“It’s not like any other city,” said Mira Rubel. ARTnews, referring to Washington, DC. “To bring a group [my husband] Don and I have built over the past 58 years in our nation’s capital something emotional.
I have a lot of history with Washington. I was there for the Martin Luther King Jr. career in 1963.”
More than a decade in the works, the Rubell Museum DC, which opens to the public October 29, is the second private museum for Mira and Don Rubell, after the one in Miami. It is located in a building that is over 115 years old, and spans over 32,000 square feet. Architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle is renovating the building, which was the home, until 1978, of the Randall School, a separate high school for African-American children in the capital’s southwest neighborhood. (Alumni include singer-songwriter Marvin Gaye.) The building joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
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“We tried to preserve as much of the character and spirit of the school as possible, because there is something very special about saving a building in this era and in that neighborhood and [with] Mira said.
Unlike the Miami Museum, which has 20-foot ceilings and loading bays, physical limitations may affect the type of art the capital city can display. Mira sees it as an opportunity to highlight businesses in the group that may not shine brightly in the more expansive areas of the Miami branch. “Many of the spaces—classrooms, teachers’ offices—are very intimate workspaces. You can feel this history,” she said.
The building was once billed as the new home for the now defunct Corcoran Art Gallery, which she purchased from the district in 2006 for $6.2 million, and then sold to Rubells in 2010 for $6.5 million. The Rubells also owns the Capitol Skyline Hotel, down the street, which has been providing shelter to homeless people amid the pandemic. (As part of the acquisition, Rubells is also developing a nearly 500-unit apartment building that will share a courtyard with the Museum; one-fifth of those apartments are set aside for affordable housing.)
Rubel Museum | Courtesy of
In August, the Robles family appointed Caitlin Berry, director of the Cody Gallery at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, as the inaugural director of the capital branch. Berry’s curatorial experience ranges from mid-century African American art to the Washington School of Color to contemporary art. The institution’s upcoming programs, still in print at press time, will highlight the esteemed Rubells art group, which began in 1964, shortly after their marriage, while Don was still a medical student and Mira was a Head Start teacher.
“We’ll do what we do – nothing has changed for us,” Mira said. “Finding talent is our life’s mission, participating in artists’ visions, helping achieve those visions, helping artists, and that’s what we live for. Nothing gives us greater satisfaction than finding talent that we can help take the next step. It has been an absolutely special life.” That would be our mission.”
For the Robles family, joining the capital’s art community would not only put their group in conversation with those of leading institutions such as the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Group; It will also highlight the political nature of work by artists who have long supported it, including Rashid Johnson, Bob L, David Hammons and Cady Noland.
Artists are sensitive to all the issues we live with every day. “They don’t just make beautiful paintings,” Mira said. “They don’t just decorate people’s homes. That’s not their goal.”
A version of this article appears in the 2022 issue of ARTnews’ Top 200 Collectors, under the heading “Expanding Capital.”
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