Each fall, it is the labor of arts writers everywhere to forge connections between the many exhibits about to snap open and clamor for the eye’s attention. There is much excitement after many hot and slow months of student art shows and sweetly presented orchid photos at community centers.
September marks the beginning of the real pageant, or so we write, the onslaught of serious and money-minded mega fairs, the lockstep march of masters and up-and-comers, sculpture and paintings from exotic continents, the panache of New York canvases, the dioramas strewn with Pop surrealist kitsch. Arts writers strive to say how individual shows are, in fact, subtly linked through form or era, through tradition and culture, or even perhaps through the sweat of sheer intention.
But the truth is — they are not. Each art season and its body parts arrive as beautifully disarrayed as the last. When it comes to this and every season’s exhibit roster, there is no pattern, no unity, no invisible reed joining the twilight penumbra of one cityscape to the charcoal clavicle of another nude drawing. Why pretend there is some overarching story? What is the point in making everything so tidy?
No fun in that, we say, so this year, we’ll dispense with the alleged themes and continuity. Let’s just say that there is much to see in South Florida. The eye is ready.
In what promises to be a rich retrospective, Tom Wesselmann Draws opens the season at the Museum of Art: Fort Lauderdale, Nova Southeastern University. The show includes more than 100 cutout still lifes, found-art collages, and mixed-media paintings and constructions made over 45 years by the late American Pop artist. Included are the some of the large-scale drawings and initial sketches for Wesselmann’s color-sensual Great American Nude series.
Vatican Splendors: A Journey Through Faith and Art arrives in January and teems with paintings, mosaics, sculpture, papal jewels, embroidered silk vestments and the armor and swords of the Swiss Guards. One of the grandest gatherings of art and historically significant objects from the Vatican that has toured North America, the exhibit also boasts the compass and tools used by Michelangelo while making the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. www.moafl.org
The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood has already begun its seasonal offerings with Sinisa Kukec: And Yet Another Wayward Landscape and Stephan Tugrul: En Masse. The former sprawls across the center’s main gallery and considers shape, light, and movement through a host of sculptural, and in places sexual, elements, some of which include a turntable, ornate frames, a rehabilitated dresser drawers, a ghostly fox, and swirling mirrors. Tugrul presents an energetic surge of collage and appropriated landscapes.
This year, the ever-rotating Projects Room welcomes the primordial, plastic vistas of Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Forever, the mythic banner paintings of Lisa Rockford: The She-Monster Sideshow, and Christiaan Lopez-Miro: All Roads Lead to Cassadaga, an assembly of photographs that chronicles a 115-year old Central Florida community with poetic attention to stillness and space. www.ArtandCultureCenter.org
Frances Trombly: Paintings arranges the Miami artist’s first solo exhibition at the Girls’ Club, which regularly features fiber and traditional craft media works by internationally renowned female artists including Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, Ellen Gallagher, Amparo Sard and Tara Donovan, as well as prominent South Florida artists such as Carol Prusa, Jen Stark, Kevin Arrow, Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, and Kerry Phillips. Known for handcrafting ordinary objects such as grocery store receipts and mops from fiber, Trombly expands on her oeuvre with these sculptural canvases made specifically for this downtown Fort Lauderdale art space. www.girlsclubcollection.org
The Bear and Bird Boutique + Gallery (inside/upstairs at TATE’s Comics+Toys+Videos) continues its always lively arts roster with Monsters Under My Bed, a multi-medium group show spotlighting South Florida artists and the assorted ooogah-boogahs of childhood nightmares. Also on deck: the gallery’s fourth annual Small Stuff (works 8 x 10 or smaller by local, national, and international visual artists) and The Super Punch Tarot, a wholly original tarot collection fashioned by dozens of artists and curated by pop toy-and-product blogger John Struan. www.bearandbird.com
Yves Saint Front: The Kaufman Collection shows the luminous canvases of the 20th century French painter at The Coral Springs Museum of Art. A concurrent exhibit shows bronzes, sepia-toned marine-inspired photographs, and landscape paintings by, respectively, Jim Rennert, Michael Kahn, and Nicholas Berger. The new year brings watercolors by Miles Batt and figurative and abstract sculpture by Lothar Nickel, followed by Tools in Motion: The Hechinger Collection, a sampling of visual art that honors the design and function of everyday tools. www.csmart.org
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, everyday objects and thrift store attire are bundled to form the installations found in Shinique Smith: Menagerie. This is the New York based artist’s first large-scale U.S. museum show, and it also assembles paintings, drawings, and video inspired in part from Abstract Expressionism, color field painting, and Japanese calligraphy.
During Art Basel Miami Beach, the museum conflates the oeuvre of an international fashion and street photographer with the toil of one of Miami’s Caribbean communities in Bruce Weber: Haiti / Little Haiti. Shot from 2003 to the present, approximately 75 photographs frame the lives of Haitian immigrants, and recent pictures capture the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake. In 2011, the museum brings in statues and dioramas from Jonathan Meese: Sculpture and works on paper by British artist Chris Ofili. www.mocanomi.org
The Miami Art Museum organizes Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, the artist’s first museum show in more than ten years and her debut in South Florida. Twenty-five paintings include early horse pictorials from the mid 70s to more recent canvases which address her daily life in New Mexico and the desert’s disjointed perspectives. Tomas Saraceno’s Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, is on view through the new year; the artist was the Argentine representative to the 2009 Venice Biennale, and this installation was the prototype for his work in Italy — a conceptual installation that likens the universe to a lattice of floating elastic cords. A selection from the MAM’s own diverse holdings fills out both Focus Gallery: Robert Rauschenberg and Between Here and There: Modern Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection. www.miamiartmuseum.org
In a fresh twist on tourism trends, the Art Center of South Florida unveils the Miami Poster Project, five super-sized posters by illustrator Phillip Brooker which stylize Miami’s tropical spaces, abundant bird life, and urban and arts centers. Curated by artist-in-residence Kristen Thiele, Art Basel: Good n’ Plenty places the ArtCenter front and center, with works by past and present residents flanking exhibit spaces and corridors, including efforts by Gavin Perry, Luis Gispert, William Cordova, Beatriz Monteavaro, and Ellie Schneiderman. Next spring, architects and University of Miami professors Jacob Brillhart and Errol Barron display their sketchbooks and illustrations in Visual Thinking in the Digital Age. www.artcentersf.org
The Frost Art Museum focuses on one narrative arc of abstract painting in Embracing Modernity: Venezuelan Geometric Abstraction. Covering the late 1940s through the 1960s, landmark works by Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gertrude (Gego) Goldschmidt, Mateo Manaure, Alejandro Otero, Jesus Rafael Soto and several others consider the genesis and history of this country’s modern art movement. In Sequentia, artist Xavier Cortada visually depicts the four bases of a DNA strand through large-scale oil portraits; he also works with a microbiologist to create a living model of the famed double helix. Arnold Mesches, whose works are included in the collections of the Met, the National Gallery, and the Whitney, is featured in the Florida Artists Series: Selections from Anomie 1492-2006, an assemblage of 48 large acrylic paintings and 150 collages that blend postmodern thought with Old Master techniques. http://thefrost.fiu.edu/
At The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Speed Limits celebrates of the role of velocity in modern-day life and showcases more than 200 works from the collections of The Wolfsonian and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Some of the fare includes photographs of the construction of the Eiffel Tower and the Irving Trust Building in New York; films of early 20th-century American workers, paintings, drawings, and books. Art and Design in the Modern Age: Selections from the Wolfsonian Collection views cultural and political arenas through ceramics, handmade and mass-produced furniture, graphic design, ephemera and household objects. Highlights include a bas-relief produced for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and a sculpture by Alexander Stirling Calder for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. www.wolfsonian.org
New York artist Ellen Harvey exhibits oil paintings inspired by nudes from the permanent collection of the Bass Museum of Art. Also on display: Florida’s only ongoing Egyptian gallery, which includes a sarcophagus and mummy, and rotating selections from the museum’s archives, which span more than five centuries and contain North American sculpture, landscapes from the 19th and 20th centuries, paintings from Latin America and the Caribbean, contemporary photography, and Asian art. www.bassmuseum.org
The Jaguar’s Spots: Ancient MesoAmerican Art from the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami displays masterpieces from ancient Mexico and Panama that examine the dynamics between art and the natural world. In The Changing Face of Art and Politics, 32 works consider political imagery through an aesthetic lens that ranges from an early 16th-century engraving by Hieronymus Hopfur to a late 20th-century print by Stanley William Hayter. Frank Paulin: An American Documentarian brings 30 photographs from the mid-century American artist. http://www6.miami.edu/lowe/index.htm
And finally, in its ninth and glittering incarnation, Art Basel Miami Beach descends on South Florida December 2-5, with satellite fairs, gallery events, art talks, pop-up shops, installations, street murals, bands, bars, velvet ropes, and all the usual accompanying spectacle. Get a head start here: www.artbaselmiamibeach.com
Emma Trelles is an arts writer in South Florida.
