The visual arts season in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties is as contradictory as ever, refusing to be slotted into any tidy categories. The art soon pouring into museums and galleries gives as much attention to the natural world as it does to the imagined and synthetic realms, and shows by venerable artists open concurrently with exhibits introducing the newly minted and … [Read more...]
Art and life blur in memorable Bedia retrospective at MAM
The idea to open José Bedia’s major career retrospective, now showing at the Miami Art Museum, with a painting of Coballende is a brilliant one. In the Afro-Cuban religion of Palo Monte, this god is the patron of the sick, the disabled and the homeless and wandering; his equivalent in Catholicism is St. Lazarus, and in Bedia’s sprawling acrylic on canvas, Coballende, like … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in Miami-Broward art: A widely varied menu
The visual arts season in Broward and Miami-Dade counties offers its usual host of dichotomies, plus some surprises. There are trippy, hallucinatory drawings and religious icons; Baroque paintings and contemporary female-centric photographs; sculptures both austere and intricate and installations inspired by the American palate, vinyl records, Beethoven and the Beats. If we … [Read more...]
‘southXeast’ artists mix genres with whimsy, skill
There's something to be said for the sort of tradition that manages to intrigue upon each arrival, and when it does so in the guises of filigreed robots, childhood make-believe, or the lipsticked grit of a Bayou starlet -- all the better, I say. So unfolds this year’s southXeast: Contemporary Southeastern Art at Florida Atlantic University’s galleries, which presents the … [Read more...]
God of ‘Cassadaga’ is in the photographer’s details
The interstate is really the one road that leads to Cassadaga, I-4 to be exact, and it takes travelers from both the east and west coasts of central Florida to this small hamlet of spiritualists, mediums, psychics, and healers. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this 116-year-old Volusia County community draws both believers and naysayers, those seeking … [Read more...]
ArtsPreview 2010-11: The season in Miami-Broward art
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 … [Read more...]
Art review: Steichen show offers too much of a pretty thing
The faces of both the famed and the forgotten share equal stature in the more than 200 celebrity and couture-focused photographs on display at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale. The collection unwinds across all of the museum’s first-floor galleries, yet the images found in Edward Steichen: In High Fashion – the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937, which runs through April 11, … [Read more...]
Segal sculpted with compassionate eye, Norton exhibit shows
Four tractor-trailers hauled thousands of pounds of George Segal’s sculptures from Dallas to West Palm Beach. This is worth noting because an exhibition of his work, now at the Norton Museum of Art, presents 16 installations in a modest corner gallery of the museum’s first floor. For all of its physical weight, George Segal: Street Scenes is not a sprawling sort of show, the … [Read more...]
ArtsPreview 2009-10: The season in Broward-Miami art
The season is upon us, and this is not a nod to the torrent of plastic snow and holiday jingles that will soon appear wherever we go: the mall, the gas station, the corner coffee shop hawking its pricey pumpkin lattes. In many ways, the visual arts season is a haven from the commercial flurry of the fall and winter months. Whether intimate or expansive, organized from afar or … [Read more...]
New acquisitions add vigorous life to MAM collections
There are glittering and faux botanies at the center of Recent Acquisitions, a gathering of approximately 20 artworks that feature some of the Miami Art Museum’s latest additions to its growing permanent collection. Stamped with beads and sequins, the plastic and russet-hued confection of shrubs known as Endless Autumn, by Cristina Lei Rodriguez, contains South … [Read more...]