Silvia Karman Cubiña has a museum to run. Amid this nation's monumental changes and multiple challenges, Cubiña, 43, has taken the reins of Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art. She does so at a time, as evidenced by the latest New York auction results, when the high-flying art world has begun to land among the potholes and bumpy patches of our crumbling economy.

The nonprofit institution's recently hired executive director and chief curator, who started Oct. 1, is part of a new breed of museum leaders who must navigate an increasingly complex global art world, not only as historian and curator, but marketer, fundraiser, administrator, and even bureaucrat. As Philippe de Montebello told the press when he retired this year after three decades heading New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art: ''The job doesn't even resemble what it once was.'' (Still, he noted in October that deflating art prices can only help art museums, despite the financial strife all nonprofits face because, ``We're not sellers; we're buyers.'')

According to Miami-based collector Rosa de la Cruz, Cubiña is up to the challenge. ''Silvia did a great job,'' says de la Cruz, who hired her to direct the now-closed Design District venue she founded several years ago with art impresario Craig Robins. ''Not only did she support the artists who were defining our contemporary art culture, she was also great at networking in Latin America, Europe, and the United States.'' De la Cruz sees Cubiña as a well-traveled, well-informed ''administrator, director and curator'' who's been a juror for several important art shows. ''If you go to Europe and mention her name, she's well-known,'' de la Cruz adds. ``She understands the global scene and she has a vision because of that. She can take the museum to another level.''

The Miami-born, Puerto Rico-raised art historian returned to Miami with her husband and children in 2001, running de la Cruz and Robins' Moore Space until earlier this year. Her jump from an alternative contemporary space with three full-time employees, five contracted ones and a $350,000 budget to overseeing the Bass Museum's $3 million budget and eight employees -- just two months before our region's biggest art event of the year -- might seem gutsy. (The 33,000-square-foot Bass also has long-term plans to add another 35,000.) But beyond her almost 20 years as a curator in the United States and abroad, Cubiña spent this year bolstering her skills as one of 10 fellows chosen to inaugurate the New York-based Center for Curatorial Leadership program, initiated to give talented curators with a true passion for art the real-world business acumen they'll need to thrive in their profession.

''What I have learned I can immediately put into effect,'' Cubiña, also a finalist for the 2007 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, told the New York Times. ``Things like how you professionalize your operation, or how you implement a system of responsibilities and delegation of duties.''

She adds that Diane Camber, who spent almost three decades guiding and building the Bass before her 2007 retirement, also ``has offered to be a resource, and I'm very appreciative of that.''

So, with Art Basel primed to set up shop again in Miami Beach and art folks wondering how the corporate meltdown will affect the annual fair, Cubiña took time from prepping the Bass's December exhibitions -- Russian Dreams and 47 Undertakings, a project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes -- to discuss her new place in South Florida's art landscape.

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