<div><p>After a year-long delay due to 9/11, the show launched in December 2002 to great success</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Robin Pogrebin

20 years of Art Basel Miami Beach: The first show

<p><em>This article is the penultimate installment in a four-part series about the history of Art Basel Miami Beach published in the run up to Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. The first chapter can be read&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/20-years-art-basel-miami-beach-oral-history-part-two" target="_blank"><em>here</em></a><em>&nbsp;and the second&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/20-years-art-basel-miami-beach-oral-history-part-two" target="_blank"></a><em><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/20-years-art-basel-miami-beach-oral-history-part-two" target="_blank">here</a></em><em>.&nbsp;The final piece will be published on Friday, November 25.</em></p><p><strong>The first fair</strong></p><p>The fair was on track to open in December 2001, but then the World Trade Center attacks happened. There was some debate about whether to go forward. Sara Fitzmaurice, who helped lead the VIP relations at the fair’s start and is the founder and president of public relations firm Fitz &amp; Co., says she strongly advised against it. ‘New Yorkers and Americans were grieving and shellshocked, people wouldn’t get on planes, shipping was at a standstill, art insurance cost a fortune,’ she says. ‘People were shaken to their core.’ So the fair was called off, but some people came anyway, experiencing the private collections and museum shows, visiting with artists. A major <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6740/Roy-Lichtenstein" target="_blank">Lichtenstein</a> show premiered that week at MOCA North Miami, organized by Bonnie Clearwater, then the museum’s director and chief curator. That 2001 prequel launched what Clearwater calls the ‘Miami model’ ­­– in which the fair becomes a citywide event.</p><p>A year later, the fair finally had its debut. When the fair opened in 2002, it grew at lightning speed. ‘At one time, we had 3,500 press registered, and we did everything by the buzz,’ shares Robert Goodman, president of Miami Beach-based Garber &amp; Goodman Advertising and Marketing. Stefanie Block Reed and her Basel-based colleague Sascha Nikitin personally manned the VIP desk and were inundated by collector visit requests; Reed admits they once hid in the closet, momentarily overwhelmed.&nbsp;</p>

<p>It seemed the whole city had exploded. Miami gallerist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1277/Fredric-Snitzer-Gallery" target="_blank">Fredric Snitzer</a> was so nervous manning his booth the first year, he says, that one of his collectors gave him a Valium to calm him down. Fitzmaurice was there working, with her firstborn daughter, just five weeks old. She says: ‘There are a handful of us working artworld parents for whom Art Basel Miami Beach is a family affair,’ she says, ‘one that our kids grew up coming to until school schedules kicked in.’</p><p>Novel art programming amplified the city’s offerings. Art Positions, credited to Mera and Don Rubell’s son Jason Rubell’s ingenuity, activated shipping containers used to bring the fair’s walls from Switzerland as ‘pop-up’ exhibition booths on Miami Beach. Annette Schönholzer, the fair’s manager, says she spent her first day of work on the beach, having been tasked with overseeing the delivery of the 20 bright orange containers that were to become the iconic image of a village of galleries set on a sandy strip on the oceanfront. ‘I recall being utterly out of my depth, having only a vague idea what I had gotten myself into,’ she says. ‘That unforgettable day on the beach marked the beginning of what I still refer to as “my overhanging learning curve” – a learning curve that never stopped until I left Art Basel 12 years later, after launching a third fair in Hong Kong and six years as one of its co-directors.’</p>

<p>On the evening before the fair opened, after everyone had left to rest up for the next day’s frenzy, Schönholzer would use her show manager credentials to access the halls with her fiancé and walk the fair in the semi-darkness. ‘A very intimate moment with thousands of art pieces,’ she says, ‘to remember why all the hard work and efforts were worth every minute of it.’ </p><p>Collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros decided to use the opportunity of the fair to open her first art center, MAC (Miami Arts Center). ‘We knew that everything we did would be for the success of the art fair and the future of Miami,’ she says. ‘I was very excited to start this new journey.’ MAC brought to the city high-quality exhibitions from important institutions worldwide such as the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, MALBA in Buenos Aires, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. </p><p>In the early years, a lot of major artists came to the fair, invited by Miami collectors. And many of Miami’s major collectors opened their homes to the artists and out-of-town visitors, hosting receptions in their homes. ‘You never knew who you were going to meet,’ says the <em>Miami Herald</em> reporter Jane Wooldridge, who has covered every Art Basel Miami since its launch. ‘I remember sitting one night with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7502/John-Baldessari" target="_blank">John Baldessari</a> on the curb outside the home of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz.’</p>

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	‘I had never been to Miami before the fair launched,’ continues Marc Spiegler, who joined Art Basel in 2007 as co-director and has led the organization since 2012. [From November 2022, he’s passing on the baton to Noah Horowitz, who’ll take on the new role of Art Basel CEO.] ‘And 20 years later, I still distinctly remember my first night there, because it ended at the home of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, filled with amazing art. Their garden, directly on Key Biscayne was filled with many of the best collectors and gallerists in the world that night, a lot of them also Miami first-timers. Rosa and Carlos’ generosity was stunning – the idea of letting hundreds of artworld strangers into your home was completely new at the time. And the fair’s success was important to them. Years later, Sam Keller told me that they had asked him on the last day which galleries had not succeeded financially and then gone to those galleries looking to buy work, so that they would come back the next year.’
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	Receptions at the home of collectors Norman and Irma Braman in Indian Creek Village also became one of the major ancillary attractions of Art Basel Miami Beach during its early years – important collectors and curators continue to pilgrimage there to this day. This kind of an open door was unusual for Art Basel; Switzerland collectors were known for being more closed and formal, so the contrast was striking and liberating.&nbsp;
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<p>Art Basel Miami Beach also established the importance of the in-person experience, which was essential at a time before iPhones and PDFs. ‘If you came to the fair, you were not able to take pictures,’ collector Lauren Taschen says. ‘People had to be there to see the art.’</p><p>The first installment of this story can be read <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/20-years-art-basel-miami-beach-oral-history-part-one" target="_blank">here</a> and the second&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/20-years-art-basel-miami-beach-oral-history-part-two" target="_blank">here</a>. The final installment will be published on Friday, November 25.</p><p>This article was originally commissioned for the&nbsp;<em>Art Basel Miami Beach&nbsp;</em>magazine 2022.</p><p>Robin Pogrebin has been a reporter for&nbsp;<em>The New York Times&nbsp;</em>since 1995, where she covers cultural institutions, the artworld, architecture, and other subjects.</p><p>Captions for full-bleed images: A view of Art Basel Miami Beach, 2005. 2. A work by Pope.L installed outside during Art Basel Miami Beach, 2009.&nbsp;3. A work by Karmelo&nbsp;Bermejo on the beach during Art Basel Miami Beach, 2009.</p>

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<p>Regulars on the list of top art collectors in Miami and beyond, the couple has assembled one of Miami’s finest collections of contemporary art</p>

Stories

Spotlight on Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz

<p>As Art Basel celebrates 20 years in Florida, we talked to those who made it happen</p>

20 years of Art Basel Miami Beach: Present at the creation

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Paulo Nazareth’s long journey to Miami

After a year-long delay due to 9/11, the show launched in December 2002 to great success

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