Free Contemporary Art Space Coming to Miami's Bird Road
Visitors to a new Miami art space will not need to pay to get in. Collectors Cristina Chacón and Diego Uribe are opening DC Lab on Bird Road, and it opens on 29 November, timed for Miami Art Week, the city's annual run of art fairs and events. The Art Newspaper reported the plans on 2 November.
DC Lab is an expansion of the DC Art Foundation, a nonprofit the couple founded in 2021. The space covers 9,000 square feet, about 836 square metres. It will include exhibition rooms, education spaces and a library.
The opening show is the first major survey in Miami of Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. A survey is a exhibition that gathers work from across an artist's career. Garaicoa is also the foundation's current artist in residence. The show is co-presented with Italy's Galleria Continua, a commercial gallery with spaces in several countries, and with Mor Charpentier, which is based in Paris and Bogotá.
The space will also host projects by international galleries that do not have a permanent base in Miami. Research and public programmes will run alongside them. Uribe described the idea in plain terms: DC Lab is "a laboratory where experimental ideas and projects can happen in the city."
The couple are based in Miami, Bogotá and Madrid. Their collection includes more than 500 modern and contemporary works. Chacón and Uribe also sit on the chairman's council and the acquisitions boards of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. A chairman's council is a group of major donors who support a museum's work. Acquisitions boards help decide which works a museum buys. The two also serve on the international patronage board of Madrid's Museo Reina Sofía and on the boards of Bogotá's Museo de Arte Moderno and Miami's Coral Gables Museum.
The DC Art Foundation has run a residency programme since 2022 for mid-career and established artists. Past residents include Spanish textile artist Sonia Navarro and Colombian artist Miler Lagos. The residency gives artists time and space to make new work, and the new building will give that work a public home in Miami.
Details about the opening and the foundation's programmes are on its website, dcartfoundation.org.
