Mera and Don Rubell make the bold move into Allapattah, to a new museum — and restaurant — that has the Miami buzzing

Back when Don Rubell was a medical student, he and wife Mera would take long walks between study sessions. This was New York City in 1964, when an artist revolution was being led by people named Baez and Lichtenstein and Warhol, and the newly married Rubells would walk by art studios that had taken over empty storefronts. These off-the-grid galleries were foreboding places for someone who had never been in one, but the Rubells made eye contact with an artist one night. He was standing outside smoking. He said, “Why don’t you come see my work?”

The young couple were captivated by what they saw. Mera especially gushed over the pieces. “You love my work,” the artist said, “so why don’t you buy something?”

Mera explained that her husband was in medical school, and she was making just $100 a week as a Head Start teacher. They were living in a five-story walk-up in Chelsea.

“Well,” the artist said, “how much can you afford?”

They agreed on $25 a week, and so the Rubells bought their first original piece of art, on an installment plan.

Spending a quarter of everything they earned became a rule for the Rubells. It continued for the next half century, even when they became wealthy enough that 25 percent became a significant number, enough for them to acquire multiple works and even entire collections. Now, 55 years later, they have upwards of 7,200 pieces from a thousand artists in their collection. Beyond just the sheer numbers, the Rubell collection is counted among the world’s most important contemporary art holdings.

Rubells 2.0

Just recently the Rubells moved their artwork into a new expansive museum campus in the Allapattah neighborhood. It is arguably the most significant art museum opening since the Pérez Art Museum Miami opened in 2013. The Rubell Museum will help solidify the city as a place where art lives, and considering the breadth of the Rubell collection, undoubtedly it will be counted among the nation’s top contemporary art institutions.

What makes the Rubell works so significant isn’t just the numbers but the fact that the couple had an eye, early on, for artists just about to break into the scene. They focused on acquiring the works of artists before their work would have been cost prohibitive, making the Rubell collection the envy of other dealers and museums.Their collection didn’t come about from formal university training or even a family history in art. Don had a collecting gene; as a young boy, he collected baseball cards and stamps from around the world brought home from his father, a mail carrier. It wasn’t that way for Mera, who had lived in U.S. refugee camps in Germany, Russia and Israel before coming to America at 12 with few possessions of her own.

Thrill collectors

On that night in a Chelsea gallery, when they set out on what would become their life’s mission, the couple had been married just two years. They met in the library of Brooklyn College. Mera was finishing up her degree in psychology, and Don, with a degree in theoretical mathematics from Cornell, was studying to be an actuary.

For three months, they sat across from each other without saying a word. Mera figured Don just hadn’t noticed her. “Would you like to have a vanilla egg cream?” Don asked her out of nowhere one day. The drink was a Brooklyn special at the time, and it’s something Mera remembers vividly: a vanilla milkshake with seltzer water, creamy, effervescent and sweet.

“I was madly in love with him. He had never said a word to me, but I was already in love,” she recalls.

After that day in the Chelsea gallery, Mera can clearly picture the moment when they hung their first piece in their apartment. “Anyone who has ever bought an original piece of art knows there’s a thrill of putting it up on your wall,” she says. “It’s sacred.”

In their early days of collecting, they acquired the works of artists who would later become known, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons. They added to their collection the works of artists like Jean- Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol.

Southern winds calling

After five years teaching, Mera left her job and opened a commercial real estate company and retail stores and raised their two kids. Don transitioned from his role as an actuary and went to medical school. As a gynecologist, he delivered 5,001 babies. Don also served in the Army reserves, rising to lieutenant-colonel, a position that took them to Los Angeles and San Antonio. They came to Miami in 1992 and discovered a city Mera said was an undiscovered artwork of its own.

“Miami was like this land of opportunity, full of Art Deco treasures that were beginning to be discovered,” she says. They bought real estate, including hotels, now headlined by the Albion Hotel on Miami Beach and the Capitol Skyline Hotel in D.C.

They also came into an inheritance in an unfortunate way, when Don’s brother Steve Rubell, an icon of the disco era for co-founding Studio 54, died in 1989 and left them a small fortune. As always, they put a quarter of everything into collecting art. They’ve traveled the world to find unique items, becoming experts in the Chinese art scene after a first trip there in 2001. Unlike most art collectors, they have held on to almost everything they’ve bought, selling less than two dozen pieces.

A family of firsts

It was a surprise to the Rubells that their daughter, Jennifer, became an artist of acclaim. Mera says it’s rare for kids of collectors to become artists. It was less of a surprise when their son, Jason, became an art dealer, with galleries in Miami and Palm Beach.

But then their lives would make a turn again when Jason, studying art history atDuke University, conducted a study of private museums. This was the early ’90s, and the Rubells had become such prolific collectors that many of their pieces sat in storage. Jason developed a plan to make the collection public, and he closed his galleries to help. In 1993, the family bought a former DEA warehouse, and turned it into the Rubell Family Collection/ Contemporary Art Foundation.

This was Wynwood long before it would become a neighborhood for art. “It was amazing to me that we could buy a 45,000- square-foot building for the price of a one- bedroom apartment,” Mera says. “We didn’t think about making a neighborhood. We didn’t think about what Wynwood would become. It was just what we could afford.”

Without the need to chase attendance figures, the Rubell Family Collection — and now Rubell Museum — has never sought the kind of attention that other institutions need. While the Pérez Museum saw a million visitors in its first three years in the new space, the Rubells see 40,000 a year, half of them coming through in early December during Miami Art Week.

Just like they did with their art and in buying the Wynwood warehouse, the Rubells had invested in something before it became valuable. They remained in Wynwood for 26 years, until they realized they could finance a much bigger museum by simply selling the old warehouse.

A new neighborhood

The new Rubell Museum in Allapattah will spread out on a 100,000-square-foot campus, half of it dedicated to 40 galleries. The rest is split between a bookstore, an art research library with 40,000 volumes and a Basque-style restaurant, LEKU. Selldorf Architects designed the new museum campus by transforming six former industrial buildings, with the courtyard full of native plants that are mostly threatened by habitat loss. Symbolic of how long the Rubells themselves have been collecting, the inaugural show features more than 300 works by 100 artists of the last 50 years.

The museum will also feature a rotating selection curated from the Rubells’ private collection. It’s a testament to a couple that donated a large chunk of everything they made to art — and also to how they built it.

Unlike so many art collectors, Mera says they never saw a new piece as a conquest. They never viewed going to galleries or events like Miami Art Week as shopping. And it was certainly never a way to invest. she says.

She likes to think about how for much of human history only kings and queens and aristocrats collected art. Before the first museums opened in the last couple centuries, most people had never seen a piece of art, let alone bought one, and so they never felt the way Mera says she still feels when buying a piece.

“It has always been for us about falling in love with art,” she says. “It’s something that has transformed our lives, and it’s always such a privilege that we’ve been able to do this.”

FASHION STYLING BY ELYSZE HELD / FASHION ASSISTING BY PANGEA KALI VIRGA AND SAMANTHA TORRES. PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT: FRANKLIN MONTENERO / PRODUCTION MANAGER: ANGELA BONILLA.