A paradox has emerged in South Florida’s art economy in the years following the Covid-19 lockdowns. On the one hand, the region’s upper income brackets have swelled from a massive influx of finance firms and their staff—so much so that Miami and West Palm Beach have worked to rebrand themselves as “Wall Street South”. On the other hand, after a two-year growth spurt, the pinnacle of South Florida’s art-market infrastructure has receded noticeably since 2023, even as economic indicators suggest the area has never offered a broader, richer base of potential buyers.
Reconciling these apparent contradictions clarifies more than just the present state of the trade in South Florida entering Miami Art Week; it also clarifies how long-lasting the pandemic’s effect on the market has been, as well as how slow and difficult it can be to permanently redraw the industry’s map.
Blazing a money trail
The leader of the finance sector’s stampede to South Florida has been the mega-collector Ken Griffin, who announced in 2022 that his hedge fund, Citadel, would move its headquarters from Chicago to Miami. Around 500 staff were already based in Miami full time by this autumn; thousands more transplants and hires are looming once Citadel completes its forthcoming $1bn tower on Brickell Bay Drive.
Hedge funder Ken Griffin is moving his firm—and hundreds of staff—to Miami © 2023 Bloomberg Finance LP
Other finance fixtures that have opened or expanded offices in the Magic City since 2020 include the investment bank Goldman Sachs, the private asset management titan Blackstone and the Founders Fund, the entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm.
Less than two hours’ drive north, Palm Beach County hosts more than 300 hedge funds, private equity firms and financial services companies, according to data from the jurisdiction’s business development board. Around 40% of those entities have relocated to the county in the past four years, boosting its population of billionaires to 59 and of millionaires to around 71,000.
Yet Palm Beach was a haven for high-level collecting long before this recent surge, Sarah Gavlak, who founded her namesake contemporary art gallery there two decades ago, tells The Art Newspaper.
“When I first came to Palm Beach in 2004, there wasn’t much of a gallery scene, and the Norton Museum did not even have a curator of contemporary art, but there were plenty of great and forward-thinking collectors,” she says, naming Jane Holzer, Beth Rudin DeWoody and Milton and Sheila Fine as some of the seasoned locals who helped sustain her business in the early days.
Around 2014, Gavlak says she started to notice an influx of wealth-management firms and financial professionals moving from New York to the Sunshine State, a process that “accelerated during the pandemic”. Drawn by the unique combination of alluring weather, feather-light public health restrictions and longstanding wealth-friendly policies (including the lack of state-level income, inheritance and property taxes), an array of high- and ultra-high-net-worth households relocated to Florida amid the lockdowns.
The international art trade swiftly followed. The list of dealers to open outposts in Palm Beach between November 2020 and 2022 included Acquavella Galleries, Paula Cooper, Pace Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, Lévy Gorvy (now Lévy Gorvy Dayan) and White Cube. Sotheby’s and Christie’s established showrooms in the city, too.
The other side of the coin
Fast forward to late 2024, however, and only two of the major brands above are still operating their Palm Beach satellites: Sotheby’s and Acquavella. The mass retreat clarifies that, unlike in finance, much of the art industry’s southern rush was a temporary emergency response to Covid-related limitations, not a step towards a long-term realignment.
“Now that people are no longer trapped in Palm Beach, it no longer has the same purpose as it once did,” says Mari-Claudia Jiménez, Sotheby’s chairman, president of the Americas and global head of business development. The purpose of the expansion, she adds, was for the auction house “to meet people where they were” and offer “more of a ‘buy it now’ gallery format”.
But as life returned to normal and a growing number of borders reopened between late 2021 and early 2023, the value proposition of lockdown-era pop-ups faded. In an increasingly cost-sensitive environment, the clearest savings to be had were the ones from staffing and programming the seasonal spaces minted in a once-a-century public-health crisis.
Another factor is that pandemic-era changes in technology and habits have decreased the importance of sustained physical proximity between buyers and sellers. Whether buying from PDF previews, over Instagram or after a dealer ships the works over for evaluation in situ, the ease and prevalence of lower-touch forms of dealmaking show how misguided it is to assume that a city or region’s art-industry infrastructure should always grow in direct proportion to its population of high earners.
This is especially true given that many of the finance professionals now or soon to be ensconced in South Florida have been buying art elsewhere. “We’ve seen a huge influx of finance types who have moved to Miami, but these are global citizens just as present in New York or London or Paris as they are where they technically have their main tax residence,” says Jiménez. In this sense, the rise of Wall Street South should be thought of more as a redistribution than an expansion of the collector class.
None of this is to say that the art scenes in Palm Beach and Miami are withering, only that for now the inflow of finance wealth remains a subplot in their evolution.
“As with our New York gallery, there are finance professionals who both collect work from our living artists and are also active on the secondary market, but we find our collectors in South Florida to be diverse,” says Eleanor Acquavella, the eponymous gallery’s third-generation co-owner. “Not only do they work in a range of fields, but they are also international and range widely in age as well.”
Similarly, Gavlak says Palm Beach’s art scene owes partly to the influence of professionals from a broad swath of industries, including television and film, medicine, real estate and sports management. Alongside the true newcomers acquiring of-the-moment works at more accessible price points, she adds that “many of these younger collectors are also part of established collecting families”. The result is “a bit like the dynamic between Old New York and New New York—they can co-exist and both play an important role in the art world”.
Miami’s collecting culture, in contrast, tends to focus more narrowly on emerging and under-appreciated artists, with a strong interest in the Latinx diaspora. According to the adviser Adam Green, this commitment to the young and local has benefited a group of homegrown Magic City galleries, including KDR305, Spinello Projects and Central Fine.
Gabriel Kilongo, who founded his gallery Jupiter Contemporary in 2022, says recent transplants to Miami are generally “more interested in a different dialogue about remaking art history” than about spending six or seven figures on works by canonical names. Also faded is the attitude of frenzied speculation that bound the city so tightly to NFTs (non-fungible tokens) during the pandemic-era cryptocurrency boom. “What’s happening here is now much healthier than what was happening during Covid,” he adds.
“There’s a certain amount of sophistication and rebranding that has come along with people moving here and bringing their cultural knowledge and interests with them,” Kilongo says. “I can’t speak to the idea that everyone in art is benefiting directly from this migration, but I can say that they’re benefiting indirectly.”