By Maris M. Bish, The Wolfsonian-FIU

When Knight Foundation gave a $5 million grant to The Wolfsonian–FIU in December, one of the goals of the grant was to provide support to enable greater public access to the museum’s unparalleled collection.  With a new gift from Wolfsonian founder Mitchell Wolfson Jr., this will begin to become a reality as three floors of a downtown Miami space and the collection housed there have been generously donated to The Wolfsonian.  This will open new opportunities for public viewing and engagement as The Wolfsonian heads into the next phases of its master plan.  The new gift, which comprises over 25,000 objects, rare books, works-on-paper, and archives that complement and enhance the museum’s collection of modern visual and material culture, comes at a pivotal time for The Wolfsonian as it enters the next phase of growth as a major cultural institution with holdings that are the strongest of their kind in the world.

The Gift The three floors in the new Wolfsonian downtown Miami space consists of an expansive 20,000 square feet. The objects, rare books, and other items in the promised gift have been collected by Wolfson over the course of the past sixteen years, since he donated The Wolfsonian (the collection and its historic Miami Beach site) to Florida International University in 1997. Since then, Wolfson has collected in consultation with curators and librarians at the museum, focusing on materials that would strengthen and deepen the museum’s holdings. His private collecting, therefore, has concentrated on the same time period (1885–1945) and themes as those in The Wolfsonian’s collection. The new downtown space will enable the museum to build on its education and research offerings and offer a qualitatively different way of engaging with the collection—however, The Wolfsonian will remain headquartered in Miami Beach with plans to vastly expand its offerings there.

The Collection and Mission The Wolfsonian houses one of the most important collections in the world of visual and material culture from 1885 to 1945. The collection, comprising 120,000 art and design objects and materials primarily from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, addresses issues of politics, mass communication, technological change, war, ideology, ethnic and national identity, urbanism, globalization, and many other phenomena that remain critical to understanding today’s world.

This latest gift from Wolfson supports The Wolfsonian’s mission to use objects to illustrate the persuasive power of art and design, to explore what it means to be modern, and to tell the story of social, political, and technological changes that have transformed our world. In doing so, the museum encourages people to see the world in new ways, and to learn from the past, give meaning to the present, and shape the future.

With this latest gift and generous grants from organizations like the Knight Foundation, The Wolfsonian is making continued progress towards sharing more of our vast collection with the Miami community and the world. We look forward to sharing this resource with Miami and the greater community!

Photo by David Almeida

Photo by David Almeida

Photo by David Almeida