When Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art (MoA) pulled the plug on the Hortt Competition last year, an era appeared to have ended. At 41 years old, the Hortt — named for former Fort Lauderdale mayor, art collector, and MoA benefactor M. Allen Hortt — was one of the region’s longest-running…

Step into the first gallery to your left at the entrance to “Sophia Vari: Volumes of Poetry,” now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. You’ll see pedestal after pedestal, display case after display case featuring the gleaming, curvaceous sculptures of the Greek-born Vari, who typically works in bronze, often…

A little girl, her pouty lips slightly parted, lies stretched out provocatively in shadows that fall like a lattice across her body, while a ghostly TV image hovers above and behind her. In another picture the same girl sprawls on the floor in a blue bikini and a platinum blond…

Three very different solo shows currently share the spacious galleries of the Coral Springs Museum of Art: “Clyde Butcher: Visions for the Next Millennium,” “Len Janklow: Kinetics in Light & Color,” and “Leo Kaplan: Nostalgic Gatherings.” Butcher, of course, is the South Florida photographer celebrated as the “Ansel Adams of…

Curator Bonnie Clearwater succinctly states the premise of “Mythic Proportions: Painting in the 1980s,” now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, in the introduction to the show’s catalog: “This examination of the decade of the 1980s is not an arbitrary chronological focus: 1979 was a watershed year…

Anyone unfamiliar with the name Pablo Picasso and all it entails — could such a creature exist? — might wander through “Picasso: Passion and Creation — The Last Thirty Years,” now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, in all but complete bewilderment. The works on display focus almost exclusively…

About three months ago, the Fine Arts Gallery at Broward Community College’s Central Campus in Davie showcased an eclectic retrospective of works by five full-time faculty members. Now the gallery weighs in with the fourth annual “Adjunct Faculty Exhibit,” an even quirkier and more ambitious show featuring the works of…

After three visits to Harmony Isle Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, I still found myself circling through the gallery again and again, picking up on items that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere when my back was turned. Was that piece really there a moment ago? Surely I would have…

You won’t find any trendy installation in “The Triumph of French Painting: Masterpieces from Ingres to Matisse,” now at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. No interactive or conceptual work. Nothing contemporary that ambitiously sets out to redefine art. You will find gallery after gallery of gorgeous…

Long before I saw what turned out to be my favorite piece in “publikulture (a social experiment by eight Miami artists)” — one of two shows now downstairs at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale — I heard it. The work, called Playground (for Mila), is a room-size installation…

Give me a break,” a friend said when I told her about one of the works in “Making Art in Miami: Travels in Hyperreality,” the new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami. The piece is identified as an oil, but rather than oil on canvas,…

Has any 20th-century artist exerted a more ruthless, relentless hold on the public imagination than Salvador Dalí? I doubt it. Even Picasso occasionally stepped out of the limelight. Not so Dalí, the perennial showman, the unapologetic huckster. Dalí always seemed to be on. Dalí at his most flamboyant is the…

The five artists represented in “Faculty 2000: A Retrospective,” now at the Fine Arts Gallery on Broward Community College’s Davie campus, are all full-time faculty members at BCC. As the subtitle indicates, this show has sent them rummaging through their pasts; as with most such expeditions, the results are highly…

The juxtapositions are sometimes jarring: Two Andy Warhols are propped on the floor a few feet from a vintage Norman Rockwell. A quartet of pieces by actor turned painter Anthony Quinn give way to a Red Skelton self-portrait, followed by a pair of Ertés. A cluster of Picassos shares space…

The show’s title sounds slightly reckless, as if the artists had knocked back a few or taken a couple of hits to jump-start the creative juices. And sure enough, some of the best work in “Under the Influence: An Exhibition by 2 + 3,” now at the Museum of Art…

There are two ways to approach “The Male Form in Contemporary Art,” now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Enter the door directly in front of the museum’s main entrance, and you’ll find the “Education Center,” a midsize gallery that’s meant to prepare you for what’s to come…

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For decades the ultimate “head movies” included Disney’s animated Fantasia and Stanley Kubrick’s special effects­laden 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it’s only fitting that cinematic psychedelia be dramatically brought up to date for the brave new world of the 21st Century — via computer, of course. The recipe sounds simple:…

A few months ago, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) in Lake Worth featured an exhibition called “Against Design,” which presented items that would normally be considered functional — furniture, appliances, fashion — redefined in the context of art. Now the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami…

As a child growing up in New York City, artist Anita Giteck Drujon was mesmerized by the mummies in the basement of the Museum of Natural History. Many years later she was exposed to the medium of encaustic, in which heat is applied to pigment mixed with wax. An artist…