There may be only three pieces in “Empathic Economies: The Work of Lee Mingwei,” now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, but don’t let the spareness of the show fool you. It’s as enigmatic and fraught with significance as a Zen koan. And indeed, Lee is steeped in…
Credit Max Schacknow with persistence, if nothing else. In 1994 the feisty millionaire artist gave Coral Springs $1.5 million to name the museum section of its Coral Springs City Centre after him, with a provision that he be allowed to display his works in some of the galleries there. Four…
If you wandered off the street into “Against Design,” now at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, you could easily get the impression you were in the showroom of a particularly eccentric department store. In the lobby sit five rounded cushions, with several items of clothing…
It’s that time again: the doldrums of the South Florida summer art season, when many of the big museum shows have ended or are winding down. This is when the museums typically turn to their permanent collections to help get them through to the fall. At the Museum of Art…
The Bock Gallery in Plantation doesn’t really lend itself to a typical exhibition. It’s a relatively small display space with not much chance of establishing any sort of flow to a show. And besides, because it’s a commercial gallery, that limited space is also crammed with all sorts of other…
Museums and galleries get inexplicably overexcited about the word juried, as if a juried exhibition is somehow more legitimate or worthy than an ordinary show put together by a museum curator or gallery director. But as we all know from real-life civil and criminal trials, a jury’s verdict is subject…
It was the Haitian art featured in “Haitian Celebration: South Florida Collects Haitian Art” that lured me to the Coral Springs Museum of Art, way out in the suburban sprawl of northwest Broward. And a fine show it is: 88 pieces in various media by 62 artists, the works drawn…
The eerie glow that emanates from so many of the canvases in “Kate Kretz: Fate of a Technicolor Romantic” is the result, according to an artist’s statement, of being raised “on a regimen of Catholicism and Technicolor movies.” It’s an odd but apt convergence of influences, with the conflicting impulses…
Surrealism has wormed its way so deeply into the fabric of contemporary culture, especially pop culture, that it’s easy to forget how dramatically it shook up the art world when it emerged in the mid-1920s. That’s part of what gives the works in “Sweet Dreams and Nightmares: Dada and Surrealism…
One of the most memorable images of Willem de Kooning has to be the 1986 portrait by the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a straightforward black-and-white photograph in which the artist, 82 years old at the time, looks directly into the camera with a benign half smile. He’s wearing his familiar…
“Anyone can cut and paste,” I overheard a museumgoer mutter while wandering among the pieces that make up “Bruce Helander: Survey of Collage Works,” one of two current shows at the Coral Springs Museum of Art. “Everything here’s a jumble.” His female companion quickly stepped in to correct his misperception,…
“Making time” is exactly the challenge you’ll face if you decide to take in “Making Time: Considering Time as a Material in Contemporary Video & Film,” the inaugural exhibition at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) in Lake Worth. The show consists of nearly three dozen videos and…
Check your sense of seriousness at the door — and your sense of moral outrage, too, for that matter — before entering “Lowbrow Art: Up From the Underground,” the gleefully subversive show now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Although there’s probably not something to offend everyone, there’s…
“Too much of a good thing,” Mae West once quipped, “can be wonderful.” That’s pretty much the position we’re in this season in South Florida. Two weeks ago I wrote about the embarrassment of riches on display at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in “Paris 1860-1930: Birthplace of European…
For years it has been a South Florida cultural landmark. First it was a movie house called the Lake Theater. Then it was the Lannan Museum, home to the collection of J. Patrick Lannan, a financier with deep pockets and a penchant for modern and contemporary American and European art…
The roll call is impressive: Paul Cézanne, Giorgio de Chirico, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh. And that’s just a dozen names, perhaps the best-known of the more than 75 artists included in the sweeping…
The ID tags for the works on display in “Ian Murray,” a one-man show now at Art Frenzie in Wilton Manors, are vague and a little misleading. “Oil pastel, printing ink” is a typical combination. Most of the pieces are on paper, although a few are identified simply as “acrylic”…
If you require, as I do, a very good reason to venture into the volatile cauldron of Miami-Dade County, then let one of those reasons be the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami, which regularly showcases some of the most exciting art in South Florida. Last summer, for…
The upcoming five-day extravaganza FOTOfusion 2000 at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in Delray Beach bills itself as “the international festival of photography and imaging where creativity and technology fuse.” A better slogan might be: “Everything you always wanted to know about photography (but were afraid to ask).” From the…
If you’re looking for provocative art this season, look no further than the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University (FAU), where the Schmidt Center Gallery is hosting an unsettling site-specific installation with the unwieldy title “Body Buy Back: A Temporary Installation Reflecting on the Practice and Social Dimensions of…
The introductory essay in the fine catalog for “American Glass: Masters of the Art,” now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, gets right to the point: “Glass is one of the world’s oldest materials for art and, in America, one of the newest.” It’s a simple statement that…
When it comes to hype and ego, the New York art world has nothing on South Florida. Consider, for example, Edna Hibel, the 82-year-old artist who currently has a small selection of her work on display at the Cornell Museum of Art & History in Delray Beach, in a show…
