For one week each year, Art Basel consumes Miami Beach.
The December art fair has become a marquee event in the annual circuit of the world’s moneyed set, bringing in artists, galleries, collectors, scene-watchers and social climbers from all over. The parties are legendary. Celebrations can inspire only-in-Miami debauchery, like the couple caught in an intimate moment at the “Great Elephant Migration” installation last week.
South Florida’s art scene is no longer confined to the land of Miami Vice.
Now, at the end of Miami Art Week, attendees can board the Brightline to West Palm Beach, where a budding art scene materializes for the annual New Wave Art Wknd, a four-day event led by gallerist Sarah Gavlak. The weekend event, which ran this year from Dec. 6 to Dec. 9, included panels with gallerists, artists, local leaders and developers.
“[Gavlak] wanted to highlight what was going on in Palm Beach, as opposed to just Miami,” said Beth Rudin DeWoody, founder of the Bunker, a private West Palm Beach art space that displays her extensive collection.
But the cultural renaissance unfolding in the Palm Beaches is not merely a phenomenon of New Wave’s creation. An entire arts ecosystem has emerged since the pandemic, funded by real estate developers, philanthropists and galleries seizing on the region’s growth and striving to achieve the intangible, precious it-factor that can cement a place as truly desirable. The Palm Beaches, for so long known as “God’s waiting room,” need to get cool if they’re going to win over the throngs of young, affluent New Yorkers who would otherwise spend their weekends doing the gallery shuffle in Chelsea and Soho.
It wasn’t long ago there wasn’t much going on in this sleepy tropical hamlet, but the pandemic was a transformative force in South Florida. Lockdowns and remote work spurred an unprecedented wealth migration to the region, fueling a real estate boom. The ultra-luxury real estate market in tony Palm Beach ballooned, with back-to-back years of record-breaking sales. The rapid metamorphosis has meant crowded private schools and private clubs and a shortage of ultra-luxury homes.
DeWoody, the daughter of the late Lewis Rudin of Manhattan’s Rudin Management real estate dynasty, was already there — she opened the Bunker in 2017. The West Palm Beach art scene then would be unrecognizable now. More than 900 people attended the Bunker’s opening on Saturday, she said. It’s in large part because the new arrivals, many of them from New York City, expect and demand cultural offerings, in addition to warmer weather and lower taxes.
“A lot of people don’t want to move to a place that’s a wasteland,” she said. “They want a place that has cultural things.”
She summed it up with a quote from her dad: “[He] would always say, ‘People didn’t come to New York for the mountains and the clean air.’”
DeWoody said this fledgling arts scene benefits from civic and real estate leaders who understand the role art can play in driving an economy.
Sybille Canthal, director of arts, culture and community building for the City of West Palm Beach, credits Mayor Keith James with moving her position and the ArtLife program into the Office of the Mayor, and elevating art as a public priority.
“He made a dedicated space for the program to exist,” she said. “Which means he understood that arts and culture play a vital role in the city.”
Canthal said the last five years have been a “renaissance” for the arts in the Palm Beaches, fueled by growth and support from a wide range of players and institutions, including the program she oversees, ArtLife program she oversees, which requires that developers with project budgets over $500,000 devote 1 percent of their total costs to public art.
With developers like Related Ross’ Steve Ross spending billions on commercial and residential projects, that 1 percent adds up.
Last month, Related Ross unveiled a public art installation called Portals, part of Artlife, by sculptor Fred Eversley adjacent to the nearly complete office tower One Flagler.
Earlier this year, James Harpel’s Two Roads Development put up two sculptures at the Norton Museum as part of a collaboration facilitated by ArtLife, the Palm Beach Post reported. The sculptures will move to the garden at the 24-story, 41-unit Forté on Flagler luxury condo when it is completed next year.
Individual philanthropists and collectors have also poured funds into local arts institutions. In 2022, billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin relocated works in his $1 billion collection from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. The items moved included masterpieces by Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Griffin, who spent more than $350 million assembling 8 oceanfront acres for a megamansion in Palm Beach, also endowed the museum’s directorship in 2018.
With their clients moving to Palm Beach, galleries followed. They also weren’t really getting any business in their Manhattan shops in the early days of the pandemic.
“No one was going out in New York, but people were freer down here,” DeWoody said. “So that all of a sudden gave a jolt to the contemporary art market.”
Ben Brown now has a seasonal gallery in Palm Beach. Acquavella has an outpost on the island. Kristin Hjellegjerde opened her gallery on Florida Avenue in West Palm Beach, where her neighbors are Gavlak’s namesake gallery and Mike DePaola’s TW Fine Art.
“Obviously, a lot of galleries came and opened,” Ryan Ross, owner of Arcature Fine Art in Palm Beach, said.
But the 2020-art scene wasn’t permanent.
“Now a lot of them have gone,” Ross added.
Among those that came and went are high-profile international galleries like White Cube, Pace and Paula Cooper.
DeWoody said she expects some of these galleries to return. She remembers a time when such galleries couldn’t cut it in the Palm Beaches, when the locals didn’t care much for contemporary art.
“In the 90s, Jason Rubell opened a gallery in Palm Beach. He had very cool artists, I would go and buy things from him there,” she said. “He couldn’t make it because there wasn’t really a contemporary art-buying public. If there was art being bought, it was more traditional.”
Now, she said, “It’s become much more interesting here.”
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