Bal Harbour Art Night

Photography by Nathan Valentine on February 8th, 2012 in Arts, Lifestyle

Ruth & Marvin Sackner, & Cathy Leff

Miami Beach, FL – February 8, 2012 – “A Collecting Life” was a conversation with Marvin and Ruth Sackner, creators of the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, the world’s largest private collection of concrete/visual poetry from twentieth century art movements as Italian Futurism, Russian and Eastern European Avant Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Tabu-Dada, Lettrisme, and Ultra-Lettrisme. Over sixty-thousand objects from around the world speak volumes about a compulsive and joyful life of collecting art, poetry, and artist books.

Also a part of the discussion was Cathy A. Leff, Director of The Wolfsonian at Florida International University, an internationally recognized museum and research center in Miami Beach. The museum promotes the study and appreciation of the persuasive power of art and design, engaging audiences in thinking about the active role design plays in human affairs. The museum focuses on its extraordinary collection of predominantly North American and European artifacts of the 1885-1945 era. The collection is comprised of more than 120,000 decorative, design, propaganda, and fine arts; architectural elements and archives; works-on-paper; textiles; and rare books and ephemera, donated to Florida International University in 1997 by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.