Arsht Awards: Adrienne Arsht  

by Jake Cline

Adrienne Arsht knows what you’re thinking: What a coincidence that the recipient of the first Arsht Angel Award at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s inaugural Arsht Awards is … Adrienne Arsht.

“I’m sure, ‘Yes, we have to give you the first award,’ ” she says during a recent phone interview, clearly enjoying the irony. “My name is on the building, now it’s on the award, and it’s also on the garbage cans.”

Well-played jokes aside, when Arsht returns to the performing arts center that bears her name for its annual gala on April 13, she says she will be applauding not just the other Arsht Awards honorees, but “the angels” who have supported the Center and its role in Miami’s becoming a major city. “I’m so proud that the community has accepted and taken on my vision of what matters,” she says, “and I look forward to seeing other angels doing equally valuable things.”

A little more than 16 years ago, Arsht’s vision for the Center and its downtown neighborhood was shared by precious few. As detailed in Les Standiford’s 2018 book Center of Dreams, which chronicles the decades-long effort to create a major performing-arts center in Miami, the then-named Carnival Center was in trouble just one year after its October 2006 grand opening. Ticket sales were below projections, and supporters of the project were losing patience and faith.

Then, on January 10, 2008, came an announcement, Standiford writes, “that changed everything”: Adrienne Arsht, a Miami-based banker, lawyer and philanthropist, was donating $30 million to the Performing Arts Center Trust. A member of the trust and foundation boards, Arsht was a longtime advocate for the Center whose previous gifts included $250,000 for “Water Scores,” the plaza fountains designed by British installation artist Anna Valentina Murch. Now, the venue would get a new name — the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County — and a second chance.

“It is impossible to overstate the difference that Adrienne Arsht made in stabilizing the center,” Lawrence Wilker, interim CEO at the time of the 2008 donation, told Standiford in Center of Dreams. “Without her, I am not sure the place would still be operating today.”

(Adrienne Arsht attends the 16th Anniversary Arsht Center Gala in 2022. Photo by WorldRedEye.com.)

Arsht has spoken often of the role the arts play in uniting, defining and elevating communities, and she notes that performing arts centers are essential characteristics of world-class cities along with airports, school systems and hospitals. Arsht is deeply involved with the best arts institutions in the country, including the Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kennedy Center. She is also a major donor of the Smithsonian Institution; the international-affairs organization the Atlantic Council, for which she founded the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center; and a host of other arts, education, medical and legal organizations.

Nonetheless, Arsht recalls that her $30 million donation to Miami’s performing arts center was met by some quarters of the philanthropic community with indifference — and worse. “There really wasn’t anybody at that time who felt that the performing arts center mattered,” she says. “I don’t know that it was opposition, because nobody was going to stop me, but nobody cared, either. It was really a total lack of interest.”

Others questioned why someone of her means would donate such a large sum to a performing arts venue and not to what they perceived as a more worthy cause. “It was pretty wicked,” Arsht says of feedback she encountered in online news reports of the donation. “You know, ‘Why did you give to that? Why don’t you feed children?’ or ‘That’s a waste of money.’ Yes, all those things ended up in the comments. I guess it’s all been erased. I should have saved it.”

Then, as now, Arsht found an object lesson in the apathy and trolling. “I say, as the French, ‘Vive la différence,’ because what if everyone thought, you know, saving chickens was the most important thing — which I sometimes think it is around Miami, given how many chickens run in the streets. It’s a good thing that everybody has a different priority,” Arsht says. “Because that’s why we can cover everything. Somebody wants to save the mangroves, and somebody else says, ‘Why do that when you could try to fight the cause of blindness?’ Or, ‘Leave the mangroves alone and save the peacocks.’ To me, it’s a good thing that each of us is wired a little differently in what our passion is.”

(Adrienne Arsht is joined by Rita Moreno, Chita Rivera, Gloria Estefan and other performers in 2017 at the Arsht Center's 11th Annual Gala – A Celebration of Women in the Arts. Photo by Sergi Alexander.) 

At the 2022 Arsht Center gala, Arsht brought attention to another of her passions with an $11 million donation to the Center’s endowment keyed to establishing a fully paid internship program. (Foundation Board chairman Eric G. Johnson contributed an additional $1 million that evening.) In 2020, Arsht created a similar program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a $5 million donation.

“I think that an internship should be a step up, not a stumbling block,” Arsht says. She recalls how her father, Samuel Arsht, was offered an unpaid position at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the oldest legal journal in the United States and a pathway to Supreme Court clerkships and jobs with the nation’s top law firms.

“But my father was poor and had to earn money to pay for law school,” Arsht says. “And so he could not accept the Law Review internship. He commuted back to Wilmington [Delaware] to teach students. He hitchhiked, because he had to earn money. And it just obviously is so very clear in my mind that an unpaid job opportunity is hardly an opportunity.”

In 2022, Arsht sold her bayfront estate in Coconut Grove, which includes a home she had built in 1999 and a second mansion constructed in 1913 by then Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Now living in Chevy Chase, Maryland on a historic, 19th century estate she has restored and renamed “The Folly,” Arsht says that, as she did in Miami, she continues to search for solutions to problems that go overlooked or unaddressed.

“I’m not somebody who thinks about what I’m missing,” she says, dismissing the idea that she might feel nostalgic for the quarter-century she spent in Miami. “I focus on what’s available and what more I can do. What I feel about Miami but also the Arsht Center is I am thrilled that there are now others who see its value. It was important that the community understand its value and support it. And they have, and they do, and my role is to start something and let others take it to another level.”

(Top: Adrienne Arsht attends the 2016 Arsht Center Gala. Arsht Center file photo.)