It’s relatively early in the year, I know, but “Wifredo Lam in North America” is such a knockout that I’m prepared to go ahead and declare it one of the best exhibitions of 2008. Yes, it’s that good. The show, now at the Miami Art Museum (MAM), is the Cuban-born…
When is a lamp not a lamp? When it’s a Tiffany lamp, in which case it qualifies as a work of art. By the end of the 1970s, the lamps of American art nouveau designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of Tiffany and Co. cofounder Charles, were fetching up to and…
To get into “southXeast: Contemporary Southeastern Art” — or at least the half of the show that’s at the Schmidt Center Gallery at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton (the other half is across campus at the Ritter Art Gallery) — you must first pass through a large installation. Mike…
You could be forgiven for wondering whether you’re in an art gallery or a plant nursery when you come upon the work of glass artist Debora Moore, now on view at Habatat Galleries in the Gallery Center art mall in Boca Raton. Such is Moore’s mastery of her medium. She…
Sometimes the making of art is as interesting as the art itself. Occasionally, as with “Degas in Bronze: The Complete Sculptures,” now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, it’s even more interesting than the art itself. Imagine a body of work so distinctive and unusual that a whole subculture…
There is crockery, and then there is crockery. As in the earthenware bowls and other vessels commonly used to store things in and serve them from, and as in the ceramics found in “Peter King & Xinia Marin: Ceramics for Architecture & Music,” now at the Coral Springs Museum of…
The concept and even the title sound hopelessly gimmicky: “A Show of Hands,” as in an exhibition consisting solely of works featuring human hands and other reasonable facsimiles. And yet the show itself succeeds despite the gimmick, simply because the content is so strong. As indicated by the subtitle, “Photographs…
“Jorge Pardo: House,” now at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami, is the sort of show that’s likely to divide museumgoers into two camps: those who will emerge stroking their chins and going “Hmmm… interesting” and those who will be left scratching their heads and going “Huh?”…
The past few years have been good to Purvis Young. Last year he was named Best Local Artist by this paper. The year before he was the subject of both a career retrospective, “Purvis Young: Paintings From the Street,” at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and a documentary, Purvis…
It comes into view as you round the southern curve of Young Circle in Hollywood. Perched on a plot of park land on the eastern edge of the circle, across from a Publix parking lot, it looks poised and ready. Neither bird nor plane nor Superman, it is nevertheless an…
Form vs. function. The argument seems almost quaint now. It has been more than a century since Oscar Wilde began his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray by declaring, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things,” then ended, 30 or so sentences later, with a trio of bizarre…
In her catalog introduction to the quirky group exhibition “Delicatessen,” now at the Schmidt Center Gallery on Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus, the show’s guest curator, Latvian-born Diana Shpungin, an adjunct professor at FAU, declares the title “a peculiar word.” She then goes on to ask, “How can a…
If you have a problem with vertigo, approach the latest body of work from Royo with caution. In “Royo: Ingrávidos,” now at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Spanish artist is preoccupied with the human body suspended in space, and the overall effect of seeing so many of his…
For confirmation of the idea that bigger is not necessarily better, look no further than the Boca Raton Museum of Art, where two exhibitions that vary dramatically in scale vie for visitors’ attention. The main first-floor galleries are taken up by a splashy crowd-pleaser, “Conflicting Currents: Aspects of American Art…
If ever an exhibition needed a map of some sort, “Craig Kucia: many sundays were spent talking of rockets,” the small one-man show now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, is it. Unfortunately, no directions are forthcoming, just a postcard handout with this meager description: “Craig Kucia creates…
When the Museum of Art/Fort Lauderdale shut down at the beginning of the summer, there was more than a little skepticism, in these pages and elsewhere. What could they be thinking? And more to the point, how could they leave the art-loving public high and dry for the long, hot…
It really was like déjà vu all over again. Stepping into Art Expressions Gallery, I mean. The gallery, once crammed into a cramped space in a tiny strip mall on NE Fourth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, reopened on June 1 in a space more than twice as large. And while…
A text panel early in “Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford” notes that the artist has been called “Audubon on Viagra.” It’s a clever line, and Ford could indeed be seen as the great painter of The Birds of America with a hard-on. But he could also just as…
A teenaged Ugandan girl stares solemnly at the camera, the lower third of her face a mangled mess. Her crime? Refusing to have sex with a rebel soldier. Her punishment? Having her lips cut off. A young American, his face a crumpled mask of pain, holds the equally crumpled helmet…
After nearly a decade of covering the “Annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition” at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, I had come to think of it a little like a dental exam — something more to be expected and endured than enjoyed. Much the same thing had happened…
¨Art of Asia: Focus
on Japan¨ On display through August 18 at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, 2855 Coral Springs Dr., Coral Springs.
Call 954-340-5000.
Objets trouvés. Found objects. In the right hands, so to speak, few words are as charged with artistic possibilities. And when the hands are those of someone as ingenious as puppeteer extraordinaire Pablo Cano, whose ¨Pablo Cano: Marionettes as Sculpture¨ exhibition has been extended through the summer at the Coral…
