toured the floor that was open to visitors on Thursday wandered through a staggering, and staggeringly diverse, array of paintings, sculpture, and objects. These included two figures that were studies for sculptures in the chapel at West Point; a wooden pedestal designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for a building in Tokyo; and a 1906 missionary map of the world, which declared much of the globe to be populated by heathens.
Unlike the more curated setting of its Miami Beach facility, the Wolfsonian’s downtown space is meant to be research-oriented; there, students can curate their own exhibitions, which the Wolfsonian can in turn use for its own research and scholarly programs. And the new location, Leff said, gives the Wolfsonian another way to connect to the public.
Wolfson, who appeared at the press preview wearing a pink, green and white print shirt that he said was made from the leftovers of a fabric that was used to cover his sofa, regaled reporters with stories like the one in which he was unsuccessfully targeted by a hit man hired by a jealous woman who was in love with Wolfson’s butler, and who blamed Wolfson for allowing the butler to run off with someone else — just, as it happened, when Wolfson had royalty coming to visit. At least I think that’s what happened.
But on a more serious note, this charming raconteur and man of the world also described himself a contrarian who had always hated authority — which was one reason why he wanted the materials that are contained in the downtown space to be an educational resource. “There are no value judgments here,” he added. “I want people to have access to ideas. I’m interested in the language of objects.”
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