TWO MIAMI ORIGINALS: CITY NATIONAL BANK x BAKEHOUSE

This year, City National Bank celebrates its 80th anniversary; Bakehouse culminates its 40th. Our relationship, however, began at our founding and continues into the future.

Some sponsorships begin with an event. Others are part of a much longer story. For City National Bank of Florida and Bakehouse Art Complex, that story goes back nearly 40 years to Bakehouse’s very beginning. Both are homegrown Miami stories, created by people who believed in this city, invested in it, and helped build institutions that would grow and change along with it.

City National Bank traces its history to 1946, when Leonard Abess Sr. and Baron de Hirsch Meyer established North Shore Bank in Miami Beach. Miami was a very different place then—a young, rapidly growing city whose future was still being invented. The bank grew by building relationships with the people and businesses building Miami itself.

Four decades later, another group of believers was thinking about what Miami needed. This time, they were artists.

In 1985, a group of artists displaced from their studios in Coconut Grove came together to find an affordable place where artists could work and build community. Their search led them to an old industrial bakery in Wynwood, long before the neighborhood became internationally synonymous with art.

They saw possibility in a place others might easily have overlooked.

That former bakery became the Bakehouse Art Complex, founded by artists for artists and formally established in 1986. Its founding idea was both simple and radical: if Miami wanted artists to be part of its future, artists needed affordable space in which to work, experiment, collaborate, and build their lives.

City National Bank was there from the beginning. At the time, Leonard L. Abess Jr. was Chairman, President, and CEO of City National Bank of Florida. Under his leadership, the bank supported then-young Bakehouse and the artists who were attempting to create something Miami did not yet have.

It began a relationship that has endured across four decades. There is wonderful symmetry in revisiting that history today.

In 2026, City National Bank celebrates its 80th anniversary and Bakehouse celebrates its 40th. Together, that is 120 years of two homegrown institutions growing up alongside Miami, through extraordinary changes in the city’s economy, population, neighborhoods, architecture, and cultural life.

And through all that change, something about the original relationship still feels remarkably current.

Bakehouse’s founders understood 40 years ago that artists needed more than occasional opportunities to exhibit their work. They needed the infrastructure that makes a creative life possible: affordable space, tools, community, time, and the freedom to experiment.

Those needs have only become more urgent as Miami has grown and the cost of living and working here has risen.

That is why City National Bank’s role as Lead Sponsor of BAKEHOUSE HOMECOMING: CELEBRATING THE CLASS OF NOW! on November 6 means more to us than underwriting an event.

CNB’s sponsorship, together with the generosity of our other sponsors, allows us to keep advance tickets at $100 and welcome a broad Miami community into Bakehouse to experience what those founders set in motion four decades ago: working artists, Open Studios, exhibitions, music, conversation, and a place where people from across the city come together through culture.

“We believe the strongest communities are built through relationships that last,” said Gerardo Rodriguez, Corporate Banking Executive at City National Bank. “For 40 years, we have been proud to stand alongside Bakehouse, supporting the artists who give Miami its voice and helping create the foundation for our community to grow and thrive. That is what long-term partnership means to us, and it is a commitment we are proud to carry forward.”

And the partnership arrives at another important moment in Bakehouse’s history. The artists who founded Bakehouse looked at an old bakery and imagined what it could become.

Today, we are asking that question again. On the same campus they secured for artists 40 years ago, now expanded to 2.6 acres, we are planning the next generation of Bakehouse: preserving affordable space for artists while creating affordable live-work housing and new places for making, learning, cultural production, and civic exchange.

The scale is larger. Miami is vastly different. But the fundamental proposition is much the same.

Invest in people. Give creative people the conditions they need to do consequential work. Build community around them. And believe that doing so makes the city stronger.

That belief connected City National Bank with Bakehouse at our beginning. It connects our two institutions again today. And we hope it will continue to shape a relationship focused not simply on preserving what Bakehouse has been, but on helping build what Bakehouse and Miami can become.

So, at this year’s Homecoming, we have more than one anniversary to celebrate. Eighty years of City National Bank. Forty years of Bakehouse.

We celebrate the founders who had the foresight to build both institutions, the generations who sustained them, the artists who continue to give Bakehouse its reason for being, and the Miami community that has grown up around us.

Two Miami originals. Still homegrown. Still investing in this city. And still believing in what Miami can become.