Perhaps now isn’t the best time to be singing the praises of public art, considering that the Broward County Commission recently suspended its Public Art and Design program because of budget cuts. Tell that to the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, which is currently showcasing “Natural Forces: Broward County…
Michelle Weinberg wears many hats: working artist, gallery director, arts educator — and now, judge for the MasterMind Awards, a contest founded by New Times and sponsored by the Amplitude Academy of Musical Arts, a new music school. “Always artist first,” Weinberg emphasizes. The native New Yorker, who won a…
Three exhibitions at the Boca Raton Museum of Art: one, an expected pleasure; one, a pleasant surprise; the other, a disappointment. Let’s dispatch the disappointment first. “Gary T. Erbe: Forty-Year Retrospective” is a perfectly lovely survey of an artist who leaves me, for the most part, cold. Erbe is a…
It seemed like a cool idea: Invite a bunch of tattoo artists to put down the needle and pick up the paintbrush (or pencil or whatever). That’s the premise behind “Off the Needle: The Art of SoFla Tattoo Artists,” a group show now at the Bear and Bird Boutique +…
I would be hard-pressed to come up with two artists as diametrically opposed as Sheila Elias and Stan Slutsky, whose work is presented in a mismatched pair of solo shows at the Coral Springs Museum of Art. Maybe that’s the point. Elias, whose “Sheila Elias: Somewhere — Anywhere” takes up…
New Times is excited to announce that we’re giving away $1,000 apiece to four local artists as part of our newly established MasterMind Awards. Individuals can enter a variety of media — performance art, video/film/multimedia, visual art, fashion design — or nominate someone whose work they admire. Winners will be…
In the early 1960s, George Segal began producing the sculptures on which he built his reputation: life-sized plaster casts of the human figure, sometimes alone, often in pairs or groups, usually in public places that he re-created using found objects. There are 13 such sculptures in “George Segal: Street Scenes,”…
As one character says to another in the 1992 indie film The Living End, “You know what they say: Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach get paid 25 cents a word to rip other people’s work to shreds.” No longer content with doing the latter, I…
The two-man show “Recent Works 09: Drawings, Paintings, Digital, Sculpture,” now at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale’s Mark K. Wheeler Gallery, pairs current Art Institute instructor Jon Hunt with former Art Institute instructor Jim Radford, and it’s an odd-couple affair that works wonderfully. Both men are essentially realists, although…
While many of us are feeling draggy and listless during the hot, humid days of a South Florida summer, the seemingly tireless executive director of the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Barbara O’Keefe, has assembled not just one but four shows to get us through the season. The first and…
In the one-woman show “Passages,” now at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale’s Mark K. Wheeler Gallery, Art Institute instructor Jody Thompson explores her fascination with a couple of key items: female mannequins, especially, with Arabic numerals running a close second. In archival digital prints and mixed-media works, we encounter…
When I tell you the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood’s big summer show features the work of a Jack Russell terrier, you’ll probably expect a string of dog puns: “It’s the dog days of summer!” “The Art and Culture Center has gone to the dogs!” Well, you’re barking up…
For anyone who has been inside the tiny display space that is Artist’s Eye Fine Art Gallery in Dania Beach, a continuing source of amazement is the amount of art that owner Timothy Leistner is able to pack into the place — and he invariably does it without making the…
With a group exhibition, as with a party, so much depends on both the guest list and the host. In the case of the “58th Annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition,” now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the guests are about four dozen artists from all over…
Two exhibitions at two venues take a look at the phenomenon of outsider artist Purvis Young. One, titled simply “Purvis,” is now winding down at the 12th Floor Art Space at Broward College (formerly Broward Community College) in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The other, called “Purvis Young: Raw,” has a slightly…
The title of Vickie Pierre’s “If You Win Me, I’m Forever,” now in the Project Room at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, rings an ever-so-slightly ominous note as if to say, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.” The installation itself is a fairly innocuous…
There are ordinary framers, and then there is the Art & Frame Shop and the Williams Gallery in Davie, where owner William Bock is an artist himself and brings his well-trained eye to bear on what he frames. He does exceptional work. He also shines the occasional spotlight on the…
It’s hard to look at the crumpled black form that seems to be crashing toward the bottom of the canvas in Cleve Gray’s Death of the Eagle (1977) and not see the eagle of the title. If Gray had given the big acrylic one of his more generic titles, we…
Would it be the teensiest bit ungenerous to suggest that artists, as a group, tend to be self-involved? Of course not. Artistic ego is part of what makes “Me Me Me Me Me” so much fun. The group show of artist self-portraits is on display now at the Bear and…
What impulse compels people to buy art and hang it on the walls of their homes? What drives them to share that art — or some of it, anyway — with museums so that others can enjoy it? These are among the provocative questions posed by “With You I Want…
The people portrayed in the paintings of Andrew Stevovich tend to be social creatures. They congregate in places like an internet café, a cocktail lounge, a casino. They line up to file into theaters or to place wagers at betting windows. They fill buses and trains and subway cars. Occasionally…
A decade or so ago, I used to run across the work of David Maxwell in group shows on a fairly regular basis. I always said nice things about it, and one day the artist contacted me to invite me to his home studio in Miramar. This big bear of…
