How Art Basel came to Miami Beach: the collectors, the deal and the first fair in 2002

On June 13, 2001, during the art fair in Basel, the government of the Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt received a delegation from Miami Beach led by its mayor, Neisen Kasdin, and its city manager, Jorge Gonzalez. They had come to talk about the fair the two cities were about to share: Art Basel Miami Beach, set to open that December (Basel-Stadt). It did not open that December. When it did, a year later, it began a change in Miami that is still going on.

The story is usually told in a line: the Rubells brought Art Basel to Miami. The record is more interesting than that. It involves a collector who went to Basel every June, a developer remaking the Design District, a family who had been showing contemporary art in a warehouse for a decade, a city rule about hotel rooms, and a rival fair whose contract decided the month.

Much of what follows comes from Art Basel's own oral history of its Miami fair, recorded by the New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin for its 20th edition in 2022, and from the fair's own releases at the time. Those are participants' memories, and where they differ from each other or from the record, we say so.

Basel, 1970

Art Basel was founded in 1970 by three Basel gallerists, Trudl Bruckner, Balz Hilt and Ernst Beyeler. The first edition brought together 90 galleries and 30 publishers from ten countries and drew more than 16,000 visitors (Art Basel). By the 1990s it was the fair every serious dealer wanted to be in, run by Lorenzo Rudolf, with Sam Keller rising through his team; Keller became director in 2000 (The Art Newspaper). Miami Beach would be its first fair outside Switzerland.

The courtship

Many of those involved trace the idea to Norman Braman, the Miami collector. Jeffrey Deitch, then an art adviser, first took Norman and Irma Braman to Basel, and they went every year from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. Braman began pressing the fair's directors to look at Miami Beach and set up meetings with local leaders (Art Basel).

Craig Robins, the developer then remaking the Miami Design District, knew Keller from his own trips to Basel. When a first meeting at the Miami Beach Convention Center went badly, Robins's friend Nick Pritzker, whose company managed the center, arranged another, with Braman, Keller and Robins at the table. Keller was looking elsewhere too: Alberto Ibargüen, then publisher of The Miami Herald, recalls him weighing Chicago, New York and the West Coast, and others remember Los Angeles and Orlando's convention center on the list. Lauren Taschen, who became the fair's events manager, made the case in a sentence: "Miami is the gateway to South America."

Don and Mera Rubell had been showing their collection in a Wynwood warehouse since 1993, and Mera Rubell calls bringing the fair to Miami "a family mission." She argued that Miami, like Switzerland, sat at a crossroads, here between North and South America. Over lunch at Rosinella's on Lincoln Road, their son Jason pitched Rudolf and Keller the idea of putting young galleries in shipping containers on the beach (Art Basel; Cultured).

Two obstacles: hotel rooms and a rival's calendar

The city had a condition for any fair at its convention center: it had to fill 1,500 hotel rooms. Robert Goodman, a Miami advertising man who became the fair's Florida representative, used Art Basel's figures from Switzerland to show that it could.

The second obstacle shaped the fair for good. Art Miami, the city's established fair, then ran every January at the convention center, and its contract barred any other art fair within 45 days of its dates. That pushed Art Basel into early December, then thought of as the off-season. Braman argued that pre-holiday hotel rates and the weather would bring people anyway (Art Basel). A rival's contract gave the fair the month that is now its identity.

According to Art Basel's own history, the contract was signed in 1999. Mera Rubell remembers going to Switzerland with Mayor Kasdin, Commissioner Nancy Liebman and other officials to secure the deal; the visit on record is the one in June 2001. The city looked for public money, too: in February 2001 its Cultural Arts Council asked the state of Florida for $500,000 toward a citywide art exhibition alongside the fair. The legislature's record does not say whether it was granted (Florida House).

Why Miami

The fair did not land in an empty place. Miami's collectors had been opening their doors for years. The Rubell Family Collection opened in a former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse in Wynwood in 1993, and Martin Z. Margulies opened the first phase of his warehouse in 1999 (Margulies Collection). The Center for the Fine Arts had become the Miami Art Museum in 1994 (PAMM), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami had moved into its Charles Gwathmey building in 1996 (MOCA). On Miami Beach, preservationists led by Barbara Baer Capitman had won National Register listing for the Art Deco district in 1979, and South Beach had spent the 1990s coming back to life (National Trust).

The city's image had not caught up. Goodman remembers Miami being thought of as "God's waiting room", and then as a city of drugs and crime. The artist Mark Handforth recalls that the idea of Art Basel in Miami "sounded like total insanity" (Art Basel).

September 11, and the fair that waited a year

The first Art Basel Miami Beach was set for December 13 to 16, 2001, and more than 150 galleries had confirmed. On November 5, eight weeks after the attacks, the organisers postponed it by a year, to December 5 to 8, 2002. They cited the continuing danger in the United States, the anthrax letters, the war, and the difficulty of flying, shipping and insuring art. Only five galleries had withdrawn, but many leading ones had asked in writing for a delay (e-flux). The cost was put at several million: about $4 million in the fair's own statement, about $5 million in Keller's later recollection.

Keller says he advised postponing and offered to take the blame. Then he went to Miami anyway that December with the collectors' and museum program, and later called it the most important moment of his time as director (The Art Newspaper). People came. A large Roy Lichtenstein show opened that week at MOCA North Miami, and its director, Bonnie Clearwater, dates the "Miami model", the fair as a citywide event, to that week without a fair (Art Basel).

December 2002: the first fair

The first Art Basel Miami Beach opened with a vernissage on December 4, 2002, and ran to Sunday, December 8, in the Miami Beach Convention Center. It had 160 galleries, 56% of them from outside the United States, about 30,000 visitors and 7,000 guests at the vernissage, and about 50 museum groups, from MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Met among them (e-flux). Prices ran from under $2,000 to millions.

On the beach, Jason Rubell's idea had become Art Positions: 20 young galleries in a village of bright orange shipping containers, the same containers that had carried the fair's walls from Switzerland. There were talks, with Hans Ulrich Obrist among the speakers, a video lounge in the public library, and parties from the Design District to South Beach. Collectors opened their homes, the de la Cruzes in Key Biscayne and the Bramans in Indian Creek.

The memories are vivid. Braman says the fair "started under a real dark cloud". Fredric Snitzer, the Miami dealer, was so nervous in his booth that a collector gave him a Valium. The London dealer Leslie Waddington called the fair a "real miracle". On the last day, Keller later told Marc Spiegler, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz asked which galleries had sold badly, and went to buy from them so they would come back (Art Basel). Braman says the major galleries that had stayed away scrambled to get into the second fair (Art Basel).

What the fair set off

Other fairs followed within a year. NADA held its first Miami fair in 2003 with 35 galleries (NADA); Robins founded Design Miami in 2005 (Design Miami); UNTITLED pitched its tent on the sand in 2012. In Wynwood, the Wynwood Walls opened in 2009, and the warehouse district the Rubells and Margulies had pioneered became a gallery district (see Wynwood during Art Basel).

The museums timed themselves to the fair. PAMM opened its Herzog & de Meuron building on Biscayne Bay on December 4, 2013, in Art Basel week. ICA Miami opened in 2014 and moved into its own building in the Design District in December 2017, paid for by the Bramans. The Rubells moved to a far larger museum in Allapattah in December 2019, the same week Jorge Pérez opened El Espacio 23 nearby. The convention center itself was rebuilt: a three-year, $620 million renovation finished on December 4, 2018, in time for the fair (WLRN).

The fair made its own legends along the way. In 2019 Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall at Perrotin's booth, sold three editions of Comedian for $120,000 to $150,000, and watched the performance artist David Datuna take one down and eat it (NBC Miami). Five years later an edition sold at Sotheby's for $6.2 million (The Art Newspaper). By 2025 the fair had 283 galleries from 43 countries and more than 80,000 visitors (Art Basel).

2026: the price of staying

The city has had to keep winning the fair. In 2017 it agreed a five-year deal from 2019, with an option for five more, and paid for a $2.8 million elevator and escalator as part of it; the mayor at the time compared it to locking in the Super Bowl (TSNN).

This October the commission approved a new agreement that keeps the fair at the convention center through 2031. The fair's base fee for 2026 falls to $500,000, about $455,000 less than before, rising by 3 to 5% a year from 2027. Miami Beach residents get a half-price presale, and no competing fair may use the convention center or nearby sites for 30 days on either side of the fair, with Design Miami exempt. Commissioner David Suarez, who wanted unlimited half-price tickets for residents, voted against (Miami Today).

Twenty-four editions on, the fair that almost did not happen is the anchor of a week the city has built around it, and the argument now is not whether Miami wanted Art Basel, but what it should pay to keep it.

Seeing the history in Art Week

Much of the story is still there to visit. The Rubell Museum in Allapattah and the Margulies Collection in Wynwood are open in fair week, and the private collections guide has their hours. MOCA North Miami, where the Lichtenstein show opened in the week without a fair, is still in its 1996 building. PAMM and ICA Miami are in our museums guide. At the convention center itself, the renovation's public art begins with Franz Ackermann's mural on the outside walls (WLRN). And the idea of a fair on the sand lives on: UNTITLED and InScope both pitch their pavilions on the beach; see Miami's art fairs.