Miami-Dade College operates a small but well-curated art museum downtown; the permanent collection includes works by Matisse, Picasso and Chagall and focuses on minimalism, pop art and contemporary Latin American art. The museum's home building is art itself: the Freedom Tower , an iconic slice of Miami's old skyline, is one of two surviving towers modeled after the Giralda bell tower in Spain’s Cathedral of Seville. The ‘Ellis Island of the South,’ it served as an immigration processing center for almost half a million Cuban refugees in the 1960s. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, it was also home to the Miami Daily News for 32 years.
