Arts pioneer Ellie Schneiderman, founder of ArtCenter/South Florida, dies at 80
The Miami Herald once celebrated the 10th anniversary of the South Florida Arts Center on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road Mall by noting how it recast the mall and returned it to a destination hot spot.
Lincoln Road Mall in the 1950s was a street where you “dressed up to shop,” the Herald’s late art critic Helen Kohen noted, adding that its decline into the 1980s took it from “haute couture to ‘Secondhand Rose.’”
That is, until 1983 when First Class Eleanor Schneiderman got hold of $62,000 in federal money and convinced the Miami Beach Commission to trust her to convert three blocks of deserted storefronts into what would become the South Florida Arts Center — later renamed ArtCenter/South Florida.
Schneiderman, who died April 18 at age 80 after a long illness at her Coral Gables home, envisioned an arts center modeled after the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia.
Molding Miami-Dade’s arts communities
In 2000, Schneiderman, alongside business partner Stanley Levine, also founded ArtSouth in Homestead and opened its doors a year later when few believed an arts community could thrive in South Miami-Dade.
“In 2000, there was no arts venue in the area and ArtSouth was meant to serve people from Kendall South to Keys North,” Schneiderman told the Miami Herald in 2010. “People said I was crazy to start something like this in Homestead, but that’s what they also said when I started the South Florida Arts Center at Lincoln Road.”
She saw the Homestead venue, which closed in 2013, as well as the original Art Center/South Florida in South Beach, as “a living museum because you see the art and the people who do the work. You do not get that at a gallery,” Schneiderman told the Herald in 2006.
Schneiderman, a potter turned pioneer, also is credited as founder of Oolite Arts because the arts organization sprung out of Art Center/South Florida. Her idea, begun more than 36 years ago, was to use that Lincoln Road support center — a $30 million facility in Miami’s Little River neighborhood will open in 2022 — to help visual artists secure free studio space, find exhibition opportunities, obtain direct support and connect to programming to advance their careers.
“Under Ellie’s visionary leadership, what was then ArtCenter/South Florida managed to buy several buildings, providing a dedicated space for the arts that has been credited with catalyzing the resurgence of Lincoln Road. Over the years, her work has provided hundreds of Miami’s visual artists with the affordable space they need to create and bring art to life,” Oolite Arts said in a statement.
Oolite President and CEO Dennis Scholl said of Schneiderman: “So much of what we we are able to do as a visual artists support organization comes from Ellie’s foresight. The artists in our community will forever benefit from her initial instinct to ‘help artists help themselves.’”
An astute businesswoman
Schneiderman was as astute at business as she was at molding clay.
“Ellie was a committed artist with a grand vision beyond her work. Her astute purchase of property for the South Florida Arts Center on Lincoln Road, at a time when the area had fallen on hard times, has left an amazing legacy for the visual arts community here,” said Elisa Turner, a Miami-based art critic and journalist who wrote for the Miami Herald.
“That legacy is sure to continue boldly into the 21st century, even after the pandemic finally leaves us. Many artists here remember her fondly as a mentor, which is further tribute to the powerful example as she has set for all of us,” Turner said.
Two of those once dilapidated storefronts sold for $88 million in 2014.
The Ellies Awards
Oolite Arts named its annual awards program, The Ellies, Miami’s Visual Arts Awards in 2018, after its founder. The fund grants Miami-Dade visual artists $500,000 each year.
The Ellies’ third awards will begin accepting applications on June 2. There will be three awards, ranging from $2,500 to a $75,00 stipend. The program also will provide K-12 teachers with $5,000 in funds to help them enrich their classroom instruction.
Oolite, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, has offered visual artists who live in Miami-Dade County the opportunity to apply for up to $500 in relief through the Oolite Arts Relief Fund.
Schneiderman and family
Born Oct. 27, 1939, in Brooklyn, Schneiderman found her life’s work in South Florida.
Her son Eric Schneiderman, in a Facebook post, recalls how his mom’s art made her cool in the eyes of his friends.
“I remember being in elementary school and my mom would come to pick me up in her VW bug covered in clay and I would be so embarrassed and worried about what my friends would think. The funny thing is my friends thought my mom was the coolest because she got to play in mud all day long.
“I miss the days of walking in to her studio hearing her rocking out and making beautiful pieces of pottery,” he wrote.
“Growing up, I had the great fortune to have parents who were very passionate about the well-being of others, always striving for knowledge, and who had a love for the arts. This legacy my parents shared with their children, grand-children, other family, friends, and colleagues,” her son wrote.
In the 1970s, Schneiderman taught and exhibited her ceramics at Grove House in Coconut Grove and turned it into a hangout for local artists. The Grove, after all, was long a community that had been a haven for creative talents — such as the folk music scene in the 1960s that helped David Crosby, Jimmy Buffett and Bobby Ingram develop their careers. Schneiderman was a catalyst for the visual artists to do the same a decade later.
In 1979, the state bought the land The Grove House sat on and turned it into the parking lot for the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Schneiderman wasn’t happy.
“Artists go to affordable areas and act as catalysts for revitalization of an area,” she said. “Later, they are out-priced and have to move again.” Schneiderman told the Herald in 2006.
Five years after she lost The Grove, the art center in South Beach was to be the start of her lasting legacy.
“We started the Lincoln Road project not because it would benefit the community, but because I thought it would benefit the artists,” Schneiderman told the Herald in 2006.
In 1992, Schneiderman resigned as full-time director of the center so she could concentrate on making her own art again.
Miami Beach’s rebirth
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“The Center was the true beginning of not exclusively Lincoln Road’s contemporary renaissance, but also Miami Beach’s renewal,” wrote George Fishman on the center’s 30th anniversary for the Miami Herald in 2014. “The Miami City Ballet, New World Symphony, Art Basel and untold millions in retail commerce owe much to the Center.”
Jane Harris was one of the first artists to take a studio at the sprawling center’s storefronts in the 800, 900 and 1000 blocks of the mall, beginning in 1984.
“The Art Center/South Florida provided the opportunity for me to make art night and day within a creative community in a tropical paradise, an incubator for ideas and like-minded friendships,” Harris said in Fishman’s feature for the Herald.
“Lincoln Road isn’t Dadeland,” Schneiderman told a reporter in 1990, when about 80 artists rented subsidized studios in 22 of the storefronts. “Buying a painting is lot different from buying a pair of shoes. However, the artists are starting to develop a following, and each year it’s getting better.”
Haitian-born Edouard Duval-Carrié was another early tenant when he moved to Miami Beach and became internationally recognized. He later helped his old home celebrate its 30th.
‘Ellie’s presence was always there’
Asandra Lamb, who has exhibited nationwide and now lives in Coconut Creek, worked in a large space in the back of the 924 building for seven years, from 1992 to 1999. “It was my very first art studio and had a window facing the alleyway with natural light — a feature most studios didn’t have,” she said.
There was something special about that lived-in space, she believes.
“It appeared to be clean from first glance, but as I began to move things around behind shelving that was left behind, I discovered the walls and shelves all had a thin residue of clay coating it. It turns out that the studio had belonged to Ellie, who was of course, a clay artist. I never did manage to clean up all that clay so in some ways, Ellie’s presence was always there,” Lamb said.
“Most of my South Florida Art Center friends, and I, agree that the period spent at Art Center/South Florida during the 1990s, was the best time of our lives,” Lamb said. “We found our creative family and many of us didn’t just work side by side in studios, we celebrated holidays and birthdays and anniversaries together. Ellie helped revitalize Lincoln Road, and opened the way for Miami to be seen as a viable international arts city, which eventually led to the success of Art Basel Miami.”
Schneiderman was ‘a doer’
On the fifth anniversary of that center in 1988, Schneiderman seemed to reveal the secret to her success when she told the Herald, “Ideas are a dime a dozen. I’m a doer.”
Schneiderman’s survivors include her husband of 60 years, Dr. Neil Schneiderman; her children Jon and Eric Schneiderman and Laura Redwine and five grandchildren. There is no information on services.
This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 5:02 PM.
