The institution known for almost two decades as HistoryMiami Museum is changing its name to the Museum of Miami to reflect a countywide “museum without walls” mission.
The name change is only a small part of a deeper transformation for one of the oldest cultural institutions continuously operating in South Florida, and housed inside the Miami-Dade Cultural Center area downtown on West Flagler Street.
“It’s more than a name change. That’s just the visible part,” says Natalia Crujeiras, chief executive officer of Museum of Miami. “It’s really about a deeper shift about how we think a museum can really, truly serve a city like ours.”
The shift follows three years of research and listening sessions in neighborhoods across Miami-Dade — from Homestead to Overtown and Liberty City to Miami Beach, according to Crujeiras. The recurring message was that HistoryMiami Museum “made a lot of people feel like they didn’t belong here, or our content was not for them.”
For some, the word “history” was the stop gap.
“The word history felt sometimes distant or like a school assignment,” she explains. “Or for many people that come from other places, there was a deeper connection for the places of their home countries or the places they relocated from.”
While she maintains that the museum will still serve as a repository of the area’s history, it will broaden its accessibility.
“In many ways it’s kind of we’re expanding our scope, rather than limiting it to one tool or one discipline,” she says. “History is a core component of what the museum does, but we also care about culture and art and community; all of the things that make Miami, Miami.”
The rebrand, says Crujeiras, is rooted in a bigger question: What does it mean to be a Miamian, and how do people feel they belong here?
“Miami is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic cities in the world, and that diversity makes us exciting and dynamic, but it also comes with a cost. Neighborhoods change quickly. Community shifts. New residents arrive, and many are not connected to Miami. For many it’s hard to answer a question like, ‘What is a Miamian? How do I fit in this place?’”
One of the most concrete shifts is how the Museum of Miami will show up for residents. She says that there shouldn’t be an expectation that people will make their way downtown to visit the museum.
“We realized that we can’t continue to wait for people to come to us only,” Crujeiras says. “What we heard is that Miamians want us to come to them as well.”
The museum will keep its West Flagler Street home as “a hub, a place where you can access our collections and see our extraordinary artifacts” — but the new strategy is to get out into the community.
“We want to have programs, experiences, exhibitions across the entire county.”
The “museum without walls” model was well underway before the name change was announced.
“We just had a program in Miami Dade College’s Homestead campus, connected to our current exhibition, but we brought the program to that community, and it’s really leaning into that, in making sure that every place in Miami can be a vehicle to take our stories. We want to be wherever people live, learn and gather.”
Even as it moves forward, the Museum of Miami maintains its deep roots.
Originally formed as the Historical Association of Southern Florida and founded in 1940, it moved through several homes and evolutions before becoming HistoryMiami Museum and, now, Museum of Miami. The original name was the Historical Association of Southern Florida.
“We began with collecting little things in a storage cabinet at the University of Miami,” says Crujeiras. Over time, it became a collecting institution and in the 1980s, Miami-Dade County built the Cultural Plaza to house the main library and what was then the Center for Fine Arts and the then Historical Association of Southern Florida.
Its name was changed to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in 1962 and then HistoryMiamiMuseum in 2010.
The museum holds what Crujeiras calls “the largest leading archive about Miami.”
“We have the first photos, the glass negatives, the first images that were taken of Miami in the late 1800s; letters of exchange between Henry Flagler and Julia Tuttle to convince him to build the railroad. We have over two million photographs and more than 40,000 artifacts.”
There are also emotional tales reflected in installations. “We have rafts used by Cuban refugees and Haitian refugees. That shows really the trauma and the risk and the hope and opportunity for so many of our community members that had to have been forced to relocate seeking freedom.”
And one of the most popular attractions is the electric trolley from the 1920s.
“It was the main vehicle for public transportation in the 1920s, which happened to be segregated. We can have a conversation about that part of our history in an artifact where you can actually get in and sit down. It is very personal and very emotional to try to put yourself in the experience of people that came before us.”
As part of its new chapter, the Museum of Miami will host a rare traveling exhibition from the National Archives.
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