A Miami space for two monumental artworks is scrubbed. Where will the masterpieces go?

Available: Corten steel artwork by sculptor Richard Serra. Weight 600,000 pounds; length and height app. 200 feet by 15 feet. Must have football-field-size space to show. Owner will pay shipping.

After years of planning, prominent Miami-based mutual-fund manager and art collector Bruce Berkowitz says he’s given up trying to build a museum on Biscayne Boulevard tailor-made around a pair of immersive, monumental works. They are the legendary Serra’s “Passage of Time,” which consists of two undulating, parallel walls of steel for viewers to walk between, and James Turrell’s contemplative “Aten Reign” light sculpture, which requires a 100-foot-tall rotunda to install.

And so he’s willing to loan either or both pieces long term to an art institution with the space to show them off and the logistical resources to meet the artists’ exacting specifications for their exhibition and maintenance.

So far, Berkowitz said, there is “some interest” — all outside Miami — but no definitive takers.

That’s no surprise, he noted.

“Aten Reign,” designed for the spiraling interior of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where its 2013 exhibition set attendance records, requires a building specifically engineered for it. Serra’s conditions, meanwhile, include an enclosed courtyard exclusively dedicated to its exhibition as well as approval of the location by the 82-year-old artist or his representatives.

James Turrell’s “Aten Reign” light sculpture drew record crowds to New York’s Guggenheim Museum during its 2013 showing.

“We’ve got to find somewhere to place it,” Berkowitz said while describing the Turrell, though the same applies to the Serra. “I just want to find an area where people want it. It’s not so easy.”

The under-the-radar outreach, Berkowitz said in an interview, came after he and his family decided last year to reorient the resources of their Fairholme Foundation back to its original goals of supporting healthcare and education-related initiatives, at least partly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation had created a nonprofit spin-off, Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation, for the museum project.

“My conclusion was, with everything going on, the last thing the world needed is another private museum,” Berkowitz said. “We decided to pivot and start to give money away, and to start to think about placing the pieces that we do have elsewhere.”

That includes, by the way, some smaller pieces in the family collection that are in storage in Miami and available to local institutions for display.

“We’d like to get the pieces seen and we will lend them out, at our cost,” Berkowitz said.

At least one leading local light fervently hopes Berkowitz can steer either the Serra or the Turrell — preferably both — to a Miami institution.

Bruce Berkowitz, head of Miami-based Fairholme Capital Management.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to convince him these artworks should stay in our community,” said arts entrepreneur and collector Dennis Scholl, president and CEO of Oolite Arts in Miami, who formerly served on the Berkowitz Contemporary board. “We’ve already had some conversations about it.

“Each of these objects are some of the most extraordinary pieces that could land in a community. Miami would be a good home for either of them. I will never stop trying to make that happen.”

This marks the second time Berkowitz has halted the museum effort, which he launched in 2014 after purchasing vacant land in Edgewater at Biscayne and Northeast 26th Street. An initial design by Miami design giant Arquitectonica for an anvil-shaped building failed to pass muster with city of Miami planning and zoning officials. A modified design did win preliminary approval in 2015, but would still have required extensive public hearings and review. A frustrated Berkowitz put the effort on hold.

Two years later, he revived the initiative with a new, also unconventional but scaled-back conceptual design by highly regarded Miami architect Rene Gonzalez, before again quietly pulling the plug last year after spending what he described as “a lot of money” on the stillborn project.

The museum, to be financed entirely by the Fairholme Foundation, would have been the fifth public showcase in Miami for a private family collection. But while the idea won accolades from some leading figures in Miami’s art scene, Berkowitz said he was “surprised at the lack of interest” in the initiative locally.

A rendering of a conceptual design by Rene Gonzalez Architects of Miami for a private museum on Biscayne Boulevard for mutual-fund manager and art collector Bruce Berkowitz, who says he has opted not to pursue the project.

The Turrell piece, consisting of an array of color-shifting LED lights, was disassembled and sits in a New Jersey warehouse. After purchasing the Serra sculpture, made in Germany and exhibited in a convention center hall in Doha, Qatar, Berkowitz said he had it shipped to the nearest port to Miami that could handle the ship it traveled on — in Jacksonville, where it remains. Getting it out of there, he noted, would require several special trucks because normal 18-wheeler trailers can’t handle the bulk and weight of the sculpture, made up of several sections.

Berkowitz said the foundation gave some of the money earmarked for its project to half a dozen other unnamed museums “that needed help,” in part because of the pandemic’s impact, before concluding its resources were best used to meet urgent needs at home.

“We concluded we were heading in the wrong direction,” he said. “There are many ways to do good.”