Get Your Party Hats On
MOCA Celebrates 10th Anniversary

By Melanie Klesse

	Adora with Andy Warhol lookalike at last year's PopLove event at MOCA

North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) turns 10 this year, and like all the popular kids who turned 10 in elementary school, MOCA is throwing a yearlong party.

This party comes complete with special celebratory exhibitions all year long, culminating on January 28 with a “Pop Ten Party.” Tickets are steep at $150 a head, but the cause is good: to raise money for the museum's future acquisitions. But the money will be put to especially good use this year—MOCA's space is doubling. Akin to that feeling of getting that birthday check in the mail from grandma, Goldman Properties is supporting from afar, donating a 12,000 square foot, state of the art, climate-controlled Goldman Warehouse in the Wynwood Arts District to MOCA for their use. This space at 404 NW 26 th Street will double the current exhibition space in the Joan Lehman Building and be a part of Joey Goldman and his partner-and father-Tony Goldman's “vision” for the Wynwood Arts District. The Goldman Warehouse will open December 1, 2005.

Let's party! Reveles from MOCA's PopLove event

“We are orchestrating an innovative neighborhood for Wynwood, a Miami Warehouse District, with live/work artist's warehouse lofts, and bringing in restaurants, including an Italian groceria, opening in the next few months….along with galleries, retail shops and other amenities that will enhance the mix and spark the community's growth,” stated Joey Goldman in a recent press release on the redevelopment plan.

The woman behind all the magic is Director Bonnie Clearwater, the woman who claims that she has had no favorite past exhibitions—“I loved them all equally”—and gets excited thinking about their new warehouse as a former shoe factory—“We will bask in the aura of shoes past.”

Clearwater has been at the Museum since 1994 and director since 1997. How has she seen it change? Miami, perhaps, is beginning to get the credit it deserves on a social/cultural level-beyond the “pink flamingos and Gloria Estefan,” as Elle Decoration put it. Others outside Miami are finally beginning to catch up to what those in the Miami arts scene have been seeing for years.

MOCA's inaugural exhibition, “Defining the Nineties: Consensus-making in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles”, was considered presumptuous at the time, putting Miami up there with cultural meccas New York and L.A.

But by 1995, it was clear that Miami was at least a hub of unique international work.

And then Art Basel validated “what all of us here in Miami have known,” and Miami was chosen out of all others internationally to be the site of what Art Basel claims, “ is the most important art show on the American continent and a cultural and social highlight of the Americas.”

As Clearwater relates, it is “one thing for us to know [what Miami has], but when another alternative organization picks Miami out, then people really take notice.”

With all of this going on, the most important thing to MOCA is that it will continue to retain its hitherto successful mission of advancing local artists. In addition to its obvious monopoly on contemporary art viewers—it's the only museum in Miami dedicated solely to contemporary art—MOCA's success can also be attributed to its advocacy and support for emerging artists. Among artists just sending in tapes, photos and whatnot of their work, there are two specific programs through which MOCA's staff ensures that they will still be in contact with new and emerging art and artists. The first is called Optic Nerve, for which original filmmakers send in their work for what will become a 50-minute program of all the works selected. Clearwater shares that on average she gets about five hours of film that they all work through each year. Secondly, twice a year, on a first come, first serve basis, unknown artists, in a public forum, are able to show their work to the director and another curator for critique.

In this way and others, Miami has grown not only internationally, but it has continued to grow locally—and the Goldman Properties-Wynwood District expansion seems to portend that this trend will not abate.

But will Miami ever be like New York?

Clearwater denies this as ever being the goal in the first place.

“The important thing for each city is for it to develop according to its own special qualities,” she says.

And while Miami is what some may call a suburban city due to its lack of transportation and the sheer breadth of its span, there are benefits to its disconnect. Each section becomes its own community.

(Photo by Steven Brooke) The Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. MOCA's Wynwood expansion will signifigantly increase the museum's space

“There are so many options,” Clearwater says. “It's great that there are so many different institutions to take part in and it's so spread out. It's a decentralized city so the people in South Miami have their place, Coral Gables, you don't have to go far.”

The important thing, according to Clearwater, is “for everyone to be a part of it-to participate and to support it.”