Reflecting on last month’s Art Basel Miami Beach and Miami Art Week — and all the art that abounded in the Magic City and across the bay throughout the period — the continued popularity of the Pop Art movement that sprung up in the mid-20th century is undeniable. Anyone who took part in the week’s activities could easily glean that the lasting impression it has made on artists and other denizens of the art world, locally and around the globe, is beyond palpable, as is the keen interest in it from art enthusiasts and the general viewing public.
Just prior to the annual art bacchanalia descending upon our shores, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, home to the vast and diverse contemporary art collection of real estate developer, philanthropist, and renowned collector Martin Margulies, opened its new exhibition for the 2025-2026 season, “Pop Art: Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, Chamberlain, Segal.” The collection has long been internationally recognized as one of the most significant collections of its kind, containing works by some of the preeminent artists of the 20th and 21st centuries — think Willem de Kooning, Anselm Kiefer, Joan Miró, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, and Frank Stella, to name only a very few, along with the titans featured in its current Pop Art exhibition.
Margulies, with his longtime curator Katherine Hinds, opened the Warehouse in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood in 1999 after a year-long search for a space to present his collection. Veritable pioneers in Wynwood at that time — well before there was even a thought of the Wynwood Arts District that would later blossom — it has since grown into a 50,000 square foot space producing dynamic seasonal exhibitions from October to April that showcase works from the collection, special exhibitions, and educational programming. The collection also has a substantive international loan program.
Hinds, who has been with the collection for more than four decades, and who developed this season’s Pop Art exhibition with Margulies, gave insight into how it evolved.
“Each year in January, we discuss which exhibitions would be interesting for us to produce for the next season,” Hinds said. “We decided to install another Pop Art exhibition as a follow-up to our 2017 Pop Art show. As is our practice, we brought several works from the private collection that have never been seen publicly in Miami before.”
These include five of Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreen box creations — the Brillo soap pad, Campbell’s Tomato Juice, Del Monte Peach Halves, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, presented together in a commanding 6-foot-high tower.
The boxes come with historical provenances as interesting as their visual appeal, from artist and Warhol confidante Marisol Escobar, and Warhol’s own family, to the late curators Alan R. Solomon and David Whitney, and dealer Leo Castelli, who had initially declined representing Warhol.
In addition to being shown here to the public for the first time, the selection of the nine works in the exhibition reflects the Warehouse’s strong commitment to education.
“One of the factors that is very important to us is that our exhibitions incorporate art historical points of reference,” said Hinds. “We feel this is essential for the young students who visit us at the Warehouse. The decade of the 1960s proved very influential with both the Pop Art movement in America and the Arte Povera movement in Italy. There is so much contemporary art in Miami that we think it is imperative to illustrate these influences. Certainly, the 20th century avant-garde movements of Pop Art and Arte Povera were major influences on the art of today.”
Hinds elaborated more on this when asked about her thoughts on the impact and inspiration of the artists in the Pop Art exhibition on today’s 21st century emerging artists, or even those who are now mid-career or established but who became so after the rise and recognition of the Pop artists in the exhibition.
“I am not sure about inspiration, but certainly the Pop artists of the 1960s influenced art in the decades that followed,” Hinds said. “The introduction of everyday subject matter, mass media images, and commercial products was very radical at the time. It was a shift away from the internal, heroic preoccupation of the abstract artists of the 1950s into a subject matter of common, everyday ‘low’ objects.”
The curation of the show was not only illustrative, but seemingly prescient too, at least in relation to recent national events and two of the works on display, a fact neither Hinds nor Margulies could have imagined when planning it last January. More specifically, the show opened in November as the United States was ending its longest federal government shutdown ever, and amid the very real threat of a large number of Americans — families with children and the elderly — going hungry without receiving essential food assistance via the SNAP program. And what happens to be a focal point of the gallery room as you enter the exhibition, but George Segal’s monumental bronze sculpture, “Depression Bread Line.”
Fast forward to a couple of weeks later when it was announced the federal government was not going to recognize Dec. 1 as World AIDS Day, turning its back on the disease as the Reagan administration did for much of the 1980s. In this instance, the show has James Rosenquist’s “The Serenade for the Doll after Claude Debussy, Gift Wrapped Doll #1,” a painting the artist created as a meditation on the complexities of the AIDS crisis.
And as artists themselves often convey messages or viewpoints through their works, in producing an exhibition, art and cultural foundations and institutions do similarly. Hinds spoke to what the Warehouse wants people to take away from their visit.
“There is no main message, really,” Hinds said. “We want visitors to come and enjoy the exhibitions. How can you not have a good time with such iconic American images as a hot dog or a box of Heinz Ketchup? We want creative people to know that there is great art in the city after Art Basel week. Our perspective is: let the viewer come to their own conclusions.”