Museums and Culture in Miami

Pérez Art Museum Miami, universally called PAMM, opened its Herzog and de Meuron building in 2013: a raised concrete platform under a broad canopy, hung with vertical gardens, facing directly onto Biscayne Bay. The collection concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century art of the Atlantic rim, which in practice means Caribbean, Latin American and African diaspora artists alongside North American and European ones. General admission has run around $16 for adults with reductions for students, seniors and young people, and small children free. Entry is free on Thursday evenings, roughly 5pm to 9pm, and on free second Saturdays, which are family days with music and are genuinely busy.

The terrace at PAMM, under the canopy with the bay in front of it, is one of the better free-to-look-at views in the city even if you never buy a ticket. The restaurant is open to the public.

Next door, the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science opened in 2017 and is built around a conical aquarium you view from underneath, beside a planetarium with a domed screen. Adult tickets have sat in the $30 to $35 band including the planetarium, with lower rates for children and seniors, and combined tickets with PAMM save roughly 15 per cent against buying both.

The two together make a full day. The Metromover stops beside them, which makes this the one museum cluster in Miami that needs no car and no parking fee.

Vizcaya is the one to prioritise. James Deering, of the International Harvester family, finished the main house in 1916: an Italianate villa built on the bay with formal gardens behind it, a stone barge moored off the terrace as a breakwater, and interiors assembled from European rooms shipped over wholesale. It is a National Historic Landmark and it is closed on Tuesdays, with admission around $25 for adults, roughly $10 for children and reduced rates for students and seniors. Allow two to three hours and go early; the gardens have almost no shade and the house is not air-conditioned in the way a modern museum is.

The Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay, built by James's half-brother Charles, is the quieter version: a stone house, a 1900s inn, pine rockland and mangrove on a bayfront site with archaeology going back thousands of years. It is a forty-minute drive south of downtown and rarely crowded.

Downtown, HistoryMiami is the city's own museum and a Smithsonian affiliate, and its long-running programme of walking tours led by the resident historian is the best guided history available here, including the free Little Havana walk on Viernes Culturales evenings.

The Freedom Tower on Biscayne Boulevard, the 1925 tower where Cuban refugees were processed between 1962 and 1974, houses a museum of art and design and has been through a major restoration in recent years. Check whether the galleries are open before you make a special trip.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, in the Design District, is free. Not free one evening a week, free. It shows serious contemporary work in a purpose-built building with a sculpture garden behind it, and it has taken over the former de la Cruz Collection premises on NE 41st Street as a second site. If you do one art thing in Miami and do not want to pay for it, do this.

The Rubell Museum in Allapattah holds one of the largest private contemporary collections in the United States across thirty-six galleries in a converted warehouse complex, with a restaurant and a garden. Mera and Don Rubell started buying in the 1960s on a teacher's and a doctor's income, which is the part of the story that makes the scale of it strange.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Wynwood shows large-scale installation, sculpture and photography, opens on a seasonal schedule rather than year-round, and gives its admission income to a local shelter for women and children.

Bakehouse Art Complex, also in Wynwood, is a working studio building rather than a museum, with open studios and a gallery, and it is where you can meet artists who still have space in a neighbourhood that has mostly priced them out.

Between them these four do more for Miami's standing as an art city than the fair in December does, and three of the four are in buildings that were built to store things.

The Adrienne Arsht Center, two halls either side of Biscayne Boulevard downtown, is the city's main performing arts venue: opera, ballet, touring musicals, jazz and the Florida Grand Opera season. The Metromover stops outside.

The Olympia Theater on Flagler Street is a 1926 atmospheric cinema with a ceiling painted as a night sky, the kind of room that was built to make a Depression-era audience feel wealthy for two hours. The Tower Theater on Calle Ocho, from the same decade, showed subtitled and dubbed films to newly arrived Cubans in the 1960s and still programmes Spanish-language cinema.

In Overtown, the restored Lyric Theater is the surviving anchor of what was the touring circuit for Black performers who played Miami Beach hotels and were not permitted to sleep in them. The Little Haiti Cultural Complex runs its free Sounds of Little Haiti night on the third Friday of each month in the courtyard, and the Caribbean Marketplace beside it opens Friday to Sunday.

In Coral Gables, the art cinema on Aragon Avenue is where the subtitled and independent releases play, and the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami holds the encyclopaedic collection the city otherwise lacks, from antiquities to Latin American modernism.

Across the bay, and worth naming because they are frequently listed as Miami: the Wolfsonian, the Bass, Miami City Ballet and the New World Symphony are all in Miami Beach. The symphony's outdoor projected concerts on the park wall are free and are one of the best evenings either city offers.