THE RUBELLS ACQUIRE A MUSEUM

Don and Mera Rubell are expanding their footprint in the nation’s capital with the purchase of a former school—a site where the art collectors will build a contemporary art museum and hotel.

Art in America reports that the Rubells purchased the former Randall School at Sixty-five I Street NW in Washington, DC, for $6.5 million from the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design, which bought the school from the city in 2006 but never developed the site. In a joint venture with urban-development firm Telesis Corporation, the Rubells will build a satellite museum and hotel complex just down the road from their other DC property, the Morris Lapidus–designed Capitol Skyline Hotel.

“It’s been a fantasy to launch a satellite of our collection,” says Mera Rubell, whose forty-five-thousand-square-foot Rubell Family Collection museum in Miami opened to the public in 1994. “I can’t say that I have an immediate model of what this museum will be like. What we do now is a good blueprint for what we’ll be working toward.”

Much as with their museum in Miami, Rubell says, their DC contemporary museum will place emerging artists in context with artists whose work they have collected for thirty years. The thrust will ultimately be contemporary, but she explains that she and her husband have no guess yet as to how the museum will fit into the local ecosystem—which is dominated by the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art’s East Wing, as well as the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran.