In the ensuing wave of traveling museum shows and glowing press, as Cuban exiles such as the late Carlos Alfonzo and José Bedia grabbed the spotlight, 1980s and early-'90s Miami art became perceptually synonymous with Cuban-American art. Previous generations of talented Anglos were often erased from this vibrant new picture, instead remaining where they had always been -- at local colleges and universities, quietly teaching.

'The whole idea of `making it' as an artist was a very private thing,'' recalls sculptor Robert Thiele of his 1966 arrival in Miami to join the faculty at what was then Miami-Dade Community College, where he taught art for the next 30 years. At that time, Thiele says, Miami's art world began and ended at the campus grounds -- collectors who bought local work were virtually nonexistent. For artists like him, ``The only option was to teach. Unless you wanted to starve to death. There was no support structure.''

Indeed, though Thiele and fellow Miami-Dade professor Salvatore La Rosa were featured alongside each other in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, neither experienced the kind of career boost and sales boom that has greeted Miami's more recent Biennial picks -- such as Hernan Bas, Dara Friedman, Mark Handforth or William Cordova, one of Thiele's students.

ON AN ISLAND

Of course, to illustrate those changes further, Thiele has only to look to his daughter, Kristen, an accomplished painter. Although she received a full scholarship to the University of Miami in 1986, she found the notion of a life in academia creatively stifling and dropped out after two years. She subsequently moved into a studio on Miami Beach's then artist-dotted Española Way and enjoyed the productive atmosphere, ''but it didn't feel like any of it was reaching beyond Miami,'' she says. ''We were literally living on an island in every sense.'' Kristen moved north in 1992, eventually graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Yet when she returned to Miami in 2000, ''I was shocked!'' she says. ''In Chicago it seemed like everyone was playing in a band. In Miami it seemed like everyone now was an artist!'' The air was filled with more than paint-splattered pretensions; a homegrown, cross-ethnic market had finally emerged.

''To be able to pay my rent from selling my own work was such a novelty,'' Kristen says. ''It really made me feel hopeful about Miami for the first time.'' Growing national notices, as well as her solo show in Basel, Switzerland, this past June would seem to confirm that sentiment.

Now the Miami art world has moved so far off campus that much of the excellent work of visual-art faculty and M.F.A. students at UM and Florida International University often is ignored while the crowds flock to Wynwood gallery shows. On a note of ''We're still here!'', UM's art department has even opened a Wynwood exhibition space. The school also administers and co-funds the Design District-based Art + Research -- a ''post-graduate'' institution spearheaded by local developer and collector Craig Robins. Its 2009 launch is bound to further overshadow UM's M.F.A. program.

''The art scene has definitely passed on from the universities,'' Kohen agrees, but despite its greater public exposure and a corresponding swarm of TV cameras that serve up everything from charmingly giddy profiles on the Beach's Plum cable channel to Art Basel reports on CNN, she still finds a crucial intellectual component missing.

''Visual art is not entertainment,'' she insists. ``It's philosophy.''

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