Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is now open to the public in Museum Park. Pérez Art Museum Miami is a modern and contemporary art museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Pérez Art Museum Miami serves one of the most diverse populations in one of the fastest growing regions in the country, where a unique confluence of Caribbean, North and South American cultures adds vibrancy and texture to the civic landscape. The city’s thriving community of artists, designers and collectors and its avid and growing art-engaged public are driving Miami’s demand for a world-class museum and dynamic center of visual arts education. PAMM transformed Museum Park into a central destination on Miami’s cultural map, promotes progressive arts education, builds community cohesiveness and contributes substantially to downtown revitalization.
Mission Statement
Pérez Art Museum Miami exists to improve the quality of life for individual residents of and visitors to Miami-Dade County, as well as social life in the communities they represent, by facilitating catalytic engagements with the most progressive visual arts of our time.
History
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) evolved from the Miami Art Museum, which grew out of the Center for the Fine Arts (CFA). The CFA opened to the public in 1984 as a partnership between Metropolitan Dade County Government and the Center for the Fine Arts Association Inc., a private 501(c) (3) corporation. In 1994, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the CFA’s leadership determined to transform this County department from a space solely for temporary exhibitions into a private institution with a permanent collection dedicated to international art of the 20th and 21st centuries that reflected Greater Miami’s diverse community and pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas. To embody this new mission and the community’s aspiration for a major art museum on a prominent waterfront site, the CFA was renamed the Miami Art Museum of Dade County Association, Inc. (MAM).
Plans began to establish a significant educational program, build the collection, and create a new world-class facility that would affirm the region’s growing stature as a global capital. MAM, in tandem with the Miami Museum of Science, led the charge to transform a derelict 30-acre waterfront site in the City of Miami into Museum Park. The City dedicated the land and funding to realize the vision of a great public park anchored by art and science museums. Through its landmark Building Better Communities program, Miami-Dade County provided the capital funds to construct major new art and science museums. MAM commissioned the Pritzker Prize-winning architects
Herzog & de Meuron to design a state-of-the-art, sustainable building that expresses the museum’s role as an educational and civic forum for the County’s residents and visitors. In 2013, when the museum moved to its acclaimed, 200,000-square-foot facility overlooking Biscayne Bay in Museum Park, it was renamed the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County, in recognition of Mr. Pérez’s generous leadership gift.
Image: Pérez Art Museum Miami, south facade