If you’ve ever wondered what an artist of only modest talent does to express himself, look no further than “Pop-ups, Illustrated Books, and Graphic Designs of Czech Artist and Paper Engineer, Vojtch Kubasta (1914-1992),” which is nearing the end of its run at the Bienes Center for the Literary Arts…

As owner Terry Michael Kost likes to say, his RaZoo Gallery “may be America’s only self-service, do-it-yourself art gallery.” He’s referring to his tendency to leave his funky little art space open but unattended. Indeed, on my last two visits, he was nowhere to be found, and I had to…

Don’t let the name throw you. Project Earth Design isn’t a cooperative of environmentalists, nor is it a clever moniker for a home landscaping service. It’s a 3-month-old gallery of sorts on the eastern fringe of Fort Lauderdale’s Gateway shopping district. And while not everything the shop sells is organic,…

When Enrique Martínez Celaya talks about relocating last year from Los Angeles to Delray Beach, the phrase “the buzz” crops up again and again, as in “We wanted someplace away from the buzz.” He makes L.A. sound not so much like a beehive, busy with productive activity, as a nest…

Every year, the Broward County-based, nonprofit, all-volunteer group ArtsUnited organizes two exhibitions to showcase local gay and lesbian artists: “United & Proud” and “ArtExplosion.” The latest edition of the latter, “ArtsUnited Presents ArtExplosion 2005,” is now on display in the JM Enterprises Family Gallery at ArtServe, and it’s a textbook…

South Florida has had a big season for big names from the 20th-century art world: solo shows by Louise Nevelson at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Andrew Wyeth at the Boca Museum, Louise Bourgeois at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Now comes “Joan Miró: Illustrated Books,” also at…

How Pocock Fine Art & Antiques escaped Artbeat’s notice for so long is a mystery. Maybe it’s because this lovely gallery, which is nearing its 24th anniversary, just reopened in its third location on Las Olas Boulevard, in the new Himmarshee Landing complex. More likely, it’s because the fine-art component…

Sometimes, exhibitions at the little Mark K. Wheeler Gallery at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale seem almost like an afterthought, as if somebody suddenly remembered, “Oh, we have a gallery to fill!” and then hastily threw something together. The current show, “Marginal Terrain: New Work by Trina Renee Nicklas…

If an expedition into the far reaches of Broward County can be thought of as a safari — and sometimes I think it can — then I bagged some big game on a recent adventure that took me first far west, to the Sunrise Civic Center, then south to the…

My favorite image of Louise Bourgeois is a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Tucked neatly under the artist’s right arm is what at first glance might be mistaken for a huge loaf of French bread. A closer look confirms that the object is one of Bourgeois’ more brazenly phallic sculptures, and…

The 18 works that make up “Alan Dayton: Portraits,” now at the Broward County Main Library’s Gallery Six, can stand on their own merits. They’re best appreciated, however, as behind-the-scenes glimpses of other artists. Most of Dayton’s subjects are active in the visual arts in South Florida — either as…

Andrew Wyeth and I go way back. When his now-notorious Helga Pictures — a series of drawings and paintings of a neighbor, many of them nudes, executed in total secrecy over a 15-year period — made its belated Florida debut at the Norton Museum of Art in 1996, I reviewed…

If there are such things as safe bets in the South Florida art world, one of them has to be Clyde Butcher, the grandfatherly photographer whose majestic black-and-white nature imagery never fails to captivate. Butcher can thrive even in an environment as indifferent as ArtServe, where more than 60 of…

If you visit Artists’ Haven, a tiny gallery that opened in a Fort Lauderdale strip mall in December, go directly to the sculptures of Miles Laventhal, whose work handily outshines what surrounds it. And to judge from the handful of pieces on display when Artbeat stopped by, Laventhal isn’t afraid…

Necessity, so it goes, is the mother of invention. In the case of the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the need is to fill about 8,000 square feet of display space on a regular basis. Amazingly, director Barbara K. O’Keefe does it and does it well, continuing to work with…

Think outside the box.” By the end of the 20th Century those four simple words had taken on the aura of a mantra — an irrefutable nudge toward creativity, innovation, and yes, artistry. It’s a good thing the great sculptor Louise Nevelson didn’t think in such terms. In fact, it…

As if the exhibition title isn’t enticing enough, the first piece you encounter upon entering “I Feel Mysterious Today,” now at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) in downtown Lake Worth, is a brazen come-on. The work is called Scratch Hither, the first of the show’s ten single-channel…

A nude man coats himself in honey and rolls in birdseed until his entire body is covered. He then enters a large enclosure, a sort of cage made of wood and chicken wire, containing only a bare-branched maple tree and a stacked pair of wooden crates, the top one much…

For the dazzling new show “Cut: Film as Found Object,” the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami has been transformed into a multiplex cinema of sorts. Emphasis on the of sorts. There are 14 works in the exhibition, and thanks to MoCA’s ever-versatile display space, each has been…

The Schmidt Center Gallery at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has to be one of the most underappreciated display spaces in South Florida. It’s not nearly as spacious as the similarly unsung Coral Springs Museum of Art, which at least has the advantage of all that square footage. In…

It gives me no great pleasure to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes, especially when he’s traipsing through the galleries of one of my favorite South Florida venues (the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood) at the invitation of one of my favorite curators (Samantha Salzinger). The…

Uruguayan artist Ignacio Iturria works with such a dramatically diminished palette that you could be forgiven for wondering if his local art supply store has run out of paints, forcing him to concoct his own pigments from dirt and ashes. His color scale ranges from dark, muddy browns, grays, and…