My most recent foray into the western suburbs of Broward was prompted by news that there was a La Monte Anderson show at the Coral Springs Museum of Art. I had seen some of Anderson’s work in a few other shows — most notably one at the Davie campus of…

If you’re a regular or even occasional visitor to the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood (and if you’re not, you should be), you’ll probably sense immediately that something is a bit off when you enter the lobby these days. That’s because the glass panes on the old-fashioned doors leading…

To declare Frank Lloyd Wright a great architect is to overstate the obvious — sort of like saying Catherine Deneuve is a great beauty (and actress) or Mikhail Baryshnikov a great dancer or Shakespeare a great writer. How, then, do we approach one of the most famous, occasionally controversial, architects…

I’m into lamps lately. Not just lamps as décor but also lamps as art. Let me explain. It all started innocently enough. While relatives were in town, we inevitably ended up on Las Olas Boulevard. A little light lunch, a little light shopping, and lots of walking. Blame it on…

You may think you recognize the ingredients of typical paintings by a group of Florida artists now widely known as the Highwaymen: gracefully curving palms jutting over a waterfront, blazingly red royal poincianas that seem to have just burst into bloom, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, churning ocean waves…

Upon first encountering the art of Carol Prusa, I wondered if I’d stumbled across work by the deranged offspring of a botanist and a biologist — the artist’s paintings are simultaneously floral and anatomical, if that makes any sense. In one painting, for instance, a cascade of flowers flows from…

I stepped into the “52nd Annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition” and it was déjà vu all over again. At the entrance to the show, now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, I encountered a trio of long vertical wooden panels, labeled Best in Show, by Boca-based artist…

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to challenge the notion that America’s gay liberation movement started with the Stonewall riots, which began on June 22, 1969, coincidentally (not to mention fortuitously) the same day Judy Garland died. You’d be equally hard-pressed to find any acknowledgment of this momentous event at…

On a recent Saturday morning, the sole employee on duty at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood rushed around turning on audiovisual equipment for several pieces in “The Hollywood All-Media Juried Biennial,” a show that had opened just the night before. The volume on two video installations was out…

I dragged my feet about going to a trio of exhibitions with religious content, all three currently at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The titles of the shows — “Lesser Ury: Images from the Bible,” “Modern and Contemporary Works from Private Israeli Collections,” and “Psychic Landscapes: Paintings by Michal…

There’s a lovely paradox at the heart of some recent works by Pérez Celis. The Argentine artist anchors his mixed-media canvases in mundane, earthbound objects, then superimposes those objects with colors and forms that send the imagery up and out into the cosmos. For Celis — who was born in…

A recent quintessential Fort Lauderdale experience — squiring visitors from out of town down Las Olas Boulevard — yielded an unexpected dividend, in the form of a reminder that I hadn’t checked out New River Fine Art, formerly New River Gallery, in more than a year. What caught my eye…

After assuring the desk attendant and the first of three omnipresent security guards that I was equipped only with pencils, not the dreaded ink pens, I made my way into what turned out to be one of the most daring exhibitions I’ve ever seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art…

One thing’s for sure: “The Sideshow of the Absurd,” which has taken over the entire first floor of the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, is easily the most bizarre show to hit South Florida in a very long time. And I mean that in a good way, at least…

For a long time, the notion of taking glass seriously as contemporary fine art made me a little nervous. It was at best decorative and at worst utilitarian. A heavy glass orb streaked with color or encasing dried flowers was something to spruce up a coffee table. A vase, however…

Having ragged on Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art (MoA) a few times recently, I figured it was only fair to check in again to see how things have been going after a series of major staff changes and budget woes. The news is both good and bad. First, the bad…

Last year, the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University contacted more than 200 art critics across the country, inviting them to participate in The Visual Art Critic: A Survey of Art Critics at General-Interest News Publications in America. About 75 percent of those responded. I was one of them…

There’s a gimmick at the heart of “The Smiths: Tony, Kiki, Seton,” but it’s a good one: Combine wildly disparate works by two generations of an artistic family and all but dare people to concoct connections among those works. The exhibition, now at Lake Worth’s Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary…

Strange how the cultural currents in Broward County shift. Not so long ago, Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art (MoA) went from being reliable, mainstream, even conservative — the place you’d go to see solid if fairly predictable big shows — to exploring quirkier waters. The museum dabbled in interactive and…

How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Irish writer William Butler Yeats wondered in a 1927 poem. And indeed, there’s a sense in which dance is the most intimate of artistic media, one that comes to life only when embodied by human beings. Writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers –…

Two years ago, Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art (MoA) shocked South Florida’s art community when it unceremoniously dumped the 41-year-old Hortt Competition from its lineup. The popular competition had a long history with the increasingly irrelevant MoA — namesake M. Allen Hortt, an art collector and former Fort Lauderdale mayor,…