Mitrani Art opens in Little River, reviving a Miami family legacy

By Daniel Okafor

Mitrani Art opens on 30 November in Little River, Miami — seven years after the Mitrani Warehouse closed in Wynwood. The new venue houses exhibition galleries, a screening room and artists' studios under one roof. That roof took a while.

The sisters behind it, Dina and Rhonda Mitrani, ran the original Mitrani Warehouse out of their family's Wynwood clothing factory from 2002. The building held their parents' business, their grandmother's workplace, and — in Dina's words — "so many cousins, uncles." Then Wynwood's rents did what Wynwood's rents do. Artists and galleries got priced out, and the sisters followed.

"We held on for as long as we could, because we had an emotional attachment to that space," Dina told The Art Newspaper. "But we realised it was time to go."

What's opening?

The inaugural show is a group exhibition of lens-based art (work made with cameras — photography, film, video) titled ReExposures: The Magic Within. The expected highlight is Suddenly We Jumped by Miami-based artist Antonia Wright. The video documents a 2013 live performance in which Wright shattered a glass ceiling — literally — by jumping onto a pane of glass and falling to the floor below.

"Antonia makes really creative work and focuses on important social issues that need change," Rhonda said. "This one is very impactful."

The building also gives a permanent home to two institutions that have survived on pop-up programming since 2017: the Dina Mitrani Gallery, a contemporary photography gallery, and the Screening Room, which was the first dedicated Miami space for film-makers and video artists. A new non-profit, Mitrani Art Projects Inc, will run educational programmes on site.

Why did it take seven years?

The sisters closed the warehouse in 2017 and started hunting immediately. In 2019 they bought a mechanic shop in Little River — high ceilings, room to build a separate studio facility — and hired R&R Studios, a local multidisciplinary architecture firm run by Argentine artists Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt. Behar and Marquardt knew the building well: they were longtime residents of the Mitrani Warehouse studios.

Then came the pandemic, permitting and, in the sisters' phrasing, "other roadblocks." The project ran years past schedule. "It's been seven years in the making, so we're very excited to open. There's a lot of anticipation," Rhonda said.

Can artists afford it?

Four studio spaces are already filling, each sized for two artists. Rent sits at the lower end of the market rate for the neighbourhood, the sisters say, and they hope grant funding will keep it there.

The model is deliberately old-school Wynwood. "We want to continue that same model that we had in Wynwood, creating a community with art studios and event spaces," Dina said. "We still want to welcome emerging and established artists to use it as a place to experiment and create new work."

The sisters' own path to this point ran through New York. Dina worked at Christie's and two galleries, one specialising in Latin American photography. Rhonda built a film production career and resisted returning home until a documentary about her father going back to Cuba pulled her to Miami for editing. "During one of those visits, Dina said, 'Why don't you stay here? There's something going on in the art community,'" Rhonda recalled.

She stayed. Whether Little River holds its artists longer than Wynwood did is the question the opening quietly poses — and one the studio rents suggest the sisters intend to answer differently.