Three years after abandoning plans to construct a non-public museum in Miami for his assortment of works by Richard Serra, James Turrell, Anish Kapoor, Jean-Michel Basquiat and others, the hedge-fund supervisor Bruce Berkowitz is constructing an artwork park in northwestern Florida round his prized Serra sculpture. The Longleaf Artwork Park, positioned on 15.5 lush acres in Walton County, will embody a pavilion designed by OLI Structure, which labored with Serra earlier than his loss of life in March, to accommodate the late artist’s 217ft-long metal sculpture Passage of Time (2014).
The park is being created by Berkowitz’s non-profit, the Berkowitz Up to date Basis (BCF), although its operations shall be overseen by the native Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County. “The significance of entry to a bit of labor as vital as Richard Serra’s Passage of Time can’t be overstated, and the influence it’s going to have on our native artists, residents, college students and guests shall be limitless and lasting for generations,” Jennifer Steele, the alliance’s govt director, stated in an announcement.
For now, the snaking, 13.5ft-tall, 540,000-pound Serra sculpture is the one artwork destined for the Longleaf Artwork Park, which will even characteristic a pond, boardwalks, landscaped mounds and an outside occasion area. The park is scheduled to open to the general public in 2026.
Rendering of the Passage of Time Pavilion as seen from the Longleaf Artwork Park’s pond OLI Structure
The selection of website for Berkowitz’s new artwork area, round 600 miles northwest of the deliberate location of his deserted Miami museum—about as distant because it may very well be whereas nonetheless inside the state of Florida—might sound stunning however isn’t any accident. The Longleaf Artwork Park shall be located inside Watersound Origins, a big real-estate growth being constructed by the St. Joe Firm. Berkowitz is the chairman of the publicly traded firm’s board of administrators and at one time owned a minimum of 40% of its excellent shares, in accordance with Forbes. (Fairholme Capital Administration, the hedge fund Berkowitz based, stays headquartered in Miami.)
Berkowitz’s plans for a Miami museum, first introduced in 2014, concerned a brand new constructing within the Edgewater neighbourhood designed particularly to accommodate the big Serra sculpture and Turrell’s towering gentle set up Aten Reign (2013), which was the centrepiece of the artist’s survey on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. After municipal and county officers in Miami initially blocked Berkowitz’s undertaking, it was finally greenlit in 2015. Initially, the native workplace of worldwide structure agency Arquitectonica was hooked up to the undertaking; by 2018, the Miami-based structure agency Rene Gonzalez Architects was main it. Development on the 45,000 sq. ft museum was anticipated to begin in 2020 and be full by 2023, then Covid-19 hit. In early 2021, Berkowitz quietly scuttled the undertaking.
A BCF spokesperson says the muse has no different tasks underway in Walton County, Miami or elsewhere. “There aren’t any present plans for a BCF-owned area in Miami, however BCF continues to work with quite a few Miami-based arts organisations,” the spokesperson stated.
Whereas the BCF museum would have been one in every of a number of personal museums dedicated to modern artwork in Miami—alongside the Rubell Museum, the Margulies Assortment on the Warehouse, the Craig Robins Assortment, Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23 and others—the Longleaf Artwork Park shall be a comparatively distinctive attraction on its stretch of the Florida panhandle, the place the closest vital cultural establishment is the Man within the Sea Museum in Panama Metropolis Seashore, a museum dedicated to the historical past of diving.
