Miami's private art collections during Art Week: the Rubell, Margulies and El Espacio 23

Private collections are part of the reason Art Basel came to Miami. Collectors like Don and Mera Rubell and Martin Z. Margulies were showing contemporary art in Wynwood warehouses years before the fair arrived in 2002, and a morning of collection visits is still how many collectors start their week. You see what serious collectors actually bought and lived with, hung by the people who bought it, at a fraction of the crowds at the fair.

The facts below come from each collection's own site and recent reporting, checked on October 23, 2026. Private collections set their own hours and change them for Art Week, so check again before you go.

The Rubell Museum: the collection that started the Miami habit

If you visit one private collection in Art Week, make it the Rubell. It is the biggest of the three, the most generous with space, and the one with the clearest story: a family that bought young artists' work for sixty years and then built a museum to show it. It is in Allapattah, west of Wynwood, and it stays open until 7:30 pm on Fridays and Saturdays, late enough to go after a full day at the fair.

Don and Mera Rubell started collecting in New York in 1964, soon after they married, and have always bought through studio visits and long relationships with artists. In 1993 they opened the collection to the public in Miami, with their son Jason, in a 45,000-square-foot former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse for seized goods in Wynwood (ArtRabbit). They went on to play a key role in bringing Art Basel to Miami. Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince are among the names in the collection, and the collection's own exhibitions, more than 50 in three decades, include 30 Americans (2008), which went on to tour.

In December 2019 the collection moved less than a mile, to six joined industrial warehouses in Allapattah remodelled by Selldorf Architects, and was renamed the Rubell Museum to stress its public role. It now runs to 36 galleries on a single level, with a research library of more than 40,000 volumes, a bookshop, a restaurant and a courtyard garden of plants native to South Florida (Rubell Museum). The family also runs a second Rubell Museum in Washington, DC.

The collection now exceeds 7,700 works. Two Yayoi Kusama installations are always on view: Narcissus Garden, hundreds of mirrored steel spheres filling the long central spine of the building, and one of her Infinity Rooms. Around them, a rotating Collection Highlights covers painting, sculpture, photography and video.

The Rubell residency and Art Week 2026

Since 2011 the Rubells have invited one or two early-career artists a year to live and work on site for six weeks to three months, with Knight Foundation support. Each residency ends in a year-long solo show, and the new work enters the collection. Sterling Ruby, Oscar Murillo, Cy Gavin, Amoako Boafo and Alexandre Diop all passed through early in their careers; the 2025 resident was the London painter Joanna van Son (Rubell Museum).

The museum usually opens its new season in Art Week: in 2025 it was a Thomas Houseago survey, opening December 1. The 2026 line-up was not yet posted when we checked, though the museum's menu lists a Recent Acquisitions show. Check the exhibitions page in November.

Visiting the Rubell Museum: hours, tickets and tours

• Address: 1100 NW 23rd Street, Miami, FL 33127.
• Hours: Wednesday and Thursday 11:30 am to 5:30 pm; Friday and Saturday 11:30 am to 7:30 pm; Sunday 11:30 am to 5:30 pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
• Tickets: $18 adults; $14 for seniors (65+), students and youths 7 to 18; free for children 6 and under, members, US military and veterans (plus three guests), and visitors with disabilities (plus one). Advance tickets are recommended. The museum is cashless.
• Tours: free guided tours at 3 pm, Wednesday to Sunday.
• Parking: metered spaces on 23rd Street by the entrance, plus valet. No food or drink in the galleries; lockers are available.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse: sculpture, light and photography in Wynwood

The Margulies is the collector's collection: big, serious, and hung with very little fuss in a 50,000-square-foot Wynwood warehouse. It is also the earliest riser of Art Week. In 2025 it opened every morning at 9 am, with coffee, which makes it the natural first stop before the fairs open at 11.

The collector Martin Z. Margulies and his longtime curator Katherine Hinds started looking for a space in 1998, and the first phase of the Warehouse opened the next year with a benefit for the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami. It is a nonprofit run and funded by the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation, which has also given works to the Lowe, FIU and ICA Miami (Margulies Collection). The Warehouse doubles as a charity, too: Margulies founded Lotus House, a homeless shelter in Overtown, and the collection's admission proceeds have gone to it. In one Art Basel season alone, the Warehouse raised six figures for the shelter (Artnet).

The collection runs to photography, video, installation and large-scale sculpture, shown in seasonal exhibitions from October to April, and it has appeared on ARTnews's list of the world's top 200 collectors.

At the Margulies for Art Week 2026

The Warehouse reopens on November 4, 2026 with a new season on view to April 3, 2027. The pick for Art Week visitors is Kinetic Sculpture: Yuko Mohri, which makes a neat pair with the Tokyo artist's first US museum solo show at The Bass on Miami Beach. Alongside it are rooms of Light Installations, a survey of Realism in painting and sculpture, and a project room for the Spanish artist Jordi Alcaraz and the Italian painter Mimmo Paladino. Lewis Hine's early-20th-century photographs of American child workers, Records of the Past, are held over from last season (Margulies Collection).

Visiting the Margulies: hours and admission

• Address: 591 NW 27th Street, Miami, FL 33127.
• Season: October to April. Regular hours for 2026–27 are not yet posted; in past seasons the Warehouse opened Wednesday to Saturday, 11 am to 4 pm (Time Out).
• Art Week: in 2025 it opened Monday to Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm, with coffee (Miami Living). Expect similar hours in 2026, but confirm after it reopens.
• Admission: it has long been $10, with reduced or free entry for students. Confirm the 2026–27 price on reopening.

El Espacio 23: Jorge Pérez's collection, free in Allapattah

El Espacio 23 is the newest of the three and the only one that is always free. It shows the private collection of Jorge M. Pérez, the developer whose leadership gift gave the Pérez Art Museum Miami its name, in a 28,000-square-foot warehouse on NW 23rd Street, about a mile west of the Rubell. If you are already in Allapattah, it is a short drive and an easy add.

Pérez opened it on December 2, 2019, on the first day of Art Week, to bring out works from his collection that had spent years in storage, and to give young artists and curators from Miami and abroad a place to work while drawing Allapattah's own community into the city's art scene (WLRN). The campus includes three live-work residencies, each with an apartment and an outdoor studio, with partner programs in Colombia and Cuba. The collection travels, too: in 2026 a show from it on the African diaspora opened at the CAAC in Seville.

El Espacio 23 in Art Week 2026

The model is one big themed show a year, drawn from the collection and opening between mid-November and Art Week. The 2025–26 exhibition, A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible: Territory Narratives in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, gathered about 150 works by more than 100 artists in four chapters, curated by Claudia Segura Campins of Barcelona with the collection's Patricia M. Hanna and Anelys Alvarez, and gave several Miami artists their first institutional show (Axios Miami). The space is closed for installation as we write, and the 2026 title and opening date were not yet posted. Check elespacio23.org in November.

Visiting El Espacio 23: hours and free admission

• Address: 2270 NW 23rd Street, Miami, FL 33142.
• Hours: in 2025–26 it opened Thursday to Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm. Confirm the new season's hours.
• Admission: free all year; walk-ins welcome, and booking a time slot online is optional.
• With the Rubell: go to El Espacio 23 first, before it closes at 5 pm, then the Rubell, open until 7:30 pm on Fridays and Saturdays.

The de la Cruz Collection and CIFO: no longer open

Two names still turn up in older Art Week guides. Neither has a space to visit in 2026.

The de la Cruz Collection in the Design District closed permanently in 2024 after Rosa de la Cruz, its driving force, died that February. She and her husband Carlos had run it free for about 15 years. Christie's took around 1,000 works to auction, including Christopher Wool, Mark Bradford, Félix González-Torres and Ana Mendieta (WLRN). ICA Miami bought the building at 23 NE 41st Street, and it is now ICA's second site (The Art Newspaper).

CIFO, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, made its exhibition program itinerant in April 2018 and no longer keeps a Miami gallery open. Its annual Grants & Commissions program for Latin American artists continues (CIFO).

MOCA North Miami: worth the drive north

The Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami is not a private collection, but the museum where much of this story started, and worth the drive if you have a free morning.

It began in 1981 as the Center of Contemporary Art, a single gallery founded by the City of North Miami and its trustees, and its current building, by Charles Gwathmey with the Miami firm Gelabert-Navia, opened in 1996; 2026 is its 30th year there (MOCA). It collected contemporary art when no other museum in Miami-Dade did, gave early shows to artists such as Daniel Arsham, Didier William and Andrea Chung, and in 2019 became the first Florida institution to show at the Venice Biennale, with its AFRICOBRA exhibition (Cultured). ICA Miami was founded in 2014 by trustees and former staff who left MOCA.

The galleries closed on October 5 to install a new exhibition, and MOCA lists Miami Art Week 2026 programming on its site, where it has traditionally hosted an Art Week reception; details were not yet posted when we checked. It is open Wednesday from 12 to 7 pm and Thursday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm, closed Monday and Tuesday, at 770 NE 125th Street. It is well north of Wynwood, so go by car and allow extra time in Art Week traffic.

Planning the circuit

The three open collections sit in a line across Wynwood and Allapattah, a few minutes apart by car. The days they overlap are Thursday to Saturday.

Margulies days follow its 2025 Art Week schedule and El Espacio 23 days its 2025–26 hours; both may change for 2026.

A half-day route, Thursday to Saturday: the Margulies when it opens, then El Espacio 23 before lunch, then the Rubell in the afternoon, with lunch at the Rubell's restaurant. On Friday or Saturday, the Rubell's late hours let you do the fair first and the collections after.

Monday or Tuesday: with most museums shut, the Margulies is one of the few things open, if it repeats its Art Week hours. Pair it with Wynwood's galleries and walls; see Wynwood during Art Basel.

For the public museums, see Miami museums to see during Art Basel; for the fairs, the satellite fairs, mapped.