Thom Collins, the new director of the Miami Art Museum, has a background in New York sites. (Patrick Farrell / The Miami Herald)

During this first tour of New Work Miami 2010, an eclectic Miami Art Museum exhibition of paintings, photography, video and sculpture from dozens of artists that was conceived as a snapshot of the region’s growing art scene, incoming director and art historian Thom Collins suddenly knew he was in the right place.

“I think of a museum as a library and a laboratory,” Collins said Wednesday, glancing at works from Miami’s Bert Rodriguez, known for his playful and humorous installations, and Adler Guerrier, whose mixed-media works confront urban life, race, class and memory.

“This place, this art is the center of such a rich cultural nexus,” said Collins, 41, who takes charge Monday at the modest downtown museum that’s poised to expand rapidly as it readies for a $200 million move to its new bayside home designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.

“It’s a livable city, an affordable city — unlike New York — where artists can devote their time to making art rather than mere survival,” said Collins, who most recently directed the Neuberger Museum of Art at State University of New York at Purchase, north of Manhattan. “And it’s a great, pregnant moment at MAM.”

Collins, who replaces interim director John Wetenhall and succeeds Terry Riley, an architect and former chief curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is well aware of the challenges he faces.

“Miami is the only major city in the U.S. that doesn’t have a major art museum of its own. I think this is particularly unfortunate,” Collins said. “But it’s a city and a county that seems unusually committed to supporting cultural endeavors.”

If all goes as planned, MAM, now a two-story building with a $5.5 million to $6 million operating budget, a 632-piece permanent collection and 33,000 square feet of space — a little less than half carved out for exhibitions — will move into a snazzy 200,000-square-foot facility with 120,000 square feet of programmable space where, museum leaders hope, its holdings will multiply.

The County Commission recently cleared the way for the project to receive $100 million for construction. MAM, which must raise another $100 million in private funds to cover all other expenses, has collected $45 million so far. Construction is set to be finished in 2013.

The museum’s board of directors spent six months before plucking Collins from a national field of contenders.

“He’s an outstanding manager, firmly grounded in contemporary art, and he helped transform his prior institution to be even more involved in their community and be forward looking in their collecting,” said Rose Ellen Greene, who chaired the search committee.

HIS ACHIEVEMENTS

Among Collins’ qualifications from his five years at the Neuberger, which specializes in 20th century, contemporary and African art: managing a budget of $3.5 million and an endowment of $18 million at a teaching museum with 90,000 square feet of space, almost half for exhibitions.

MAM has about 60,000 visitors a year. The Neuberger attracts 75,000. The 8,000 pieces in its permanent collection include single works by such prominent American artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper and more than 30 paintings by modernist Milton Avery, none of whom are represented in the MAM collection.

The MAM board was particularly impressed by the new director’s interest in Hispanic artists. In 2007, Collins procured a $1 million donation to establish an “art of the Americas” curator position at the Neuberger, located in Westchester County about a half hour from Manhattan in an area with a growing Hispanic population.

Last year, the museum launched a lecture series on “Pre-Columbian Art Through the Eyes of Modern and Contemporary Artists,” and Collins co-curated an exhibit of 25 paintings donated by the family of Luis Calzadilla, a Cuban-born architect who lived in Miami and collected works by Latin American artists active in the 1980s and ’90s. From January through April, the Neuberger exhibited Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, a survey of work by the Cuban-born performance and installation artist. The exhibit received raves in Art Forum and Art News and snared the cover of industry magazine Art in America.

“We demonstrated a significant commitment to the Latin American community because of Thom,” said Lea Emery, the Neuberger’s interim director. “He’s all about outreach and inclusion.”

To that end, Collins said he plans to host a series of town-hall sessions this fall to rally input on how MAM can become a more attractive destination for South Floridians.

“To engage people, they have to be able to see themselves in some aspect of what you do, whether it’s their histories and issues that are important to them or just fleshing out how best to communicate with audiences, how best to serve them through education and in our various neighborhoods,” said Collins, a trim, effusive Pennsylvanian who describes himself as an “anti-elitist” when it comes to art.

“It’s the obligation of the institution to make even the most difficult material as accessible to as many people as possible. That said, I don’t think the work itself needs to be compromised,” Collins said.

A NEW HUB

When Museum Park — the rechristened Bicentennial Park setting for MAM and the new Miami Science Museum — opens, its planners intend for those institutions and the nearby Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts to form Miami’s new cultural hub.

“He is enamored with the idea of our area as the new town square,” said John Richard, the Arsht Center president who met Collins two weeks ago in Aspen, Colo., at the summer home of Dennis Scholl, MAM trustee and Miami program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “This is the tipping point in his career.”

Collins, who rents an apartment at the opulent ICON Brickell “to get the downtown experience,” said he accepted his new gig with a caveat.

“I only want to be here if everyone is looking beyond the construction of the new building to a vastly expanded profile and operation for the museum as a whole,” he said. “I’m very interested in looking forward to figuring out how we can make this new museum-building project an engine for positive change.”

Collins isn’t unfamiliar with negotiating the complexities of an institution in transition. Immediately before his Neuberger stint, he was director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, and, from 2000 to 2003, chief curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where he helped plan construction of a $34 million building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid.

Born outside Philadelphia, Collins remembers bubbling over in excitement as a youngster because the weekend meant going to the city’s museums with his father, an American history teacher whom Collins credits for his belief in the social power of art.

“We started going before I was even in the first grade,” said Collins, who has never created visual art and has “terrible fine-motor skills.”

“There was beautiful Renaissance art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There was a [Rogier] van der Weyden altar piece. Even then I knew it was spectacular but wasn’t quite sure why.”

After studying art history as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, Collins earned his master’s in art history from Northwestern University. His specialty is contemporary art.

HISTORIAN SKILLS

“Every director brings certain skills,” says Riley, who has made himself available to MAM leaders as a consultant during construction of the new building. “In the four years I was there it was the most intense period of planning the museum. I am an architect, and I was able to help with that. I am not an art historian, though. Thom is.”

Riley was hired in 2006 with a mandate: Convince collectors that MAM will have a new building, and grow its collection to merit the higher profile; enhance the museum staff; build partnerships with collectors.

He helped bring aboard Pritzker-winning Herzog & de Meuron, negotiated with city and county officials for funding and raised money from private donors. When he resigned in October, he said one of his few regrets was not doing enough to muster the support of Miami’s art heavyweights.

Riley butted heads with critics of public funding for the museum, such as prominent Miami art collector Martin Z. Margulies, whose nationally known collection of modern and contemporary art is displayed at the 45,000-square-foot Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood.

Wednesday, Margulies announced a $5 million pledge to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “The donation has no conditions. I wanted to support an institution such as the Met because it’s one of the great museums of the world,” he said.

While MAM is aiming to increase its collection, “it’s not just a matter of numbers, but it’s a matter of quality works that a museum has to obtain to be considered a quality museum,” Margulies said.

Other top Miami collectors, including some founders of other private museums, also have been reluctant to support MAM substantially.

“This is an extraordinary city where there are remarkable collectors. Even more remarkable is that many of them have made a really concerted effort to make the fruits of their collection available to the public,” Collins admitted.

“But there is a difference between a public and a private institution,” he added. “A public institution is committed to collection growth with an eye to putting together a more-or-less encyclopedic survey of major developments in its area . . . and to protect and preserve those collections in perpetuity. When this building opens, I trust that all of us in public and private institutions will coordinate what we are doing so we can really together make the case for Miami as one of the most significant art centers in the U.S.”

READY TO LEAD

Annette Fromm, who coordinates the Museum Studies certificate program at Florida International University, thinks Collins seems well prepared for the challenges to come.

“The MAM collection is just at the threshold of growing,” she said. “He brings experience from Cincinnati of strategic planning for curatorial growth.” But just as attracting visitors from museum-rich New York City to the northern suburbs was a challenge at Neuberger, “it’s also a challenge here,” Fromm said. “You have to look at how we raise awareness of museums and raise the value of museums and make them accessible to the public. He seems to have some experience with that.”

Under Collins’ two-year leadership, Baltimore’s then-beleaguered Contemporary Museum doubled its membership and annual budget. Prior to his work in Cincinnati, Collins was associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle. He has also taught art history at the University of Cincinnati, Northwestern and the University of Washington.

Collins never intended to be a museum professional. Interested in philosophy, gender studies and the social role of art, he was working toward a Ph.D. at Northwestern with a dissertation titled MoMA’s Boys: Sexuality, Subjectivity and Anti-Modernism in American Art and Criticism, 1929-1939 that was mainly a study of the museum’s photography. Because of his work, MoMA offered him a curatorial fellowship from 1994 to 1997.

“In art history class, you spend most of your time engaged with reproductions,” but after getting up close with in art curation at age 25 at MoMA, “I was ruined for the rest of my life,” Collins said, chuckling.

“I ended up becoming so enamored of contemporary art that it very much distracted me from the dissertation, but I promise you, as I promise my mother all the time, I’m two-thirds of the way finished, and I will finish it. Scout’s honor.”