I went to Michael Joseph Photography and Artists’ Haven Gallery expecting one thing and got another altogether. What I expected, more or less, was a traditional art gallery with Joseph’s black-and-white photos lining the walls. What I got was a display space in transition, which in this case proved to…
“Stop!” a voice called out. “Please don’t touch.” And while the guard was not admonishing me, he might as well have been. I’m hard-pressed to remember when I have so longed to touch the art in an exhibition and been unable to. Yes, I am well aware of museum protocol…
On display through May 31 at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Mark K. Wheeler Gallery, 1799 SE 17th St. Cswy., Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-308-2109.
Six years ago, during her short but influential tenure at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, then-curator Samantha Salzinger initiated a juried biennial for the center’s museum space. It was one of her many innovations, and it was just what was needed at an institution that sometimes seemed on…
Art or softcore porn? That might well have been the question weighing on the minds of a few people poking their heads into Saba Gallery on Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard one recent afternoon. The potential gallerygoers were mostly older, and, while a couple of the men seemed intrigued, the…
So you think you know Georgia O’Keeffe? Well, think again. That, in a nutshell, was my immediate reaction to “Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction,” a relatively small but disproportionately thrilling exhibition now at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Is it a retrospective of the great American…
Timing, as they say, is everything. When I contacted North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) recently, it was just to make arrangements to see “Merce Cunningham: Dancing on the Cutting Edge,” an exhibition featuring sets and costumes from productions by dance-world titan Cunningham. As it turned out, the great…
When the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood lost its in-house curator, Samantha Salzinger, last year — she took up teaching at Florida Atlantic University — the loss was not just the institution’s but that of the Broward County art scene as well. Salzinger had brought much-needed vision and vitality…
If you’re not familiar with Marjory Stoneman Douglas — and if you’re living in South Florida and don’t know the name, shame on you, because you should — then head over to the Old Fort Lauderdale Museum of History for a crash course. The museum is located in the historic…
In August of this year, it will have been 45 years since Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a barbiturate overdose — nearly a decade longer than she was alive. Yet she remains as elusive and enigmatic a cultural icon as ever. If you doubt this, consider “Life as a…
Don’t be put off by the clunky title of artist Tin Ly’s current exhibition at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, “Morphing Forms: Selection of Dimensional Work (1990-2006).” The show and its components — a few paintings but mostly compact metal sculptures painted in oil — are much more graceful…
When most people dress up their pets in outrageous outfits and/or put them into unusual situations, then photograph the hapless animals, the result is kitsch, and the people might be considered, oh, kinky. When William Wegman does the same thing with his famous Weimaraners, however, it’s considered art, and he…
From its very beginnings — even, for some, right up until the present — photography has been both revered and reviled for its uncanny ability to capture reality. Among artists, many were exhilarated to be liberated once and for all from any obligation to re-create reality, while others dismissed the…
Local Color. One of the festival’s official closing-night features is this maddeningly uneven coming-of-age story, set in 1974, about an 18-year-old aspiring artist and his stormy relationship with a burned-out, hard-drinking artist who has given up on his work and himself. The whole movie hinges on the young man, who…
Sharkwater. Even if you don’t completely buy into the premise of this riveting documentary — that sharks are among the most misunderstood creatures on the planet — it’s hard to argue with its assertions that sharks are a crucial component in the marine food chain and therefore an essential element…
Things That Hang From Trees. Although this moody Southern gothic from first-time feature director Ido Mizrahy never quite comes together, it has its moments. Most of them involve an 8-year-old boy, Tommy Jr., played with great reserves of sorrow and mystery by Cooper Musgrove. Little Tommy has asthma, and there…
The line between decorative art and fine art grows ever fuzzier, with some declaring that it no longer even exists at all, if it ever did. I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly what might once have been dismissed as elements of interior design can now more easily pass for,…
Purvis of Overtown. This straightforward but penetrating 2005 documentary traces the life and career of Purvis Young, a self-taught artist who grew up in Miami’s notorious Overtown neighborhood in the 1940s and ’50s. He still lives and works there, painting at an amazing pace and still working with whatever he…
Shark Park: The Heaviest Wave in California. There are no sharks in Shark Park, a surfing documentary in which the only killers are the killer waves in the title’s park, which isn’t even really a park. Imagine being in the Pacific Ocean about 50 miles off the coast of California…
For so many years, people have been calling me all different kinds of names to describe me as an artist: outsider, black artist, ghetto artist, the Picasso of the Ghetto,” Purvis Young said at a public appearance in August. “I just want to be called an artist. That’s all I’ve…
“GEOMETRIC, why not?” the new exhibition at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, is an austere counterpoint to the current Latin American show at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The artists in the Boca show are all Latin American, while the Hollywood show’s Latin American majority is complemented…
It’s tempting to joke that Robert Perry incorporates everything but the kitchen sink into his art. Then again, he may well be working on a piece that throws in the sink, along with who knows what else. Perry, a self-described “lighting sculptor” whose delightful work is now on view in…
