Wolfsonian-FIU Expansion to Highlight Hidden Treasures

If you ask Micky Wolfson what his favorite acquisition is in the more than 200,000 pieces of his collection – the majority of which make up his namesake museum, The Wolfsonian-FIU – he’s quick with an answer. He doesn’t have one.

“I’m interested in the narration, not in the individual objects,” he said. “Each are part of a great chapter in this book of objects.”

The story is getting a new chapter. Opened by Wolfson in 1995, who gifted its contents and the 1927 Mediterranean Revival-style Washington Storage building that houses it to Florida International University in 1997, the museum will be expanded.

A new space will be annexed to the north of the building at 1001 Washington Ave. in Miami Beach, which will give The Wolfsonian-FIU a total of 50,000 feet of programmatic space, approximately tripling its present parameters. The expansion alone will total around 35,000 square feet, according to Wolfsonian-FIU officials. Expected completion date is late 2026 or early 2027.

The project has been a long-awaited dream of Wolfson’s: Space built to display objects that are too big to fit in the existing building, including some that have never been seen before.

“There are giant artifacts that cannot be accommodated in the current building,” Wolfson explained. “In the new space, you’ll see a great hall with some remarkable pieces that have been in storage.”

According to Casey Steadman, acting director of The Wolfsonian-FIU, one of the most important design features of the expansion will be the creation of large volumes of space, including the double-height gallery.

“We have whole rooms that are still in crates. It’s just incredible what is in this collection,” Steadman said.

Wolfson and Steadman agree on at least two of the most “must-sees” that they are itching to unveil.

They both have their No. 1: a 45-by-13 1/2-foot mural that has been in hiding. It has never been exhibited since it was acquired in 1987. It is housed, along with other objects, in a 30,00-square-foot historic warehouse space called the Annex, at an undisclosed location in Miami Beach.

“It’s this wonderful nine-panel stainless steel mural,” Steadman said.

The work was completed in 1957 by artist Buell Mullen, a female muralist described by The New Yorker in 1956 as “the only painter on metals in the world.” The piece, which Steadman calls “futuristic,” was gifted to Wolfson and the museum by Chase Manhattan Bank in 2000. It depicts an assemblage of industrial architecture – bridges, radio towers and power plants – set against a clouded sky, which according to the Wolfsonian-FIU’s archives, is meant to show the role banking plays in the technological progress of humankind.

“It was in the Chase Manhattan bank branch in lower Manhattan, New York City,” Steadman said. “Our exhibit designer went up to New York for the deinstallation, and since it was crated there we have not done anything with it because we don’t have anywhere to display it.”

The second piece, which they also agree needs a permanent home, is a plaster maquette of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“It has been displayed once before, but at more than 13 feet tall, it’s a challenge,” Steadman said.

The statue and base, purchased by Wolfson in 1987, was displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair, held at San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

Wolfson went on to talk about another sculpture that he’s been waiting for the opportunity to reveal. Made in Berlin in 1927, it is of the Archangel Michael and was purchased in Germany in 1993. It remains disassembled, crated and in storage at the Annex.

Then there is the largest item in the collection, the 56-passenger Fiat-produced la Littorina rail car. There are ever-evolving talks of somehow incorporating this largest piece in Wolfson’s collection in the new space. Currently on loan to a museum in Istanbul, Wolfson went to great lengths to find the Italian gem. He has an avowed penchant for the rails, having spent time crisscrossing the country in two personally owned vintage rail cars.

“The only thing I ever wanted in life was to be able to travel a railroad car,” he said.

Determined to find a special one for the collection, Wolfson combed Italy until the Italian State Railways, “painfully aware of my persistence, finally found one available in southern Italy.” He purchased it in 1988.

The rail car had been a workhorse for decades and was in poor condition. Wolfson had it transported to Fiat’s workshops in Savigliano, Italy, where it was given a major overhaul. Once restored, it was presented with what was described as “great fanfare” in Turin, Milan and Genoa before setting sail to America, he recalled.

Upon arrival in Miami, however, it was dropped as it was unloaded from the ship. Damaged but not destroyed, from there it was taken to the Gold Coast Railroad Museum, where Wolfson said Hurricane Andrew in 1992 wrecked it again.

Even so, it was still seen as a remarkable find, and it went on loan to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga for a time, then on to its present digs at Istanbul’s Rahmi M. Koç Museum. Its present long-term loan to the museum comes with Koç’s commitment to execute a painstaking restoration. The 10-year-agreement, established in 2010, was recently extended two more years.

Wolfson is satisfied with the rail car’s 6,000-miles-away residency.

“The Littorina is now, fittingly, on public view in an institution celebrating transportation and industry,” he said.

The rail car and its political past – the train was a collaboration between Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Fiat, and features the emblem of the Fascist party on its grill – is a shining example of what interests Wolfson when he decides to make an acquisition.

“I never wanted a museum. There isn’t even the word ‘museum’ on our stationary or on our building. This is a cultural research center,” he declared. “What I’m most interested in is the research, and the fact that people come here and can ponder references of the past.”

He added that all the items in the collection represent a language, what he calls the language of objects.

“You come here to read the objects. What they represent and who they represent,” he said. “The objects are a way to read history through what men and women made.”

The museum’s expansion, he continued, will “make the space not only friendlier for visitors, but more accessible to researchers, which is my major interest.”

That expansion has been in the works nearly 17 years, Steadman said, starting in 2004. That was the year Miami-Dade County voters approved a $2.9 billion Building Better Communities Bond Program, which allowed the county to issue long-term bonds to fund more than 300 neighborhood and regional capital projects. The Wolfsonian-FIU has received a $10 million bond through the program to help fund its expansion.

“It was the same fund that’s supported the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, and numerous other culture missions,” Steadman said.

The most recent move forward toward the Wolfsonian-FIU expansion came last November, with a ballot question put to the Miami Beach voters who had to approve it. Under a city charter, projects of this nature must be brought before the electorate, who decides whether or not interiors of historic buildings that have no available floor area may be increased. More than 60% of voters said yes to the Wolfsonian-FIU.

Steadman said only one part of the project would alter anything in the original historic building.

“We envision windows along the 10th Street façade,” he shared. “We found historic photos of those windows being there in the 1930s when the building was first built. This was built as a warehouse, as a storage facility, so it wasn’t designed to have lots of doors and entrances and windows. It was designed to protect its contents.”

When the museum opened in 1995 – remarked upon in the Sun Sentinel with “The Tasmanian devil of collecting is out of control. And Dade County, all of South Florida, even the world, are better for it.” – there were 70,000 objects. The collection has almost tripled since then.

“It’s not a pure art collection and it’s not a pure design collection,” Steadman said. “That’s what’s so unique. We can tell so many different stories.”

There are about 500 objects from the collection on display inside The Wolfsonian-FIU at any given time. A groundbreaking date for the expansion hasn’t yet been added to the calendar. The museum is in the midst of a 5-year-plan, one that involves a formal process to select an architectural firm, choose a construction firm and step up fundraising efforts.

“I am hoping … for our first big exhibit to be unveiled during December of 2026 to coincide with Miami Art Week,” Steadman said.

And with the expansion, Wolfson’s object collection, which began as a boy when he started collecting keys, will hit new heights.

“[I collect] every day; I won’t say every hour,” he said. “When you have a passion, it’s hard not to keep going.”