Fredric Snitzer lived through lean days but is now one of Miami’s most successful art dealers. Here, he sits in his gallery in front of Hernan Bas’ The Mysterious Circumstances Surrounding the Disappearance of Mr.Thomas Pennywhether (Former Bellhop of the St. Regis Inn, Ithaca, New York), 2008.

It’s a miraculous time that an artist can graduate from school and not have to wait on tables,” marvels Wynwood art dealer Fredric Snitzer. The change in fortunes hits close to home, and not simply because Snitzer’s eponymously named gallery is the one writing out the checks to so many fresh-faced standard-bearers of this past decade’s Miami art boom, from painter Hernan Bas to photographer Naomi Fisher and Duchampian prankster Bert Rodriguez.

For in 1976 Snitzer was also just another 26-year-old sculptor with a newly awarded M.F.A. degree in hand, eager to make his mark on the art world. Returning from Pennsylvania State University to his native Philadelphia, “I knew I shouldn’t stay. The same people were in the same bars, on the same barstools, as when I left for graduate school.” Then, as now, New York—the seeming center of the art universe—beckoned.

Yet lost to today’s warm nostalgia for those low-rent bohemian days is the gritty reality of pre-gentrification Manhattan. “New York in 1976 was a bad-ass place,” Snitzer recalls, sitting behind his desk inside his gallery, whose own surrounding hardscrabble streets are apt to induce a case of déjà vu. “It was tough for everybody then, and even worse for artists. To get a studio, to go knock on gallery doors, to make something happen—it was just overwhelming.” And even if you could attract the attention of the art-world doyen, critical buzz alone wasn’t going to pay the bills: The market for actually selling your work then oscillated between small and nonexistent. “I wasn’t up for the challenge,” he admits.

Instead, Snitzer and his girlfriend (now wife) headed for Miami. He had family here—a neurosurgeon brother his father hoped would help keep him from devolving into “a dirty hippie”—and a sense that South Florida was more manageable. But here, too, opportunities for emerging artists to earn a living outside academia were, well, still emerging. Snitzer found himself working in a framing shop, hawking canvases to match a customer’s living-room upholstery. “I have a master’s degree, and here I am making $4 an hour selling Paris street scenes,” he cries, visibly cringing at the memory. “I still remember the ads we ran: $19.95 for sofa-sized oils!”

Artwork by Snitzer-represented artists: Let That Be Our Last Battlefield, 2008, by Beatriz Monteavaro.

After nine months he struck out on his own, opening Opus Gallery in Coral Gables, occasionally working on his sculpture in a back room, hosting the odd exhibit for artist friends, and paying the rent with the sale of contemporary prints, imported furniture, anything. “I never sold sofa-sized oil paintings at Opus,” he laughs. “I did draw the line somewhere!”

As the ’80s progressed, and the lean times turned flush, Opus’ exhibitions became more frequent—and acclaimed. But Snitzer still saw himself as marking time: “Every time I had a kid, I’d run into the studio and make a new body of work just to re-establish myself. I didn’t want my children to have a father who was a businessman,” he jokes, distastefully rolling that final word around his tongue.

By the decade’s end, Opus was on solid footing—just in time for the art market to crash. But as galleries began turning out their lights all across Miami (and New York), Snitzer doubled down, changing the gallery’s name to his own and sharpening its focus. “These are tough times,” he told then Miami Herald art critic Helen Kohen in 1992 while announcing his new direction. “Time for me to show the tough art I love.” Looking back on that key moment now, he explains, “Opus was not me. Once I put my own name on it, then I had to be responsible for what I was showing in some bigger way.”

	iPod, 2008, by Naomi Fisher.

Cuba was calling: By 1992 the Soviet Union had collapsed, and with endemic food and power shortages looming, Fidel Castro’s regime seemed next in line for existential change. In the gap between the island’s hopes for the future and the cruel reality of the present emerged a host of artists prodding, pushing and challenging the limits of dissent. “All the time I was selling Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg prints, the work never spoke to me,” Snitzer explains. “I was looking for artists I could call my own.” He found them in Cuba.

“For years you’d go to my openings and no one spoke English. It was all Spanish,” he says of subsequent headline-grabbing shows spotlighting the work of such newly arrived Cuban artists as José Bedia, Arturo Cuenca, Tomas Esson, and Florencio Gelabert. Some arrived in Miami via Mexico, others thanks to Snitzer himself. “I’d write a letter inviting them to an exhibition, and they’d come and then defect.” After the third such defection, he began to suspect that Cuba’s visa-granting Ministry of Culture was encouraging artists to seek him out: “They were beginning to be a problem for the Cuban government. They were outspoken, doing a lot of political, anti-Castro work. They were probably as happy to get rid of them as we were happy to have them!”

Success came quickly in the early ’90s, both for Snitzer’s new stable of Cuban-exile artists and for Snitzer himself. The bulk of the contemporary market may have remained moribund, but Cuban art was now hot: Newsweek christened the Fredric Snitzer Gallery the “headquarters” of this burgeoning scene as free-spending collectors came calling and Absolut vodka launched a national advertising campaign around the designs of Cuenca, Esson and Gelabert.

Fredric Snitzer Gallery co-director Richard Arregui, manager Christopher Miro and Snitzer.

And then just as quickly as it mushroomed in popularity the art world moved on. Cuba became yesterday’s buzz—sales faltered and museum shows dried up. Some of these Cuban artists left Snitzer for ostensibly greener pastures with competing dealers; of that original crew only Bedia remains in Snitzer’s stable—and prominently in the public eye.

He places part of the blame on the fickle tastes of the avant-garde, as well as its penchant for radical chic: “When those artists were in Cuba, the left-wing establishment in New York loved them! Loved them! But as soon as they left Havana for Miami, nobody wanted anything to do with them. What changed was they weren’t as exotic and cool anymore. Once they got out of Cuba and wanted to be in a house as nice as their New York curator’s, then suddenly they weren’t so interesting.”

But Snitzer also ascribes responsibility to many of the artists themselves: “Capitalism was a complicated game for them,” Snitzer says with more than a hint of regret. “They’re all very talented, but they didn’t know how to navigate the game.” Some fell into an aesthetic rut, simply repeating whichever work of theirs sold, with ever diminishing returns. “Being a Latin American artist is a very narrow channel that ultimately became a ghetto. The ones who were able to transcend that market—who addressed bigger issues than just Fidel—were ultimately more successful.” And when the vicissitudes of the market didn’t take their toll, AIDS often stepped in. Some of that era’s most exciting Cuban figures, such as painter Carlos Alfonzo and conceptualist Félix González-Torres, were lost to the disease. For Snitzer, the remaining field no longer fired him up.

Untitled (Ingrid Bergman), 2008, by Bhakti Baxter.

“I didn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘Latin American art is at a dead end, I need to find something else.’ Something new was happening around me—and within me. It all happened simultaneously.” Or serendipitously. Snitzer had begun teaching part-time at the New World School of the Arts in 1998. There, he discovered an entirely new generation of artists—some might’ve been Latin in origin, but they were all looking north to New York. As far as social content, the personal may have been political—as with Hernan Bas’ fiercely homoerotic dandies and Naomi Fisher’s hypersexualized, jungle-shrouded self-portraits—but little else was. Ethnicity never entered into it, not for the Cuban-American Bas nor the Anglo Fisher. The reigning theory was now ambition.

“We just turned the page generation-wise. Younger kids don’t have any of these issues. Everybody’s everything,” Snitzer quips of the discoveries he added to his new roster. “They were a hungry little group. I was hungry, too, and we all fed each other. And now they’re feeding me in a different way.”

Not everyone was quite as sanguine about the attention from collectors that greeted Snitzer’s youthful turn, especially some of his older Anglo artists who’d weathered his Cuban stint, and now felt shunted aside for untested tyros half their age. Snitzer recalls one long-time associate who bitterly accused him of promoting “prenatal” painters. Another publicly considered an age-discrimination lawsuit. But as for whether this crop of frustrated veterans jumped or was pushed out the door, Snitzer counters, “If we’re not producing money for them, they shouldn’t be here. Some artists thought, Oh, he only wants to show young kids. That’s not so much me pushing my interest as there being an interest that celebrates it. The monetary connection is stupid, misleading, unfair—and a fact of life.”

Some Were Left Out, 2008, by Michael Vasquez.

Critics also took aim, charging that by scooping up so many artists at a tender age—many straight out of the New World School of the Arts B.F.A. program where they were his students—Snitzer was stunting their creative development.

That’s not a tack that sways him. “Hernan [Bas] had his first show with me when he was 19. Is that young? Absolutely. Now he’s 30. Show me the problem with his current work,” Snitzer argues. “There’s this assumption that if you leave an artist alone from age 20 to 30, they’ll somehow be better than if you put them in the middle of the war. Picasso had his first show when was 16. Did his work suffer for it?

“The thing that would be even stupider would be to take a really brilliant young artist and not show their work. What else are they going to do? Take a 22-year-old amazing artist who can’t afford to pay for his studio or buy another can of paint. You have an alternative space that’s going to give them a studio for a year? The criticism that I’m moving them too quickly doesn’t account for any alternative.”

He recalls a recent conversation with Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad, who visited Miami when her work was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Dark Continents” show earlier this fall: “She was commenting on how every artist she met in Miami was so market-driven—‘All they want to talk about is how they just had a sold-out show.’ She was proud of the fact that she doesn’t even have a gallery, but she has been showing at the Oslo museum and at not-for-profits.” However, with that kind of support system, Snitzer says, she doesn’t need a gallery representing her—especially with Norway’s generous grants to fall back on. “She’s 28, and she has been subsidized by the state since the day she finished art school. Give us that alternative.”

Then there are the whispers of competing Miami gallerists who resent Snitzer’s top-dog position. But they can at least take solace that Snitzer himself continues to feel every inch the outsider when he gazes at New York City’s Chelsea upper-tier dealers: “Matthew Marks’ front door costs more than my whole gallery,” he quips.

	Untitled, 2007, by Diego Singh.

In fact, for all the gatekeeping influence Snitzer supposedly wields as a member of Art Basel’s gallery-selection committee, he notes that he still hasn’t been tapped to participate in the main Art Basel fair in Switzerland. Likewise, London’s Frieze Art Fair has also continued to reject his applications—even while commissioning Bert Rodriguez, whom he represents exclusively, to serve up one of his “performances” for this past October’s fair attendees. (Rodriguez administered free foot massages on shopping-weary collectors, a wry comment on the artist/patron relationship.) To the rest of the world, it seems, for all of Miami’s growth as a new art city, we’re still Versace-clad yokels.

Nonetheless, Snitzer remains determined to make that upward career leap—and to do it with Miami artists. He has expanded to the Hamptons, launching the summertime Snitzer Arregui Project there with gallery co-director Richard Arregui, to better showcase his roster in the very backyard where New Yorkers live and play. Moreover, he was able to finally sway—at least partially—his biggest skeptic: his late father. As proof, he holds up a small wooden block upon which he has carved the inscription “MUMBO JUMBO.”

“My dad wept the day I went off to art school,” Snitzer says with a soft laugh at the memory, repeating the fervent question uttered by every well-meaning Jewish parent with artistic-minded offspring: How will you eat?

Decades later, his father took it upon himself to try to better understand his son’s lifelong devotion to this strange milieu, visiting Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art with a camera and a shoulder-slung tape recorder in hand, snapping photographs and recording his immediate reactions onto a cassette: “It’s so adorable, he sounds like he’s Edward R. Murrow: I’m entering the exhibition of George Segal, a sculptor. Now I’m looking at a sculpture of a kosher butcher shop. He goes through the whole exhibit and then says, I must still conclude that this is all nothing more than mumbo jumbo.”

Snitzer slams the block down on his desk, furiously shaking his head, both amazed at his father’s dismissive reaction to a canonical artist and genuinely moved by his willingness to try to make sense of his son’s passion: “He never quite understood me. The only thing he figured out was that somehow his neurosurgeon son was unhappy all his life, and I was basically very fulfilled. He never could figure out why, but he was glad it all worked out.”

E-mail: brett@oceandrive.com

Photographs courtesy of Fredric Snitzer Gallery.