Terence Riley, director of Miami Art Museum. Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

By Rebecca Wakefield

Are you afraid to grow up, Miami? Are you, as Miami Art Museum Director Terence Riley says, going through an adolescent period of being “anti-cosmopolitan, anti-urban”? Recently, I went to see Mr. Riley in the MAM bunker downtown, in the interest of hearing the other side of the debate about whether two museums should be built in Bicentennial Park.

On June 14, the Miami City Commission will decide whether to give Riley’s museum $2 million of bond money to advance its plans. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, there has lately been opposition from a number of parks advocates who think Bicentennial Park, the last bit of waterfront park space in downtown Miami, should be open and green and not filled with fancy buildings. In Riley’s opinion, the unappeasable parkies are evidence that Miami still has to grow out of its provincialism.

“Miami can’t have Art Basel come here once a year and then ignore the fact it doesn’t even have a third-rate museum,” Riley complained. “The one thing even the most confused adolescent knows is that he or she has to grow up.”

Just this week, Miami Neighborhoods United sent a request to the commission to defer payment of the money until a number of questions are answered about the scope of the project as it relates to green space, the approval process and how the money situation is going to work. Some museum critics doubt MAM will be able to raise enough private cash and donations of first-rate art to make a fantabulous new MAM in the park a going concern. They would like the museum to open its books for public scrutiny, at least in terms of the building and maintenance of the new museum.

Greg Bush, a former Urban Environment League president and one of the museum skeptics, wrote a proposed ordinance he’s hoping three city commissioners will support. The ordinance points out problems with the process of approving museums in the park, and requires a really detailed waterfront planning process with lots of public input and city follow-through.

Last week developer and art collector Marty Margulies wrote another letter to the Miami City Commission lambasting MAM and Riley, and questioning why we should spend $100 million-plus of public funds on an art museum when so many other civic needs go unmet.

Margulies is brutal in his assessment of MAM compared to other museums elsewhere. He writes that MAM ranks last among 129 museums in terms of the size of its art collection, has an abysmally small membership, a small number of paying visitors            and hasn’t demonstrated an ability to raise the huge sums necessary to sustain it without an additional future public handout.

“To our community leaders, I urge HEART — standing for Health care, Education, Affordable housing, Refuge for the homeless, and Transportation/infrastructure — before ART when it comes to quality of life,” he writes. “When we have provided for our children, our sick, disabled and elderly, our homeless, and our poor and working class, then we can spend more of our hard-earned dollars on the curbs, sidewalks, and gutters that need attention, along with a brand new art museum for the very few who patronize this venue.”

The whole thing is driving Riley nuts. After 14 years as chief curator of architecture and design for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he was hired by MAM’s board with much heralding as the walk-on-water guy who could get the thing done with a minimum of embarrassment.

Now suddenly, the feel-good environment of public bond issues is gone, residents are stressed by taxes and the political juice of supporters like Miami Mayor Manny Diaz is being drained by other battles. Riley is not happy about it. “It’s quite frustrating in general,” he said. “I waste too much time on politics when I could be talking to architects.

“I thought before I came here there was more of a solid political backing,” he continued. “Because I wasn’t aware there wasn’t, I wasn’t visiting those commissioners [who have expressed doubts]. There was a vacuum of information and half-truths were able to fill the day.”

Riley added that at the time of the public bond issues, the press seemed favorable and the trustees of the MAM board felt the overwhelming approval meant they’d done their job. Riley said MAM has since been “fairly complacent” and didn’t take the opposition seriously until recently.

“There are only three people opposed to this,” he said. “How a few people can simply, by sending a lot of e-mails, raise questions about the vote — that makes me worry a bit about the democratic process. [Activists Steve] Hagen and Bush and [Judy] Sandoval are implacably against this project. They will say the wildest things.”

In fact, Riley asserts, the longer opponents delay the project, the more expensive it will get and the less valuable the public’s contribution will be. Each delay of a month costs half a million dollars.

Another reason Riley is frustrated is that he’s an architect. He knows he can do the job. The way he figures, with a $100-million leg-up from the public and the $35 million he’s got so far in private commitments, he could build the thing right now. He feels MAM is being penalized for the massive construction management failures of the Performing Arts Center (also known as the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts) and Miami International Airport.

“In the post-PAC environment, all you have to do is wave the PAC sign [for people to get squeamish]” he told me. “But the PAC and the airport are not typical. All over the country people have projects built on time and on budget. In this case, ‘the buck stops here’ sign is on the private sector’s desk.”

As to Margulies, Riley quibbles with several of his assertions. For instance, he says MAM has doubled its art collection in the time he’s been there and scored several impressive works from local collectors. He claims there will be a half-billion-dollar economic impact from cultural tourism, and that the number of annual visitors (half of which are local school groups) will shoot from 60,000 to 400,000. Margulies wrote that MAM’s paying visitors numbered less than 5,000.

MAM critics have said its supporters can’t raise enough money because the pool of potential donors in Miami who care about anything other than bling is small. Riley admitted it’s not as easy here, but he thinks $35 million is good, considering many donors are reluctant to commit until they see dirt turning. He said the same thing happened with MoMA in New York.

“These are large gifts to the people giving them,” he said. “For some, they’ve never given a million dollars before. Most of the 35 comes from 12 people. We haven’t finished soliciting our board of trustees yet. We’re a third of the way through them.”

I asked Riley whether he would, if pressed by a commissioner, agree to extensive public scrutiny of the building process. He feels that approach risks miring the project in endless delays.

“We’ve revealed all our capital campaign to the city manager. We’ve done that with the county. The city and county have zero liability beyond the bond issues. Our [internal] committee has to approve the contracts and budget. These are people matching the county with their own money. It’s a good process.”

Right. Maybe so, but that line will never sell in this town.

What will happen if the commission decides not to release the money? Riley said if money is squeezed, it’s the extras, such as “green building” factors, that will be killed off first. “I will never pretend $2 million is not a whole lot of money, but we will still go forward,” he said.

Now I have a couple of suggestions for the park people, who have in many ways suffered from the same lack of vigilance as the museum people, thus leading to this last-minute fight.

Prove people need and want a park there, and that you won’t neglect it, even if the city does. Go round up a bunch of rug rats and take them to the park every week. Give ’em something to do. Form sports or nature clubs for young people. Make videos. Keep at it. Get a local musician to write a funny song about the park and get it on the local radio stations.

Alex Fuentes, one of the leaders of the activists trying to save the Hialeah racetrack from becoming Midtown Hialeah, has another suggestion, which is to site one or more of the museums at the old track. It's got a Metrorail stop, plenty of parking, flamingos. Not a bad idea, much as it will never happen.

Here’s another idea. What about taking a bunch of those empty lots bad affordable housing developers left behind and turning them into some parkland all over the city? How about making the Miami Heat actually put soccer fields in behind the arena, like they promised a decade ago?

I could go on, but you get the point. Bring the people and the leaders will follow.