In December of 2009, late real estate developer Tony Goldman had premiered the Wynwood Walls, an outdoor gallery space showcasing work from an internationally recognized cadre of street artists. Launched during that year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, the Walls jumpstarted a legacy of formally recognizing the district’s artists. It’s a legacy that Freidin would soon take up. 

In 2019, after six years working as a lawyer in the Florida State Attorney’s Office and later as Vice President of GlobalPro Recovery, a company that helped insurance policy holders recover from losses, Freidin decided to create the world’s first and only institution dedicated to the preservation, exhibition and celebration of graffiti.

The Museum of Graffiti, in Freidin’s words, “specifically highlights graffiti artists and defines [graffiti] as an art form based on the formation of letters.” Different from, though not unrelated to, street art, which is more pictorial and figurative, the museum understands graffiti is defined by “how much style you have in your letters, and really how eccentric you can make letters, how you put them, how you form them together.” In doing so, the museum carves out an important space for an art form that, too often wrongly associated with crime or vandalism, is often delegitimized or undervalued.

Miami’s Museum of Graffiti, founded by Freidin and graffiti historian Alan Ket, today stands as a paean to a Wynwood some now worry is becoming unrecognizable. 

“What Wynwood was in 2005 is different from what it was in 2015, and very different from what it is in 2025,” Freidin said while in an Uber on the way to her office in December. In 2005, Wynwood was still shaking off its history as a relatively sleepy industrial neighborhood as artists were beginning to decorate the “perfect canvases” of the warehouses’ flat, windowless walls. By 2015, the neighborhood had become home, too, to trendy bars and coffee shops and Italian restaurants looking to capitalize on its artistic cachet.

“The neighborhood became so cool at that time that developers and hedge funds came and bought a lot of land here,” Freidin said. “And so, with that, it’s a mixed bag of emotions because the artists built this community and can’t necessarily afford to stay. But now there’s also a global art consumer, a global tourist that we get to meet.”

It’s true, Wynwood is rapidly changing. In late 2020, Wynwood Walls began charging for timed-entry tickets and gated its once-public murals. Between 2009 and 2018, retail rents in Wynwood tripled, forcing many small businesses and community gathering places to shutter their doors or move elsewhere. Intense gentrification has also raised average residential Wynwood rents by more than 27 percent in the three years between 2022 and 2025 alone.

It’s in this context of rapid growth and development, not always or only for the better, that Freidin’s Museum of Graffiti becomes especially important. Dedicated to celebrating and promoting both international and Miami talent – which Freidin says is “just as good if not better than what you see around the world” – the Museum of Graffiti has grown in its six years to meet the city where it’s at, whether it be with publicly accessible murals in the street or weekly courses in graffiti art and spray paint for children and adults alike. It’s also grown to accommodate two other art exhibition spaces: the Private Gallery, an open-to-the-public space dedicated to showcasing graffiti artists who moved their practice to the studio, alongside other ultra-contemporary artists, and the Art of Hip Hop, a separate museum that tells the story of the photographers, videographers, graffiti artists and visual creators behind hip hop’s iconic aesthetics.

The goal for all of these spaces is to be community-driven and community-responsive. For example, Freidin said, “We believe in the democratization of graffiti and street art, and so we do many murals on the outside of buildings by world-renowned artists that are really intended to be public.”

Freidin’s dedication to protecting and democratizing the art she loves is not accidental, nor did it begin with the legendary 2019 Art Basel launch party where she and Ket introduced the Museum of Graffiti to the world. Years before the museum was even an idea, Freidin had already begun getting involved more deeply in the Wynwood art community by using her legal skills to represent artists on a pro bono basis. She did so out of a sense of justice for local artists who, because they made their art in the street, were being scorned or unrecognized in their capacity as artists. It was through this work that Freidin first gained the trust of the Miami artist community (and met her co-founder, Ket).

The more Freidin became embedded in the art world, the more she found herself looking for a space beyond the courtroom through which to celebrate and support the street artists whose work she so admired. She soon realized that what Wynwood was sorely lacking was a hub dedicated to educating people about street art and graffiti. Ket, a graffiti expert temporarily in Miami for Art Basel in 2017, agreed. It was their shared vision of street art education, exhibition and preservation that culminated in the Museum of Graffiti.

Even today, Freidin dedicates her time to pro bono work defending graffiti artists whose work is used in advertisements without permission, for example, or who face vandalism charges and arrests for making urban art in the very neighborhoods that then capitalize on their creations, like Wynwood. Recently, she won a case for an artist Freidin argued was unjustly arrested for using a stencil on a Wynwood sidewalk. “If you look outside at the walls, they’re all art-covered, and with fewer walls in Wynwood, artists have taken to sidewalks. It’s one of the most expensive neighborhoods [in Miami], and that’s based on the graffiti artists,” she explained to me. “You can’t have it both ways.”