Comments (0) Best Group Exhibition - 2012
"All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition"
Sometimes the best shows sneak up on you, registering only faintly while you're still in the museum or gallery and then later coming together in your head as a cohesive whole. The Boca Museum's 60th-annual "All Florida" was such a show. First there's the scale of the exhibition to consider: 101 artists represented, out of the nearly 600 who submitted close to 2,000 works. That juror Valerie Ann Leeds — a veteran of the Orlando, Tampa, and Whitney museums — managed to make sense of it at all is no small wonder. Leeds, however, not only culled judiciously; she also found a common thread running through so much diverse work, in the form of what might be called "the Florida experience," or, as she memorably put it, "a collective response to the environment and the bounty of natural resources found within Florida's borders." By taking the "All Florida" designation seriously, she assembled a show that somehow encompassed the Sunshine State's past, present, and future.
