Collector Martin Z. Margulies Makes Major Gift to NSU Art Museum

RENOWNED MIAMI COLLECTOR MARTIN Z. MARGULIES MAKES MAJOR GIFT TO NSU ART MUSEUM OF A SCULPTURE BY AMERICAN ARTIST GEORGE SEGAL On view in the Museum’s collection exhibition, The Riddle of the Sphinx, Part II Exhibition Dates: November 16, 2025 - April 26, 2026

George Segal, Blue Girl on Black Bench, 1977, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. Gift of Collection Martin Z. Margulies. © 2025 The George and Helen Segal Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Peter Harholdt.

NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is proud to announce a major gift from renowned Miami collector Martin Z. Margulies of genre-bending Pop artist George Segal’s sculpture Blue Girl on a Black Bench, 1977. Until its recent relocation to NSU Art Museum, this work was placed at the entrance to Margulies’s private residence for decades. Blue Girl on a Black Bench will have its NSU Art Museum premiere on November 16 in the exhibition The Riddle of the Sphinx Part II in conjunction with the public opening of the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Real Time.  Blue Girl on a Black Bench, 1977, features one of Segal’s uncanny plaster figures seated alone on a real New York City subway bench. The scene captures the fleeting vision Segal experienced of a young woman waiting on a subway platform before suddenly vanishing from his sight. Segal suggested the transience of this experience by painting only the girl’s left hand in flesh tones. The rest of her body is enveloped in a dream-like blue.