Mitrani Art Opens in Little River, Reviving a Miami Family Legacy

Mitrani Art opens on 30 November in Little River, giving Miami a photography, film and video venue with exhibition galleries, a screening room and artists' studios — and ending a seven-year wait that began when the Mitrani Warehouse closed in 2017.

The inaugural show is a group exhibition of lens-based art titled ReExposures: The Magic Within. Its expected highlight is Suddenly We Jumped, a video by Miami-based artist Antonia Wright capturing a 2013 live performance in which she jumped onto a pane of glass, shattering it and falling to the floor below. The ceiling, quite literally, gets broken.

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

Where did the Mitrani sisters come from?

Sisters Dina and Rhonda Mitrani started the original Mitrani Warehouse in 2002, operating out of their family's longtime clothing factory in Wynwood. They watched the neighbourhood around them transform into a thriving arts district — and then watched artists and galleries get priced out of it.

Both left Miami for university and found their way to New York afterwards. Dina worked at Christie's and then at two galleries, one specialising in Latin American photography. Rhonda built a film production career and had no plans to leave.

"I had no intention of leaving New York," she admits. "I ended up making a documentary film about my father going back to Cuba, and that brought me back to Miami to finish editing it. During one of those visits, Dina said, 'Why don't you stay here? There's something going on in the art community.'"

She stayed. Dina opened the Dina Mitrani Gallery, focused on contemporary photography. Rhonda opened the Screening Room, the first dedicated space in Miami for film-makers and video artists to show their work. They started small — studios on the second floor — and gradually took over the building.

Why did they leave Wynwood?

Gentrification did what it usually does. "We realised the Wynwood Art District was shifting. We held on for as long as we could, because we had an emotional attachment to that space where our parents had their business, our grandmother worked there, so many cousins, uncles," Dina says. "But we realised it was time to go."

The search began immediately after the 2017 closure. In 2019 they bought a mechanic shop in Little River — high ceilings, room to expand with a separate studio facility. They hired R&R Studios, a local multidisciplinary architecture firm run by Argentine artists Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt, who were themselves longtime residents of the Mitrani Warehouse studios. Then came the pandemic, permitting and, in Rhonda's phrasing, "other roadblocks".

"It's been seven years in the making, so we're very excited to open. There's a lot of anticipation," she says.

What does the new space offer?

The reopening restores a permanent home to two institutions that have been homeless since 2017, surviving on pop-up programming across the city:

• The Screening Room, Miami's first dedicated exhibition space for film-makers and video artists.
• Dina Mitrani Gallery, the sisters' contemporary photography gallery.

A new non-profit, Mitrani Art Projects Inc, will run educational programmes in the space.

The building includes four studio spaces, each large enough for two artists, and artists are already moving in. Rent sits at the lower end of the market rate for the neighbourhood — a modest claim in a city that has repeatedly evicted its own artists — and the sisters hope to keep it there by securing grant funding.

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

If the Little River chapter mirrors the Wynwood one — community first, slow growth, artists given room to work — Miami's lens-based scene will have regained something it lost in 2017. The glass ceiling, at least, is already broken.

By Olivia Hart, Lens Gazette