The Rubells: Art collectors with edge make D.C. their own

By Marc Fisher,September 30, 2011
(Page 2 of 4)

If not a desert, Miami Beach’s South Beach was something of a slum when the Rubells arrived from Manhattan in the early ’90s. The area was still suffering from the crime wave that Fidel Castro helped unleash on the city by dumping Cuba’s prisoners onto boats to South Florida. The refugees from the Northeast who had built the neighborhood as their retirement community were dying or fleeing up the coast. The first couple of glorious old Art Deco hotels had been restored, but the gold rush had not yet happened.

When the Rubells’ son, Jason, moved to South Florida to open a gallery, his mother fell in love with the place and its possibilities. “It was like every day you could have an idea and execute on it,” she says. “You could never do that in New York.”

One day, a lawyer Donald knew called up to say he had a client, a hotelier who was going to jail at 8 the next morning. If the Rubells could buy the place that night, they could have it for, ahem, a steal.

It was the Greenview, their first hotel, a 40-room Art Deco gem. They bought it, fixed it up, flipped it. Then an office building, distress priced at a few hundred grand — renovated, marketed, sold. Then they found the Albion Hotel, a Deco delight. They lovingly restored it and manage it still. Soon Donald was commuting on weekends from New York, where he’d been a gynecologist for nearly three decades.

Meanwhile, their art collection was growing so large that they had storage units across New York. They started looking for warehouses in Miami. That’s when they found the DEA facility. It still had closets for cocaine and guns, evidence kept for use in trials. The Rubells bought the place for less than the cost of a one-bedroom condo in Manhattan. They intended to turn it into a museum. Their children feared for their parents’ lives — there’s a major drug dealer next door, they warned.

So the Rubells bought that house, tore it down and built their own home, which is now connected to their museum by a secret doorway behind the research library.

“You go where others won’t,” Mera says, “or it’s not an ad­ven­ture.”

Art on the fly

Mera, 68, and Donald, 71, return from China, where they zipped around to 40 artists’ studios in two weeks. Donald heads home to Miami to catch up on hotel business. Mera flies to Washington to meet with architects and visit artists. Forty-eight hours later, she’s off to California for meetings with curators, gallerists and more artists.

They travel constantly, both dressed in black, head to toe. They visit new artists’ studios for an hour or two, then decide, sometimes on the spot, sometimes in bed the next morning, whether to buy. If they do, they’ll probably take a big batch of works, maybe everything the artist has.

In Washington, Mera visits 36 studios in 36 hours. “What have you got?” she asks. Show me what you did years ago. Show me everything.

The Rubells’ frenetic lives lead some people to view them as less than serious. It’s an impression the couple is not entirely eager to quash: Their museum is home to an enormous research library, they routinely appear in art journal compilations of the top 100 or 200 collectors in the world, and fabulously wealthy collectors regularly offer them millions for some of their holdings. But Mera and Donald like to operate a bit below the radar, zipping into studios in rural China or a Capitol Hill alley to discover artists no one else knows. They are certainly well off and routinely spend five-figure sums on pieces, but they say they have neither the means nor the interest to compete with hedge-fund billionaires who bid for pieces selling in the millions.

When the couple announced plans to build a D.C. museum, some local artists saw them as “interlopers,” says Kriston Capps, a D.C. art critic. “They felt a little territorial when someone comes from the outside with their own perspective. Will they really support local artists? Are they doing this for the art or to support their hotel?”

When Mera announced that she would host an art fair at the Skyline in September — the (e)merge Art Fair drew capacity crowds last weekend — some artists welcomed a new venue to show their wares. Others, such as Alex Ventura, who came to Washington to go to law school and ended up organizing performance art, reacted by organizing a counter-fair, called “But Is It Art?”

If the District is going to be recognized as a hotbed of contemporary art, Ventura wants that to be a result of work by artists who live and work here, not because an outsider creates another big institution.

“We already have a million art institutions,” he says. “Does that really do anything to support the local art community? The Rubells talk about trying to invent D.C. as a cultural tourism destination. It just feels disingenuous.”

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