What goes around comes around. We've heard this phrase many times, but the Mitrani family is living the proverb in a most positive sense.
I spoke with Dina Mitrani about her photography gallery and the family's women's wholesale apparel business that began in this very complex during previous boom years of Wynwood. Her kinsfolk was one of the few that hung in there with a string of warehouses from their purchase in the 1970s and throughout the universal scourge of overseas manufacturing, the 1980s race riots and a neighborhood’s crippling drug trade, to the morphosis Wynwood currently enjoys.
I don’t necessarily think of Miami in the same breath as great photography exhibitions, so I make it a point to hit the International Center of Photography when visiting Manhattan. After returning home from a gobsmacking photography show on Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado recently at the ICP, I noticed that Miami’s Dina Mitrani Gallery was showing Salgado, so it was time for a closer look at what Mitrani is cooking up over there. I went for clarity and received an historic story line.
As the Mitrani building was winding down its family operation, Dina Mitrani was attending to her requisite youthful soul expanding meanderings with jobs and education at the University of Michigan, contemplating the study of engineering, then architecture before settling on a life changing “History of Art class and fell in love,” she informed me. Her father wondered how she could make money at that.
“Fast forward 20 years and I currently sit in what used to be my father’s office. Growing up here, coming to his clothing factory, working here during the summers, my parents had a great business here for 30 years, then it started to shift. All around him businesses were closing.”
By the mid 90s, Dina was already in New York City.
"My first job was at Christie's, then I worked at two other galleries, got my master's degree at Hunter. Meantime, Rubell Collection and Margulies Collection opened up (in Wynwood), and a handful of galleries . . Brook Dorsch opened.”
She continues: “I decided to move back to Miami and the upstairs (cutting room) was the area first emptied of my Dad’s business. My father’s leaving was very gradual. We built artist studios and rented them out to bring artists to the neighborhood.”
Her sister (Rhonda) was involved in the making of the studios.
“Then my sister somehow convinced Marina Kessler from South Beach to open her Latin American art gallery here. (2001-02). We lived together in New York City, and she moved back to Miami shortly after I did, going back and forth completing her first documentary film called Cuba Mia. I was (also) working as a curator at the FIU art museum with director Dahlia Morgan before it became The Frost,” explained Mitrani.
Dina then spent a year in Madrid, got married, had children. She discovered she enjoyed sequencing imagery working with graphic design. Meanwhile her uncle was still using the downstairs Wynwood space in the Mitrani building. Dina later opted to take over a downstairs portion for a small gallery.
“We had no idea in our wildest dreams,” she says, referring to the fact that the family building would be smack dab in the middle of creative nirvana as she and her sister, Rhonda, were formulating their interests and future careers in the arts.
Dina still uses the old family fabric cutting table in her current gallery, along with the wooden sections that housed finished sportswear. Photos and memories of her parents and her grandmother at the sewing machine line office walls with impressions of the past.
Keeping with the family theme, her sister, video artist Rhonda Mitrani, opened up her video space, The Screening Room, next door. They collaborate on projects, i.e. the very talented photographic and video artist Colleen Plumb.
Rhonda shared her story:
“I have a co-working studio, next door to Dina Mitrani Gallery, for filmmakers and I felt like the space in the front should be put to better use. I was exhibiting work as a video artist during that time with a collaborative called RPM Project and I realized that there is no place in Miami dedicated exclusively to the moving image. The Screening Room became a passion project and has evolved to a hub where filmmakers and video artists meet to show and share their work. I am so happy to share that we were recently awarded a Knight Foundation grant which will catapult us into another strong program for 2015-16. The show we have now is a stand out piece of work by a super talented artist from Israel, Nevet Yitzhak.”
Rhonda Mitrani is working with curator Tami Katz-Freiman on the current show (until Feb. 5) of Nevet Yitshak’s WarCraft. The videos are deeply touching as Afghan war rugs come to life, depicting the ancient craft of carpet weaving, with modern reality finding it’s way into the threads. This Israeli artist recently won the most prestigious award in Israel, the Landau Prize for Art and Sciences.
The next show at The Screening Room: Video Poems combine moving image with poetry exploring how the visual alters a text's interpretation. Artist and poet Antonia Wright invited several artists to create original videos all using the same soundtrack of her voice reading a poem.
The Mitrani space houses several other galleries, an acting studio, plus five art studios on its premises.
Dina Mitrani’s future, I inquired?
“I keep saying I want to build an art gallery complex in part of the building and have 10 or 12 galleries with reasonable rents like in Chelsea.”
“We’d like to keep Wynwood charming, edgy. . . affordable for artists and boutiques to be here.”
I asked about the fact that there is no “Center” here for photography. Dina Mitrani would like to fill that gap, to grow and expand with extensive programming, to present lectures, talks and workshops along with exhibitions for new artists and continue with shows that educate, i.e. Salgado, Willie Ronis (both previously shown).
And how did Dina get from where she was to opening a photography gallery?
“It came from somewhere very deep inside, sort of organic. In college I used to rip out the pages of magazines; all the photos were taken by Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel and Calvin Klein ads”. My posters were of the Kiss by Robert Doisneau, Tomio Seike’s woman putting on lipstick....this is what I covered my walls with.”
“While working for Christies I would bring home the photography catalogues.”
She circuitously was divinely led to working for Throckmorton in New York, an important Latin American gallery focusing on photography, as it was dawning on her that the image is what she ultimately loved. Then the demise of the apparel trade happened affecting Wynwood’s Mitrani building. She had her children, opened up a gallery and off she went.
The Dina Mitrani gallery debuted in 2008. Teeny problem: it was the beginning of the great Recession of 2008, an inauspicious time to begin a new venture. Not to be daunted, Dina used the set back to learn and carefully grow her business as the economy slowly resuscitated back into a reasonable facsimile of viable commerce.
“I’ve been going step by step and day by day ever since.”
In summation Dina Mitrani’s philosophy is “for people to come here and learn. . . about providing Miami with a museum quality exhibition.”
These sisters are on an important roll. Toss in their own growing families and stir. Nothing holds them back. Watch this space.
Through March 6, Dina Mitrani will show photographer Thomas Jackson. He has a wonderful sense of the absurd in his work, cleverly executed, short on digitized gimmickry. His pieces at Mitrani mimic swarms found in nature. The “sculptures” concocted from man-made everyday objects are displayed in various wild settings; Cheese balls and pink plastic cups. . . what’s not to like. Andy Goldsworthy may come to mind. Jackson’s images followed Dina around for some time, popping up in a variety of places until she succumbed to connecting with photographer Thomas Jackson. Good move.
Dina Mitrani Gallery
Tuesday to Friday: 1 to 5 p.m.
2620 NW 2nd Ave., Miami 33127The Screening Room
2626 NW 2nd Ave., Miami 33127
