The De La Cruz Collection: The Design District’s Free Museum, and Its Second Life at ICA Miami

Art & Culture · Miami

Reading time: 10 min

For fifteen years, a converted warehouse on NE 41st Street held one family’s private eye for contemporary art and let anyone walk in and look at it for free. Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz built the de la Cruz Collection on that single idea, and the building it produced was as much a statement of intent as anything hung inside it. The museum itself has now closed, but the space, the collecting instinct and the free-admission model it pioneered are about to reappear next door, absorbed into the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

---

Introduction

Walk the length of NE 41st Street in the Design District and the two buildings sit almost shoulder to shoulder. On one side is the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, its south facade a fold of dark, reflective metal panels designed by the Spanish practice Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos. On the other is a plainer, three storey structure at number 23, built as a warehouse and converted into 30,000 square feet of gallery space by the designer John Marquette. For fifteen years, that second building was the de la Cruz Collection, a private museum that Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz opened to the public, free of charge, so that Miami could see what they had spent four decades buying.

That museum no longer exists in the form most guidebooks still describe it. Rosa de la Cruz died in February 2024. The family’s holdings were substantially dispersed at auction three months later. The building itself was sold in October 2024, for 25 million dollars, to the institution next door. What is unfolding on NE 41st Street now is not really a closure. It is a transfer: of a building, of an idea about free access to art, and of a considerable amount of money, from one Design District institution to another. The design argument worth making is not about a single museum any more. It is about what happens to a space built entirely around one couple’s taste when that couple’s collection leaves it.

A private eye becomes a public warehouse

The de la Cruz collecting habit predates the museum by decades. Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, who met as teenagers in Havana and married in 1962, began buying art in the 1960s, reportedly starting with Rufino Tamayo’s Star Gazer (1956). Carlos, a Cuban-born businessman who built his career at the bottling group CC1 Companies after studying at Wharton and the University of Miami law school, and Rosa built a collection that eventually ran to more than a thousand works. From the late 1980s they opened their Key Biscayne home to visitors by appointment, turning a private house into an informal exhibition space long before either of them thought of a purpose-built museum.

The next step was Moore Space, a kunsthalle Rosa founded and ran in the Design District between 2001 and 2007, which functioned as a testing ground for the kind of independent, artist-focused programming the couple would later scale up. In 2009 that experiment became permanent. The de la Cruzes took a warehouse building on NE 41st Street and had John Marquette convert it into a three floor, 30,000 square foot gallery, free to enter, with no government funding and no status as a registered charity. It was, in effect, a private collection given the architecture of a public institution without any of the governance that usually comes with one.

What thirty thousand square feet of somebody else’s taste looks like

The building’s design logic followed directly from that arrangement. Because there was no board to satisfy and no trustees requiring a fixed hang, the de la Cruzes treated the three floors as a living document rather than a permanent installation. Project rooms rotated through the year, and one space was set aside specifically for Miami-based artists, who could apply for a modest production stipend, historically around 1,600 dollars, to realise a new installation in the museum. A library, open to students, sat alongside the galleries. The whole building operated on a rhythm built around a single fixed point each year: the reveal of new acquisitions and reconfigured displays timed to Art Basel Miami Beach in December, when the collection’s biggest annual audience arrived in the neighbourhood anyway.

That rhythm is the clearest evidence of the underlying design argument. A conventional museum’s architecture has to accommodate permanence: works that stay up for years, loans that arrive with insurance schedules, a curatorial department answerable to a board. The de la Cruz building had none of that friction. It was designed to be re-hung, and it was re-hung, repeatedly, by the two people who owned everything in it. The warehouse shell, unglamorous by comparison with the ICA’s sculpted metal neighbour, was doing exactly the job it needed to do: staying quiet enough that the collection, not the container, held the attention, while remaining flexible enough to be pulled apart and rebuilt every few months.

The artists a family kept coming back to

What went up on those walls had a discernible shape. The de la Cruzes described their focus as artists whose work engages “issues of identity, gender, class, power, and the values that contribute to our social fabric,” and the collection built around that brief with unusual consistency. Postwar German painting was a particular strength, with deep holdings of Martin Kippenberger and Isa Genzken. American painting and sculpture from the 1980s onward ran through the collection just as thickly: Christopher Wool, Mark Bradford, Peter Doig, Jim Hodges, Dan Colen, Sterling Ruby, Gabriel Orozco, Rashid Johnson, Nate Lowman and Kathryn Andrews all featured prominently, alongside the Cuban-American performance and land artist Ana Mendieta.

No artist defined the collection more than Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose candy spills, light strings and stacked paper works the de la Cruzes acquired in depth and showed with unusual care for an artist whose pieces are designed to be depleted and replenished by visitors. The family’s Cuban heritage surfaced elsewhere in the collection too, in works by the modernist Wifredo Lam and in a portrait of Carlos’s mother painted by Salvador Dalí. In its later years, the collecting continued to move rather than settle: recent acquisitions by Glenn Ligon, Vaughn Spann, Shara Hughes, Xaviera Simmons and Christina Quarles showed a couple still buying actively into their eighties rather than resting on decades of earlier purchases.

A museum with no board and an education programme to match

The absence of institutional scaffolding extended to how the museum spent its money. Alongside the exhibitions, the de la Cruzes ran scholarships for students at Miami’s Design and Architecture Senior High and funded an international travel programme for students at the New World School of the Arts, plus summer workshops for younger children. None of it required the fundraising apparatus a comparable public museum would need, because the family funded it directly. It made the de la Cruz Collection an unusual hybrid: a serious, art-historically coherent private collection, run with a not-for-profit’s public mission and none of a not-for-profit’s fundraising machinery.

That model was always, structurally, a one-generation proposition. Its continuity depended entirely on Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz remaining active as collectors, curators and funders, in a way that a museum with an endowment and a board does not.

The collection disperses, and its market value becomes public knowledge

Rosa de la Cruz died on 25 February 2024, at the age of 81, at the family’s Key Biscayne home, after a long illness. The museum closed that year. In May, Christie’s held a dedicated evening sale, The Rosa de la Cruz Collection, in New York: 26 lots, a hammer total of 28.1 million dollars, a final total including fees of 34.4 million dollars, and a sell-through rate of 96 per cent before accounting for a late withdrawal, 100 per cent after. The top lot was Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (America #3) (1992), a suspended string of lightbulbs, which sold for 13.6 million dollars against an estimate of 12 million, a new auction record for the artist. It was bought by the Pola Museum of Art in Japan, meaning one of the collection’s defining works now hangs permanently on another continent rather than returning to a private wall.

The sale did something the museum’s fifteen years of free admission never had to do: it put a number on what had been assembled. A collection built for public viewing, without a ticket price or a membership fee attached to any of it, turned out to carry a market value in the tens of millions once it left the building. That is not a contradiction so much as a demonstration of how separate the two systems, public access and private ownership, had been allowed to run for a decade and a half.

A second act next door, under someone else’s name

The building did not sit empty for long. In October 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami announced it had bought the former de la Cruz Collection site for 25 million dollars, funded entirely by private donors, including the Design District’s co-founder Craig Robins and a 5 million dollar grant from the Knight Foundation. The purchase effectively doubles ICA Miami’s footprint, adding the full 30,000 square feet next to its existing Aranguren + Gallegos building.

The plans, as set out by ICA Miami, treat the space differently to how the de la Cruzes did. Where the private museum rotated everything, ICA Miami intends to use part of the new building for dedicated permanent collection galleries, the first the institution has had, alongside a Knight-funded new media gallery, additional classrooms, and a media creation lab. ICA Miami’s artistic director, Alex Gartenfeld, has described the timing as coinciding with the museum passing a million visitors, calling the acquisition “an affirmation of our mission, which is free access to the best in arts and education,” while acknowledging that “it took an unhappy occasion for the opportunity to arise.” Craig Robins framed the continuity in similar terms: the building, he said, had spent almost two decades presenting “thought-provoking, innovative contemporary art exhibitions,” and the acquisition would let it “continue that tradition.” Carlos de la Cruz has said he is “really happy to have helped the ICA to grow.”

The building is expected to host educational programming ahead of a fuller renovation, with ICA Miami’s own timeline pointing to a public opening from late 2025, though a confirmed reopening date and the renovation architect had not been made public at the time of writing. What is already clear is the shape of the argument the two buildings will make once both are operating as one institution. ICA Miami’s building was designed from the outset as a magnet, a piece of civic architecture meant to draw people in from the street. The de la Cruz building was designed as the opposite: a quiet container built to disappear behind whatever a single family’s eye had chosen that year. Joined together, the Design District gains a rare thing in a neighbourhood otherwise built around retail and restaurant footfall: two adjoining free museums that between them can hold a changing collector’s eye and a fixed, growing permanent collection under one roof, without a ticket booth between them.

---

Frequently asked questions

---

Final thoughts

The de la Cruz Collection was never going to be a permanent fixture in the form it took between 2009 and 2024, because its architecture was built around the presence of two specific people rather than an institution designed to outlast them. What is notable is how deliberately that impermanence was designed into the building itself: rotating project rooms, an annual rhythm tied to December, no board to slow anything down. It was a museum built to change constantly, and in the end it changed completely. That the free-admission model and the building itself have both survived the transition, now under ICA Miami’s ownership, says as much about the strength of the original idea as anything that was ever hung on its walls.