Two local museums are closing the year and welcoming the new one with an old question: does size matter? Small is in, at least at the Norton Museum of Art, which currently has on view a series of miniature paintings and bronze sculptures adorning the walls and rooms of dollhouses. This is no kids’ play, though. The artworks are by Julian Schnabel, Michele Zalopany and Cy … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 10-12
Music: One of the great tragic heroines of Italian bel canto opera returns Saturday night as Florida Grand Opera opens its new season with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The American soprano Anna Christy stars as the Scots noblewoman driven mad on her wedding night because of her forced marriage to a man she does not love. In addition to this tour de force scene, Donizetti’s … [Read more...]
Boca Museum celebrates ‘mad potter’ Ohr, contemporary innovators
By April W. Klimley More than 100 years ago, the ceramicist George Ohr (1857-1918) was called the “mad potter” of Biloxi, Miss. Today he is venerated as a precursor of abstract expressionism and his work goes for anywhere from $60,000-$70,000 apiece. His strangely shaped, broken, highly glazed works are also an inspiration for many ceramicists around the world today. … [Read more...]
Arts Preview 2017-18: The season in Palm Beach County art
Art selfies have arrived! And they are welcome to stay, so long as we are mindful of the artworks nearby. Just because cultural institutions are thinking outside-the-box, embracing new technologies and millennial-inspired ideas doesn’t mean the golden rule stopped applying: Look, don’t touch. This is not photography’s year. Then again, Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene, … [Read more...]
At the Boca Museum, life in lines as seen by Carlos Luna
Carlos Luna is the kind of artist who gets approval by not needing it in the first place. He speaks frankly, with the same boldness and assertiveness of his lines. But it is what lies beneath them that drives Deep Line Drawings, an exhibit of about 60 recent works on view through Dec. 31 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. They are not harmonious, quiet landscapes one … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 19-20
Film: Add to the list of offbeat competition documentaries like the spelling bee in Spellbound and the foxtrot battle of 2005’s Mad Hot Ballroom, an involving tale of inner-city Baltimore and the precision step dance contest, called simply Step. But far more is at stake at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, a recent charter school that strives not only to graduate … [Read more...]
Salvatore Meo: Finding poetry in the everyday and the every thing
One will never find Salvatore Meo’s name listed among the leading artists of any art movement and yet, his body of work looks very familiar. That’s because it consists of everyday objects commonly found flattened on the streets. Having exhibited along Roberto Matta, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, the Philadelphia native born in 1914 to Italian immigrants surely must have … [Read more...]
‘Glasstress’ offers sharp new take on old medium at Boca Museum
Sorry, ashtray-looking accents, candleholders and paperweights. Glass is done with being polite. It has traded its smooth curves and comfort zone for thorns, a strong pulse and a lot of nerve. The underestimated medium long thought of as merely decorative is now demanding acknowledgment through daring shapes, provocative themes and stunning colors. Glasstress, a show … [Read more...]
Hungarian art exhibit at Boca chronicles a battered country
If artworks from other European nations could talk, they would say this about The Art of Hungary: “Tell me something I don’t know about.” For the past three months, the ongoing four-in-one exhibition at Boca Raton Museum of Art has done its best to define the artistic qualities of a country more closely associated with war than artistic creativity. Before we think of Harry … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2016-17: Art in Palm Beach County
This season, brace yourselves for an identity crisis. The art and artists being featured are driven by it. Clearly, creativity thrives in the absence of a defined self. In an attempt to come up with something highly personal and unique, artists are pulling deeper than ever from within them. Equipped with more free admissions, night operating hours and themes suited for the … [Read more...]