Three years after abandoning plans to build a private museum in Miami for his collection of works by Richard Serra, James Turrell, Anish Kapoor, Jean-Michel Basquiat and others, the hedge-fund manager Bruce Berkowitz is building an art park in northwestern Florida around his prized Serra sculpture. The Longleaf Art Park, located on 15.5 lush acres in Walton County, will include a pavilion designed by OLI Architecture, which worked with Serra before his death in March, to house the late artist’s 217ft-long steel sculpture Passage of Time (2014).
The park is being created by Berkowitz’s non-profit, the Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation (BCF), though its operations will be overseen by the local Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County. “The importance of access to a piece of work as significant as Richard Serra’s Passage of Time cannot be overstated, and the impact it will have on our local artists, residents, students and visitors will be limitless and lasting for generations,” Jennifer Steele, the alliance’s executive director, said in a statement.
For now, the snaking, 13.5ft-tall, 540,000-pound Serra sculpture is the only art destined for the Longleaf Art Park, which will also feature a pond, boardwalks, landscaped mounds and an outdoor event space. The park is scheduled to open to the public in 2026.
Rendering of the Passage of Time Pavilion as seen from the Longleaf Art Park’s pond OLI Architecture
The choice of site for Berkowitz’s new art space, around 600 miles northwest of the planned location of his abandoned Miami museum—about as far away as it could be while still within the state of Florida—might seem surprising but is no accident. The Longleaf Art Park will be situated within Watersound Origins, a large real-estate development being built by the St. Joe Company. Berkowitz is the chairman of the publicly traded company’s board of directors and at one time owned at least 40% of its outstanding shares, according to Forbes. (Fairholme Capital Management, the hedge fund Berkowitz founded, remains headquartered in Miami.)
Berkowitz’s plans for a Miami museum, first announced in 2014, involved a new building in the Edgewater neighbourhood designed specifically to house the enormous Serra sculpture and Turrell’s towering light installation Aten Reign (2013), which was the centrepiece of the artist’s survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. After municipal and county officials in Miami initially blocked Berkowitz’s project, it was eventually greenlit in 2015. Originally, the local office of international architecture firm Arquitectonica was attached to the project; by 2018, the Miami-based architecture firm Rene Gonzalez Architects was leading it. Construction on the 45,000 sq. ft museum was expected to start in 2020 and be complete by 2023, then Covid-19 hit. In early 2021, Berkowitz quietly scuttled the project.
A BCF spokesperson says the foundation has no other projects underway in Walton County, Miami or elsewhere. “There are no current plans for a BCF-owned space in Miami, but BCF continues to work with numerous Miami-based arts organisations,” the spokesperson said.
While the BCF museum would have been one of several private museums devoted to contemporary art in Miami—alongside the Rubell Museum, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Craig Robins Collection, Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23 and others—the Longleaf Art Park will be a relatively unique attraction on its stretch of the Florida panhandle, where the nearest significant cultural institution is the Man in the Sea Museum in Panama City Beach, a museum devoted to the history of diving.
