Interview with Elisa Turner, author of “Miami’s Art Boom”
Elisa Turner is an award-winning art critic and journalist who covered the visual arts for the Miami Herald from 1986 to 2007. Her new book explores Miami’s rise as an art city: Miami’s Art Boom: From Local Vision to International Presence (University Press of Florida, 2025). She was gracious enough to do an interview about her book and also share some knowledge about the Miami art scene.
How would you explain the subject of this book to someone who had never heard of it?
My book offers an in-depth look at the creative local players who helped transform Miami from a cultural backwater into an internationally known, vibrant arts community. Once Miami was considered solely a “fun in the sun” destination. I was fascinated to watch the Miami art scene blossom during the years before Art Basel Miami Beach arrived in 2002 and chronicle the explosive growth afterward. The Miami area is continually enriched by its close proximity to South America and the Caribbean, attracting exceptional artists and other creative folks. They enhance the area’s daily life with opportunities to engage with adventurous art exhibits and public art throughout Greater Miami. My book explores the compelling history of how this transformation happened, paying attention to both missed opportunities and times when the art scene surged forward. As a longtime art critic for the Miami Herald, I always aim to write in concise, lively language appealing to a general audience curious to learn more about contemporary art and culture.
You’ve covered the Miami art scene for some time. Was there an identifiable moment when you realized Miami had “arrived?” Or that the world was starting to take Miami more seriously?
There were two such moments. In December 2002, the inaugural Art Basel Miami Beach ignited an audacious spirit of energy extending beyond the confines of the fair occupying the Miami Beach Convention Center. There were the striking Art Projects presented in nearby Collins Park, mixing Miami artists Robert Chambers and Wendy Wischer with internationally known artists Katharina Grosse and Anish Kapoor. Across Biscayne Bay in the Miami Design District there were sparkling parties, performances, and more art to see. Visitors from Basel, Switzerland, were quite taken with this city-wide excitement. I caught up with a group from Basel touring the Rubell Family Collection in Wynwood. “Here, the whole week is an event,” reporter Raphael Suter from the Swiss newspaper Basler Zeitung told me. “Art is much more than a fair inside a building. Basel should try this.” And during the second Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2003, I vividly recall ARTnews magazine publisher Milton Esterow, a well-traveled veteran of many national and international art fairs, telling me that he had never seen a city respond to an art fair with such enthusiasm. At that point, I felt fairly confident that Art Basel Miami Beach would be a lasting part of Miami’s cultural life.
What makes Miami a special place for art? What are its particular advantages and distinctives?
I think it is our geographical proximity to the Caribbean and Latin America. Artists who have come here from these culturally rich and varied destinations have made a distinctive mark on our own cultural ecosystem. As I write in my introduction to Miami’s Art Boom, “many have fled repressive homelands, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America. Often their art carries thought-provoking reminders of a departure under duress. Its urgent creativity freshens the city with remarkable, even radiant resilience.” I’m thinking in particular of José Bedia, María Brito, Edouard Duval-Carrié, María Martínez-Cañas, Charo Oquet, and Arturo Rodriguez.
Our lustrous vegetation and natural resources—evident in places like The Kampong, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, and most of all Everglades National Park--have also inspired artists. And not only because of their natural beauty, but because that beauty has become increasingly at risk, threatened by relentless real estate development and by rising seas of the climate crisis. I’m thinking in particular of Carlos Betancourt and his work with Albert Latorre on the Reefline, as I describe on page five of my book. Both Mira Lehr and Barbara Neijna have been inspired by Miami’s fragile coastal geography. Neijna’s Foreverglades, installed at the Miami International Airport on Concourse J, is a magnificent and cautionary tribute to the imperiled Everglades. As I write in my book on page six, throughout this remarkable example of public art are “poetic quotes from the 1947 classic A River of Grass, celebrating the Everglades, whose words begin the concourse: ‘Nothing else is like them, their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon.’”
I think a lot of people think of Miami and art and think, rightly or wrongly, basically “Wynwood” and/or “Art Basel.” What do more people need to know about? What should be on more radars?
Wynwood was important in the early years of my book. In 1993, The Rubell Family Collection opened in a repurposed DEA warehouse in Wynwood. A good friend recently summed up Wynwood as “Wynwood was.” After the Rubell Family Collection opened, there was a lot of adventurous, upstart energy starting to percolate in Wynwood. Within easy walking distance were art galleries run by Brook Dorsch, Fredric Snitzer, and Bernice Steinbaum. Nearby was the non-profit Locust Projects. In 1999, another important private collection opened in Wynwood, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse. It remains in Wynwood. Despite the popularity of Wynwood Walls and its street art, rising rents have driven many artist studios and galleries to neighborhoods of Allapattah, Little Haiti, and Little River. That exodus to Allapattah was sparked in large measure by the move of two important private collections. In 2019, the Rubell Family Collection moved to Allapattah in a new building with a new name: Rubell Museum. That same year in Allapattah saw the opening of another major private collection. This was El Espacio 23 in a repurposed warehouse, established by collector and philanthropist Jorge M. Pérez.
Art Basel is just a few days out of the year. My book makes the case that there are now numerous opportunities to enjoy art in Miami after the lavish hoopla of Art Basel has come and gone.
Was this a book you had been wanting to write for a while, or was there something about “this book, right now?”
When in 2009 I acquired a complete catalogue of my 21 years of writing for the Miami Herald for my personal archives, I began to develop several ideas for a book that could be based on this historical material. But none of those ideas came to fruition. It was really in 2022, when I read press coverage about the 20th anniversary of the first Art Basel Miami Beach that I felt that this book needed to be written to set the record straight. For the 20th anniversary, there was much press declaring that it was quite surprising that a cultural backwater like Miami was able to host an event like Art Basel Miami Beach. I wanted to show how I had watched Miami’s resilient art community grow more ambitious during the years 1987 to 2007. At this moment in 2025, when we are witnessing steady assaults on freedom of the press, ugly anti-Black and anti-immigrant rhetoric, lacerated funding for revered social and cultural institutions, I feel this book is more important ever. As I write in the Acknowledgements on page 397, “I believe this book pays insistent homage to the persevering creative spirit from which we all stand to gain.”
What do you like most about Florida?
Florida politics can be exasperating and the summers are beastly hot. The incessant traffic and construction in South Florida is a nightmare. However, living here is rarely boring. Waterfront sunset and sunrises are invariably radiant with magnificent cloud formations. They can invite alluring and spontaneous conversation over a classic rum and coke. Such lively, compelling people find their way to Miami for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. I love talking to people whose background is quite different from mine to discover how they landed in Miami.
What is your Florida story? What is your connection to this place?
I always say I came to Miami when I had run out of things I was not good at. In the late 1970s, I was studying literature in graduate school. After earning a MA in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I enrolled in the PhD program in English Literature. When I realized that people far more talented than I was were having a tough time finding college teaching jobs, I moved to New York with the goal of becoming an editor in the publishing business. Living in New York I fell in love exploring the art museums and bookstores while I was looking for a publishing job. I eventually became a Developmental Editor in college publishing at Random House. My focus was on books about writing and anthologies of literature. But I became restless with that position. Then I found gigs free-lance writing. But that was not really satisfying either and New York was becoming prohibitively expensive for my husband and me. He is half-Cuban and missed his Cuban grandmother’s cooking in Miami, where he was born and raised. So, we moved to Miami. Having written a few art book reviews for the magazine ARTnews while I lived in New York, I discovered that I really liked writing about art. After we moved to Miami in the late summer of 1984, I found a position as an adjunct teacher in freshman writing at University of Miami. Then ARTnews asked me to be the Miami correspondent for that magazine. Eventually that led to the then art critic of the Miami Herald, Helen Kohen, asking me to come for an interview at the Herald’s office in downtown Miami. She was looking for someone to cover her art beat when she was on vacation and to write about art galleries. And so my life as an art critic for the Miami Herald began. Back when I was growing up in a small town surrounded by fields of corn and soy beans in Shelbyville, Illinois, I could never have imagined that my life would take this path to Miami.
You have a great resume of art writing. How did you get interested in art? And in writing?
I have always loved images and words, even before I studied literature and art in college. As a girl I loved drawing and dabbled in water color and painting. I was not particularly outdoorsy. Instead, one of my favorite pastimes was poring over books in the musty but charming 1905 Shelbyville Public Library built with funds from Andrew Carnegie. As a young girl I was fascinated by the town’s 1941 US Post Office mural by Lucia Wiley, depicting the voluminous muscular curves of race horses at a Shelby County Fair in 1900.
How did you become a good writer?
I follow the three R’s: Reading, reading, and more reading. Revising, revising, and more revising.
What other books or writers do you recommend for people who want to read about art?
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
Duchamp: A Biography by Calvin Tomkins
Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin
Post- to Neo- The Art World of the 1980s by Calvin Tomkins
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon
Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen
Do you have a favorite Miami restaurant? Is there a spot you take visiting friends and family?
The waterfront views, especially late afternoon and dusk, from the Coconut Grove Sailing Club are spectacular. My favorites on the menu are the Greek salad and fish tacos. The bartender mixes a mean Goombay Smash.
