Wolfsonian-FIU facts for kids
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| Established | 1986, incorporated as an FIU department in 1997 |
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| Location | 1001 Washington Avenue Miami Beach, Florida, United States |
| Type | Art museum |
The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, or The Wolfsonian-FIU, is a cool museum, library, and research center. It's located in the famous Art Deco District of Miami Beach, Florida. This special place shows how art and design can tell powerful stories and even change how people think. For many years, The Wolfsonian has been a part of Florida International University (FIU).
The Wolfsonian has two big collections with about 180,000 items. These items come from the years 1885 to 1945. This time period was from the peak of the Industrial Revolution until the end of World War II. The collection includes many different types of objects, like furniture, industrial designs, glass, ceramics, and metal items. You'll also find rare books, magazines, old papers, paintings, fabrics, and medals. The museum is connected to the Smithsonian Affiliations program, just like the Frost Art Museum.
The museum has strong collections from countries like Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. There are also important items from Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Japan, and the former Soviet Union. Some of the most interesting parts of the collection include:
- The British Arts & Crafts movement
- Dutch and Italian styles of Art Nouveau
- American industrial designs
- Objects and books from world's fairs
- Propaganda from World War I, World War II, and the Spanish Civil War
- Art and designs from the New Deal era
- Unique book designs
- Drawings and publications about architecture
Contents
History of The Wolfsonian-FIU
The Wolfsonian is named after Mitchell Wolfson Jr.. He grew up in Miami Beach and loved collecting modern design, architecture, and decorative arts. Mitchell Wolfson Jr. started gathering many of the rare books and objects that are now in The Wolfsonian's collection in the 1970s. He began storing his growing collection at the Washington Storage Company building in Miami Beach, which had been there since 1926.
How the Museum Started
By 1986, Mitchell Wolfson Jr.'s collection filled 90% of the storage building. So, he bought the building! He then created The Wolfsonian Foundation. This foundation was set up to look after the collection and make it available for researchers and experts to study. He hired Peggy Loar as the first director. She brought in experts to study, document, and share what was in the collection.
In 1992, Wolfson hired architect Mark Hampton to update and expand the Washington Storage Company building. The goal was to turn it into a museum and research center. Hampton, working with architect William Kearns, changed the building. They added a modern lobby, a museum café, and a shop. Upstairs, they created galleries for permanent and temporary exhibits, a library, offices, and storage areas. The museum officially opened to the public in 1995.
Becoming Part of Florida International University
Peggy Loar left the museum in 1996. Cathy Leff, who was already involved with Wolfson's projects, became the interim director. Cathy Leff helped arrange for the collection and the museum building to be given to Florida International University. The state of Florida approved this gift in 1997. In July of that year, The Wolfsonian officially became a department of FIU in Miami.
Since 1995, The Wolfsonian has shown items from its own collection in permanent galleries. It also hosts temporary exhibits, sometimes borrowing items from other collections. To support artists, The Wolfsonian also displays works by modern artists. It even has a teaching gallery at the Frost Art Museum on FIU's campus. Here, FIU teachers often help create shows using items from The Wolfsonian's collections for their classes.
The museum often hosts events for the community, like programs for kids, talks, conferences, art shows, and music performances. It also offers special programs for visiting scholars and researchers. The Wolfsonian actively encourages FIU classes to use its collections for their studies.
Recent Developments and Future Plans
In 2009, The Wolfsonian-FIU received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This grant helped strengthen its connections with FIU teachers and staff. The Mellon Foundation gave the museum another grant in 2012. The museum used these grants to expand programs that help teachers use the collections in their classes. They also provided scholarships for FIU graduate students to research the collections for their projects and publications. The grants also helped host scholarly conferences and welcome researchers from outside FIU.
In 2012, The Wolfsonian created a new plan for its future. It had successfully grown from a private collection into a respected museum and research center. To help with its new plan and make the collection more accessible (both in person and online), it received a $5 million grant from the John S and James L. Knight Foundation. This money is being used to renovate the museum's main building and its offsite storage. These changes will make it easier for FIU students, teachers, and other researchers to access the collections. These updates are expected to happen over the next few years. The grants will also help the museum continue to document its collection and share it digitally online with even more people.
Mitchell Wolfson Jr. has continued to collect items even after donating a large part of his collection to The Wolfsonian. He has a separate but similar collection in downtown Miami called the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Study and Research Centre. The items from this center will eventually become part of The Wolfsonian's collections. The recent grants are meant to help the museum take in these new objects and printed materials over the next few years. Cathy Leff was the museum's director until 2014. Tim Rodgers was the director from 2015 to 2020. Casey Steadman became the acting director and was named Director in October 2020. He first joined the museum in 2013 as deputy director of Business Affairs.
Did you know? The Wolfsonian was the first public building in Miami Beach to have air conditioning!
Where is The Wolfsonian-FIU Located?
The Wolfsonian is considered one of the seven campuses of FIU.
The Main Building
Its main building is at 1001 Washington Avenue. This building used to be the Washington Storage Company. The first three floors were built in 1926 by Robertson & Patterson in the Spanish Renaissance style. This style was very popular in South Florida back then because of the region's Spanish history. Two more floors were added in 1936 by architect Robert M. Little. The building stayed at five floors until Mitchell Wolfson Jr. bought it in 1986.
The storage building was designed with a tall ground floor and a large main entrance for cars. Cars carrying big pieces of furniture could drive through the main gate into what is now the lobby. There, items would be unloaded and put into a freight elevator (the first in Miami Beach, and it still works!). This elevator would take the large items to the storage levels upstairs. There was no storage on the ground floor to protect items from floods during rainstorms or hurricanes. The building has thick concrete walls to keep it cool and dry. Wealthy people from northern cities like New York and Boston used it. Before air conditioning, they needed a place to store their furniture during the hot, humid Florida summers.
In 1992, the building was updated and expanded to become a museum and research center. Mark Hampton and William S. Kearns added two more floors, making it seven stories tall. The fifth floor became a permanent gallery for The Wolfsonian's collections. The sixth and seventh floors are used for temporary exhibits. The fourth floor holds storage space for some of the object collections.
The third floor has The Wolfsonian's research library. It contains about 60,000 items, including rare books, magazines, pamphlets, and other printed materials. These can be anything from brochures and old tickets to advertising flyers and matchbook covers. The ground floor has the lobby, museum café, bookstore, and gift shop. Many parts of the building still have original decorative pieces from the Washington Storage Company, like its vault doors. Some parts even have items saved from other old buildings that were torn down and then reinstalled here.
Offsite Storage
Most of The Wolfsonian's huge collection of about 120,000 objects is stored offsite in an old Bell Telephone building. You can only see these items by special request right now. However, the museum plans to update this offsite storage. This will make these collections more available to FIU students, teachers, and other researchers. It's possible that these updates will also include new classroom spaces.
What Can You See? The Wolfsonian's Collections
The Wolfsonian has two main types of collections:
- Library Collection: This includes about 60,000 smaller paper items.
- Object Collection: This includes all the 3D objects and large paper items like posters, plus a big collection of modern paintings.
Most of the items at The Wolfsonian were given by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. But the museum also has many items from other donations, purchases, and long-term loans.
The Wolfsonian library is a research library, meaning you can't check out books. But it is open regularly for researchers and scholars. You just need to make an appointment. You can search for all their books and papers using the catalog on The Wolfsonian's website. The objects not currently on display can also be seen by appointment, depending on what you need. Only some of these items can be searched online through the museum's digital images. You'll need to contact the museum staff to find out everything the object collection holds.
The flags flying above the main entrance on Washington Avenue show the countries that are most featured in The Wolfsonian's collections.
Here are some of the main types of items you'll find in the collections:
- American Industrial Design: This includes posters, graphic designs, patent models, trade catalogs, and objects like cameras, clocks, radios, and phonographs. Famous designers include Donald Deskey, Walter Dorwin Teague, Kem Weber, and John Vassos.
- British Arts and Crafts Movement: Works by artists like C. R. Ashbee, Christopher Dresser, Ernest Gimson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris, and M. H. Baillie Scott. This is said to be the largest collection of its kind outside the United Kingdom.
- Dutch and Italian Art Nouveau (Nieuwe Kunst and Stile Floreale): Objects, room setups, and a large collection of Nieuwe Kunst bookbindings.
- German Design Reform: Objects from the Darmstadt Art Colony, Vereinigte Werkstätten in Munich, and Deutscher Werkbund.
- New Deal America: Designs made during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project.
- Political Propaganda: Prints, posters, drawings, books, and magazines. There are many items from Russia/USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Spain. The collections from British, Dutch, German, Italian, and American propaganda might be the most complete in the United States.
- Transportation and Travel: Objects related to ocean liners, airplanes, zeppelins, and trains.
- World's Fairs and Expositions: Furniture, sculptures, paintings, and papers from World's Fairs since 1851. Important fairs include the 1902 Prima Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin; the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris; the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago; and the 1939 World's Fair in New York.
In early 2006, The Wolfsonian-FIU opened a sister museum in Nervi, on the Italian Riviera. This museum is in a renovated school overlooking the sea. It's managed by the City of Genoa and the Region of Liguria. It mainly shows Italian fine and decorative arts, design, and architecture.
See also
In Spanish: Wolfsonian-FIU para niños
- List of design museums
