Top 200 Collectors

Born in Cuba, Paul Cejas moved to Miami in the 1960s, where he attended the University of Miami. A certified public accountant, Cejas founded the CareFlorida Health Systems, the largest Hispanic-owned healthcare company in the United States, which he sold in 1994. From 1998 until 2001, he was the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium under president Bill Clinton. He is currently the chairman and CEO of PLC Investments, which manages holdings ranging from real estate to venture capital.

Cejas has long been a fixture of Miami’s civic and philanthropic communities. Beginning in 1980, he was on the Dade County School Board for eight years, serving for five years as its chairman. And in 1994, Florida’s governor, Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, appointed Cejas to the State of Florida University System’s Board of Regents, where he served as the system’s finance and budget chairman. He has previously served on the boards of the Miami Art Museum (now the Pérez Art Museum Miami), the Smithsonian Institution, and the Tate museum network’s Latin American advisory council.

Cejas and his wife Trudy’s art collection resides in the various impressively lavish properties in South Florida that the couple has owned over the years. They started out focusing on Zero, the artist group founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in postwar Germany, but have also added to it work by the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, which is a particular focus on their holdings. From Fontana, the couple branched out into the Italian art movement Arte Povera, buying works by the likes of Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni. But the core of the collection has shifted to focus on art of the postwar era, from abstraction to  Minimalism, and includes work by artists like Agnes Martin, Sam Francis, Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Cy Twombly.

Lately, Trudy has had an eye toward acquiring more contemporary art, with acquisitions in 2022 including recent works by Julia Rommel, Latifa Echakhch, Cecily Brown, Reggie Burrows Hodges, and Vaughn Spann.