MIAMI, FLA.- The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University announces the gift of artworks from the Collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz by ten leading contemporary women artists, in honor of the museum building’s recent tenth anniversary. The artists are: Squeak Carnwath, Petah Coyne, Madeline Denaro, Marina Font, Joanne Greenbaum, Quisqueya Henriquez, Sharon Horvath, Elizabeth Murray, Lorna Simpson and Wendy Wischer. “We are thrilled to honor the Frost Art Museum FIU and bring the work of pioneering contemporary female artists to the forefront, making these works available to FIU’s student community, faculty and visitors to the museum,” said Francie Bishop Good.
“With this donation, we are recognizing the museum’s rich history and powerful future,” said David Horvitz. “We encourage other patrons to also support the important mission of the Frost Art Museum FIU as a leading cultural institution for Miami.”
With a rich history of serving as a cultural beacon for more than 40 years, the original galleries opened in the 1970s on the campus of Florida International University. The state-of-the-art museum building debuted in 2008 and is celebrated as a jewel in the crown of Miami’s cultural landscape. Since opening its doors just over a decade ago, the architectural gem has helped propel Miami’s artistic evolution to new heights. The lakeside building was designed by Yann Weymouth (the chief of design on the I.M. Pei Grand Louvre Project), featuring 46,000 square feet of energy efficient exhibition and programming space, honored with LEED* silver certification due to the building’s high-efficiency, green capabilities.
“As the museum enters its next decade, we are grateful to cultural leaders such as Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, who share their passion for the arts by donating back to the region through public institutions,” said Dr. Jordana Pomeroy, the Director of the Frost Art Museum FIU. “As Miami’s only public and free museum, our mission is to provide access to art for all. Because of the Girls’ Club donation to the Frost Art Museum FIU, we now have ten new works by women artists in the collection to support our efforts to make ours an inclusive collection.”
Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz are among the nation’s leading philanthropists and arts visionaries. They are the Founders of Girls’ Club – “the only private collection open to the public that is dedicated to contemporary art by women.” Collecting as a couple for more than 30 years, their collection encompasses over 800 works of art, most by contemporary female artists. The mission of Girls’ Club is to educate the public, nurture the careers of female artists, and to serve as a resource for art students, scholars, curators and practicing artists on the contributions of women to the field of contemporary art. A special commitment is made to expose the work of local artists to a broader national and international audience.
This extraordinary gift includes works by internationally renowned artists such as Lorna Simpson, Quisqueya Henriquez and Elizabeth Murray, and some artists who call South Florida home like Marina Font and Madeline Denaro. The photographs and text-based works by Simpson are strong examples of the artist’s oeuvre. Repetition and fragmentation are leitmotifs in Simpson’s practice and they are present in this latest addition to the Frost’s collection. Born in Cuba and a longtime resident of the Dominican Republic, multimedia artist Quisqueya Henriquez is informed by abstraction, sequences, and sometimes athletics. The Murray artwork, making its Frost Art Museum debut this summer, is a bold example of the artist’s work. Murray, a longtime New York-based painter, made colorful abstractions that suggested representation forms and possessed a type of cartoon-like aesthetic. Often irregularly-shaped, Murray’s compositions, like the one represented here, possesses visual dynamism.
