After a celebrated career in New York and Wynwood, the veteran art dealer known for her commitment to women artists has chosen Coconut Grove for her next act.
The son of Diego Costa Peuser was the first to notice a familiar piece of art hanging in the Coconut Grove home of Bernice Steinbaum, the celebrated Miami art dealer.
There, by the entrance to Steinbaum’s kitchen, was a sculpture by his mother, the Argentine artist Marcela Marcuzzi.
Costa Peuser, the founder of the Pinta Miami art fair, had come to talk business with Steinbaum in April 2024 at the Tigertail Avenue gallery where she lives and works.
The son asked to take a photo while the father made his pitch.
Costa Peuser invited Steinbaum to participate in Pinta Miami for the first time in 2024, saying he would throw a party in her honor to kick off the annual event.
Steinbaum agreed, and the 2024 Pinta Miami art fair opened in December at the Hangar in Coconut Grove with works by 11 artists represented by Steinbaum.
“We did extraordinarily well, and we’ve just begun,” Steinbaum says today.
It’s no surprise that Steinbaum, 84, would display Marcuzzi’s work at her home, which is tucked behind a large oak tree on the corner of Tigertail Avenue and Emathla Street, across from the Ransom Everglades Middle School campus.
The veteran art dealer, known for her large personality and her bold sense of fashion, has made a career out of exhibiting and collecting women’s art, first in New York, then in Wynwood, and now at her home and gallery at 2101 Tigertail Ave.
The Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in SoHo became famous in the 1970s for committing half its roster to women artists, particularly women of color.

Since moving to Miami and opening her Wynwood gallery in 2000 on North Miami Avenue and 36th Street, Steinbaum has highlighted the works of South Florida, Caribbean and Latin American artists.
Steinbaum is often lauded as an art world visionary and, locally, as a pioneer who helped to put the Wynwood Art District on the map. The Pinta Miami event in her honor on December 6 was titled “Women of Vision Breakfast: Honoring the Visionary Bernice Steinbaum.”
Now, Steinbaum is intent on showing artists interested in ecology, nature, and climate change – topics relevant to South Florida. But her ambitions remain the same: to highlight artists who might otherwise be overlooked.
“I love talking to artists, mothering artists, caring for them,” she said. “I don’t consider artists commodities. They’re real people with real emotions, and they should be treated that way.”
Making a Home for Women Artists
Every white wall in Steinbaum’s home gallery today is covered in art. But growing up, the walls in her rabbinical Flushing, New York home were bare.
Steinbaum’s rabbi father, Julius, kept the walls plain. He died when Steinbaum was eight, the youngest of five children, leaving the family with $10,000 in the bank, and her mother, Sarah, to care for them.
Her mother was an artist herself, a clothing designer who made clothes for her children in lean times. Today, Steinbaum is known for her wild outfits: latex suits, decorous rings and oversized glasses.
Steinbaum’s mother took her daughter to art galleries and museums, where Steinbaum fell in love with art. But she hated how the art world dismissed women.
Steinbaum taught art after marrying her husband, Dr. Harold Steinbaum, who specialized in family practice and had studied art himself. In 1977, with three children at home, she quit a college teaching job because the curriculum wasn’t teaching the work of women or minority artists.
She took it upon herself to help change that.
Like her mother, who invested in real estate, Steinbaum had an eye for up-and-coming areas. With a loan solely in her name, she rented a space in SoHo before it was a booming neighborhood.
In 1977 – the same year she earned a doctorate in art education from Columbia University – she opened the first Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, devoting half her space to women artists. At least 40 percent were women of color. Artists, and art critics, noticed.
“There were no women being shown, so I became the gallerist that showed women and women of color,” she said.

For 23 years in Manhattan, Steinbaum sought out emerging women artists, helping them to get noticed and sell their work.
She helped build the careers of artists like the late Faith Ringgold, a multimedia artist whose work was exhibited at the White House and is in the permanent collections at the Met and the Guggenheim. Before she died in April 2024 at age 93, Ringgold praised Steinbaum’s effect in the documentary film “Bernice.”
“The art world has been unduly racist and sexist in America,” Ringgold said in the film. “My career as an artist would have been decidedly different without Bernice in it.”
Artists often stayed in Steinbaum’s home, sharing a table with her husband and three children. Her daughter Sarah Steinbaum, an attorney in Coconut Grove, remembers giving up her bed for visiting artists. Mother Bernice loved to pull her daughters out of school on a random Monday to take them to a new art opening.
“Our love of art comes from those ‘playing hooky’ days with my mother,” said Sarah Steinbaum, who started working art fairs with her mom when she was a teenager. “My siblings and I shared my mother with these artists our whole lives, and it gave us a rich upbringing.”
A Move to Miami
In 1998 Steinbaum bought a two-story building on the edge of Wynwood and across from Miami’s Design District that would house her first Miami gallery.
She had twice fallen in New York City snow. Her husband was ready to retire. Meanwhile everyone in Miami was dining outdoors in linen shirts on New Year’s Day.
Steinbaum left New York City and brought the art world with her.
She renovated that abandoned two-story building and in 2000 opened her gallery, where she focused on artists like Haitian-American Edouard Duval-Carrié and Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2023.
She posted her artists’ prices clearly and didn’t alter them for anyone.
“Posting my prices means there’s no B.S.,” she said. It’s both her initials and her catchphrase. “The price on a gold watch doesn’t change. If you go to the supermarket, do you ask for a discount on bread and milk?”
She might have kept up that pace had she had not lost Harold.
In 2010, the couple sold their Venetian Islands four-story home and moved to a single-story house in the Grove. She didn’t tell Harold it was because of his emphysema; she told him the windowless rooms in the new house were better suited to hang art.
Harold Steinbaum died that year. Her children asked her not to make any rash decisions, but she sold her Wynwood gallery in 2012, intending to retire for good at 70.
She tried diving into charity work. She sat on boards: “It was boring,” she said, laughing. “It was all these tedious discussions, ‘Should we have a Friday hors d’oeuvres or Saturday cocktails?’ It was not enough creativity for me.”
She even tried consulting at other galleries but bristled at the way some dealers treated artists. (“I don’t see artists as commodities,” she says.)
Her artists noticed. They knew she still had deep connections in the art world and hosted collectors and experts in her home. They asked if she would hang their work in her home.
“She tried to take it easy, but she couldn’t. She’s just not one of those people,” said the artist Thomas Deininger, on the phone from his home in Rhode Island. “She’s this shiny, beautiful lure of a person, She’s always dressed in these eye-catching outfits. That’s somebody I wanted to represent me.”
She expanded her home and built a triangular gallery space behind her living room. On January 7, 2017 she opened her gallery with the exhibition, “Threads of Connection.”
Four hundred people came.
“I realized people wanted to see what I was showing,” she said. “I realized I didn’t have to devote my life to the gallery.”
Instead, she incorporated the gallery into her life. Sculptures trace a path through the interior courtyard and into her living room, where art hangs on every wall.
Veer past Enrique Gomez de Molina’s “Calico,” a hybrid taxidermy creature that is part lion, part alligator. Past a three-dimensional sculpture by Deininger, which from the side looks like unrecyclable landfill trash, trinkets and toys, but from another, it forms an optical illusion of a red cardinal.
Steinbaum’s home is like that, too: more than what it appears when you appraise it from a different perspective. And it’s clear why artists keep coming back to her, wherever her gallery may be.
“She understands the work as an extension of the person,” Deininger said. “I like visiting her there. I like hearing her talk about the work. I like seeing how she displays the work. And she’s just fun as hell to be around.”
The Bernice Steinbaum Gallery at 2101 Tigertail Avenue is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and by appointment (305-860-3681).
We met Bernice probably 15 years ago while purchasing art for an interior design client. There was much to admire in her collection and we purchased several pieces, one by Carol Prusa. More importantly, we got to know Bernice. She is as you have described her, someone who cares about more than a sale and you sense that when you meet her. Her sense of fashion and her spirit are the things we need more of in this community. How nice to see her featured here and find out what she is up to.
Thank you Carlos Frias for recognizing my audacious angel. Once you’re under her wings, you know you’re in an awesome place.