When I arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami to see “YES YOKO ONO,” there was already a contingent of security guards in the lobby gearing up for duty. I was surprised only by the number of guards present first thing on a Saturday morning. MoCA…

Let’s begin at the end: “Fat Painting,” the small but excellent show now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, culminates in a short video that perfectly captures the spirit of the exhibition that precedes it. The video chronicles the creation of a piece by Rosaria Pugliese — one…

Not long ago, this paper did a cover story on the plight of three Broward County art galleries that had closed after a relatively short time in business. All three were on my list of to-see places, but I never got around to visiting them. I was pissed. So I…

An air of melancholy hangs over much of the work in “Reality and Figuration: The Contemporary Latin American Presence,” one of two exhibitions of Hispanic art now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. It’s evident in the three acrylic cityscapes by young Cuban artist Gustavo Acosta that greet you…

It’s not unusual for the Coral Springs Museum of Art to run three very different shows simultaneously. What is unusual is the way museum director Barbara O’Keefe manages to make the shows flow together so smoothly. On the surface, “Captain Honk and His Funky Florida Fish,” “Walford Campbell: Life Within…

No doubt, Oscar Wilde would have hated Harmony Isle Gallery. The man who so famously declared that “all art is quite useless” would find much to be appalled at in this little Fort Lauderdale gallery, which intentionally blurs the line between form and function. Harmony Isle specializes in craft art…

“Hot enough for you?” The next time some smart-ass tosses that tired one your way, direct him or her to Gallery 421 in downtown Fort Lauderdale, which is hosting “Hot Summer Nights II: An Erotic Art Show.” The show was originally intended to be no more than a weekend event…

If you haven’t been to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach in awhile (mea culpa), brace yourself. The museum, which underwent a 77,500-square-foot expansion and renovation almost a decade ago, is expanding yet again — by 35,000 more square feet, increasing exhibition space by 75 percent. That’s…

Summer is the off-season in South Florida, so museums often take advantage of the lull to showcase works from their permanent collections. A few years ago, for instance, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach did a large, ambitious, but near-incoherent summer show; last year the Museum of…

I’ve often cited Gertrude Stein’s complaint that the problem with sculpture is that one can walk around it. It’s a somewhat bizarre assertion, but there’s plenty of modern sculpture to support her sweeping dismissal — big, clunky public art that looks more like the aftermath of an industrial or traffic…

The first floor of the Boca Raton Museum of Art this summer is sort of like the South Florida weather lately: When it rains, it pours. I spent more than two hours in the museum one recent weekend and came away still uncertain if I’d absorbed everything there was to…

Art has always had the potential to shock. Some artists shock inadvertently, while others shock by design. Pretty much the whole point of Dada — one of the most extreme (and influential) movements in art history — was to piss people off, to deliver a jolt to a world that,…

Don’t go into “María Martínez-Cañas: A Retrospective,” now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, expecting anything remotely resembling what we ordinarily regard as photography. Martínez-Cañas is usually characterized as a photographer, and she uses the medium of photography and the tools associated with it, but the results she…

Two older couples — fairly typical South Floridians — were making their way through “Richard Pousette-Dart: The Living Edge” at the Boca Raton Museum of Art on a recent Sunday afternoon. As they paused before a wall of several gleefully messy abstracts from the 1940s, when Pousette-Dart was deeply immersed…

Normally, my jurisdiction as art critic for New Times Broward-Palm Beach extends no farther south than North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the inclusion of which I’ve managed to justify because no other South Florida museum consistently features such vital, cutting-edge art. (The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in…

Several months ago, I surveyed the Websites of nearly a dozen South Florida museums, only to find… not much of interest. The sites provide such basic information as hours of operation, directions, and descriptions of exhibitions. Otherwise, they serve as not much more than teasers, e-ads for the actual museums,…

The last time I visited New River Gallery, in the heart of the busy Las Olas Boulevard area in Fort Lauderdale, the gallery was showcasing a substantial collection of works, mostly graphics, by Salvador Dalí. The spirit of that ambitious but uneven show still lingers at the gallery in the…

Somehow, it’s not surprising that Salvador Dalí was one of the pioneers of an art form that didn’t even have a name until near the end of his long, notorious career. In 1939, the flamboyant Spanish surrealist created a pavilion for the New York World’s Fair that was a prototype…

The introduction posted at the beginning of “Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives,” now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, asserts: “Photographs are time machines. They allow us to look back in history, freeze a moment in time, and imagine ourselves as…