I dare you not to be impressed by Jenny Saville. If nothing else, the scale of her monumental paintings demands that you pay attention. At 103 inches tall by 192 inches wide, her Fulcrum (1997-99), for instance, is certainly one of the largest single-painting canvases you’re likely to encounter, and…
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa (1864-1901), better known simply as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, was exactly the kind of person your mother might have warned you to steer clear of: an inbred, aristocratic drunk who frequented cabarets and brothels and died, at age 36, of complications from alcoholism and syphilis…
The Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale’s new exhibition of paintings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, will make you long for a Christianity for Dummies guide or at least a set of biblical CliffsNotes. As the posted introduction makes clear, we are about to embark on a long exploration of…
The Boca Raton Museum of Art has a long and noble tradition of showcasing works from the private collections of its board members and benefactors. “Outsider Visions” continues that tradition, assembling 95 works from the collection of Ted and Ann Oliver. Collectors often establish well-defined parameters and then lavish their…
Sometimes a small, well-conceived, tightly focused show can be just as satisfying as a much larger exhibition. The Norton’s new photography exhibit is not such a show. It’s no more filling, in fact, than an appetizer when you’re hungry for a full meal. The show is made up of 20…
To walk into the Boca Museum’s Federico Uribe installation is to walk into a tropical forest filled with ideas as well as plants and animals. Uribe may not be the first “green” artist, but he is certainly one of the most original. His jungle is populated with plants and animals…
Does a museum have an institutional memory? Does it labor under the burden of exhibitions past — its memories of what once was, its aspirations forever colored by what has been and can never be again? If so, the Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale has a heavy cross to bear. It…
The good news, thanks to the tradition of exacting standards established by the South Florida Cultural Consortium, is that the work included in this year’s exhibition is of a uniformly high standard. No slackers here. The bad news is that it’s difficult to find a theme or common thread among…
The good news, thanks to the tradition of exacting standards established by the South Florida Cultural Consortium, is that the work included in this year’s exhibition is of a uniformly high standard. No slackers here. The bad news is that it’s difficult to find a theme or common thread among…
The Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale’s current big exhibition, “The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography,” seems to trend backward for the museum. It’s not a bad show, but it’s far from the caliber of the sweeping survey of American painting the museum presented a couple of years…
In museum parlance, a canned show is one that comes to a venue prepackaged, either from another institution or from a company that specializes in assembling and touring exhibitions. All that’s needed on the receiver’s end is a little curatorial know-how and some space and you’re ready to rock ‘n’…
The initial visceral impact of “Ryan Humphrey: Fast Forward” is considerable: You walk into the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, and the main gallery has seemingly been transformed into a small-scale skate park for in-line skaters, skateboarders, and BMX bikers. At either end of the space, BMX bicycles have…
The Norton’s “Altered States” is a relatively small show that traffics in big art. There are just over two dozen works by four contemporary artists, but the scale of the pieces tends to be big and the themes even bigger. One temporary site-specific installation — Jose Alvarez’s Vibrating Strands of…
You’d think photographer Jeremiah Jenner had just won an Academy Award — he’s that excited, caught up in the peculiar blend of humility and disbelief, exhilaration and relief, that we see onstage during awards shows. And truth be told, he’s not that far off. His Galerie Jenner has just celebrated…
When Katherine Helmers McCauley passed away last fall, she left behind a body of work that was vast and varied. That conclusion is based on the sprawling and generous retrospective on display at the Broward County Main Library. It takes up all of Gallery Six, covers more than four decades,…
Juried art shows are sort of like the O.J. Simpson trial — half the fun is in arguing about the verdict. “You thought that was Best in Show? You’re kidding.” In the case of the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood’s “Fifth All-Media Juried Biennial,” there’s plenty of outrage and…
What do you do with a building that was last used as a laundry facility for a state hospital in the 1950s? If you’re the City of Pembroke Pines, you turn it into an artists’ colony. That is, if you have a million dollars and eight years to invest in…
One of the ideas behind “Cultural Collisions,” now at Broward College in downtown Fort Lauderdale, was to bring together four artists from different cultural backgrounds and see what kind of cross-pollination might result. The artists — American Timothy Leistner, Venezuelan Francisco Sheuat, Honduran Julio Green, and Dominican Carmen Cordero —…
If you’re going to hang an exhibition on a gimmick, make it a really good one. Fortunately, that’s the case with “A to Z: 26 Great Photographs From the Norton Collection,” a terrific little show now on view. The idea is to take a whirlwind tour of the Norton Museum…
Father, I confess: I dragged my heels before going to see “Vatican Splendors: A Journey Through Faith and Art,” the latest religious extravaganza at the Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale. After all, hadn’t the museum already covered much of this territory, first with “Saint Peter and the Vatican: The Legacy of…
Don’t talk to Keith Clark about subtlety these days. There’s nothing subtle about three years of losing good jobs and working at near minimum wage just to get by. Nothing subtle about having to short-sell your house and dealing with banks. No subtlety to turning 50 along the way. “My…
“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” So proclaimed André Breton, the great theoretician of surrealism, in the closing words of the 1928 novel Nadja. But he could have just as easily tossed off the line last week in reference to any one of three new exhibitions…
