The Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale has been abuzz with excitement since last month’s opening of “Herb Ritts: Work” and understandably so. South Florida is only the second stop for this photography retrospective, assembled by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in late 1996, and the exhibition is…

A sense of deja vu hangs like a pall over “Eclectic Collectives,” and with good reason. This first group exhibition by the New River Arts & Crafts Association, now at ArtServe in Fort Lauderdale, is dominated by the kind of bland, innocuous art so often shown and sold at those…

Works by two artists with very different styles and very similar concerns are currently on display in a joint exhibition at the Schmidt Center Gallery — if you can find the place. I spent close to an hour wandering around the confusing, poorly marked Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic…

Looking at the paintings of Purvis Young, I kept getting the sense, sometimes unsettling, that I’d seen some of the imagery before. A few dramatic strokes of blue and green paint on paper, for instance, summoned Salvador Dali’s take on Don Quixote. Another spare piece on glossy, wrinkled, black paper,…

With a work as dauntingly large and otherworldly as the title piece in “Madeline Denaro: New Forms,” an exhibit on view at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, it’s revealing to watch people approach and appraise the piece. Some stand a few feet away, as if worried that the…

What first appears to be a huge pile of debris sits just outside the entrance to the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. If you’re approaching the museum from its main parking lot, you might not even notice this mass of vines and tree limbs. But if you’re coming east…

A faint but unmistakable electrical hum was in the air when I stepped into the Boca Raton Museum of Art to see “Richard Anuszkiewicz: Retrospective.” The buzz no doubt came from the air conditioning or lighting system, but it could just as easily have been generated by Anuszkiewicz’s work, which…

The centerpiece of “Red Grooms: Moby Dick Meets the New York Public Library,” now on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, is so dauntingly enormous that I couldn’t help thinking of the line used to promote this past summer’s flop Godzilla: “Size matters.” Just how…

The canvases of the American realist painter Janet Fish are so vibrant, so shimmering with light, energy, and bright, saturated colors, that to call them “still lifes” fails to do them justice. And yet Fish’s dominant subject matter is the stuff of traditional still-life painting: vases of flowers, bowls of…

The human body has always fascinated David Cronenberg, the Canadian filmmaker who’s the inspiration and catalyst for “Spectacular Optical,” a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. For Cronenberg the body is an alarmingly precarious, unstable thing, something not so much revolting as in revolt, often…

“Eating Monkey Brains, The Baboon Nurse and Other Tales,” Robert Morrison’s audacious one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, is pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition. If you like one piece in this exhibition, which is as provocative as its title, you’ll probably buy into the whole…

You know the saying: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” That’s not the case, however, at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, which is hosting its 21st Annual Faculty Exhibition in the school’s Mark K. Wheeler Gallery. At the very least, the show demonstrates that these instructors are…

To get an in-a-nutshell sense of the differences and similarities between the “40th Annual Hortt Competition” and the “1998 Salon Des Refuses” exhibits, now on display at Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art and the Broward Art Guild, respectively, consider two works, coincidentally by the same artist — one accepted by…

Housed in a nondescript storefront among the Fountains Shoppes of Distinction in Plantation, the Bock Gallery is the sort of unassuming little place you might easily pass. Don’t. Inside the narrow, cluttered space is a quirky array of art, ranging from the works of artist and owner William Bock to…

I knew next to nothing about Uruguayan art when I set out to see the “3rd Uruguayan Art Exhibition” on display at the Broward County Main Library. And now, having seen the show, I know… only slightly more than I did going in, other than the obvious fact that some…

One of the mysteries of 20th-century art is the remarkable outpouring of creativity that has come from a seemingly unlikely place: Haiti. For nearly half a century, a steady stream of art has flowed from the tiny Caribbean nation, which has a population of roughly six million and takes up…

Even if Frederic Clay Bartlett had never picked up a paintbrush, he would merit at least a footnote in the history of modern art for his many other art-related ventures. Muralist, architect, and interior designer, the Chicago-born Bartlett spent much of his 80 years studying art in Munich and Paris,…

The catalog for “Postcards on the Edge,” a show on display at ArtServe in Fort Lauderdale, describes it as “a multifaceted progressive traveling exhibition examining a historic means of casual communication facing the possibility of future extinction in this electronic age.” That’s artspeak for “This is a show about postcards.”…

You won’t find the work of glass artist Jackson Hall in any South Florida gallery or museum — not yet, anyway. A recent transplant from San Francisco, Hall has spent the past two months getting settled in Fort Lauderdale, where he has a small studio in his house in the…