Art Districts Magazine

All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition Returns to South Florida

raisa — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:38:06 +0000

"All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition". All images are courtesy of the Boca Museum of Art.

An annual testament to the state’s flourishing art scene, the Boca Museum of Art’s distinguished “All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition” will highlight the breadth and creative talent of Florida’s independent artists.

The “All Florida” exhibition will be on display in the Museum’s central galleries from May 8 to July 14, 2013. The state’s oldest statewide annual juried competition in its 62^nd year received submissions from nearly 550 artists from across Florida.

This year’s juror, Mark Scala, Chief Curator at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, selected 149 works for the exhibition by 122 Florida artists. The 62nd All Florida exhibition will offer a provocative glimpse of the state-of-the-art today through mediums that include paintings, graphics, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs, computer-generated images, and videos.

“The artists in this exhibition were selected not just because they were the best to have submitted work or because they seemed particularly reflective of place, but because their art could be shown in a museum or gallery anywhere in the world without there being a question of its aesthetic merit,” said Scala.

The All Florida exhibition aims to increase the visibility of emerging, under-recognized, and mid-career Florida artists, as well as encourage a stronger community of local talent. Among the 122 Florida-based artists selected for this show, we can mention: Susan Fink, Karl Andersson, Ingrid Barreneche,  Joan Criscione,  Yossi Daboosh,  Diane Dequevedo,  Janis Ehlers,  Daniel Falvey,  Misoo Filan,  Michael Gora,  Laura Greenstein,  Ari Hirschman,  Suzanne Khalil,  Enido Michelini,  Jack Newman,  Barry Rosson,  Nadine Saitlin,  Art Siegel,  David Alan Sincavage,  Shari Weidenbaum, Lois Alexander-Mandel,  David Cohen,  Larry Colby,  Norman Fleischner,  Teresa Frazee,  Choon Yi, Howard Katz,  Mary Kilbreath, Virginia Ferrara,  Paul Morales,  Jena Thomas, Tyler Smith, Gilbert Kendrick, Aaron Ansarov,  Hana Davis,  Esperanza Gomez, Francesca Mallows,  Ann Newman,  Judith Shah,  Flora Zolin, Elaine Abbe,  Stephanie Cunningham,  Bonney Goldstein,  Henning Haupt,  Janet Onofrey,  Linda Saint Hilaire, Kosmas Ballis,  Marcus Jansen, Richard Heipp, Lauren Lake, George Banet, Virginia Fifield, Craig Erskine,  Lily Kuonen,  Craig Erskine, William McMahan, Dennis Aufiery, Jane Coelho,  James Kenagen,  Elle Schorr, Enid Blechman,  Chelsea Rousso, Geoff Hamel, Janis Brothers, KYLE, Richard Barone,  Erika Masterson, Carol Alberto,  Dee Clark,  Danilo Gonzalez,  Patricia Gutierrez,  Eugenia Malioykova,  Francesca McClelland,  Gustavo Oviedo,  Bianca Pratorius,  Jacqueline Roch, Kristen Thiele,  Alex Trimino,  Alejandro Valencia,  Gabrielle Wood, Joana Bruessow,  Marina Font,  Pal Stock, Jean Banas, Joyce Rau, Joe Korte, Judy Flescher,  John Kearns,  James Knill,  Fern Samuels, Dana Payson, Sonja Hall, Judy Polstra, La Myer, Natalie Cisneros, Michael Ryan, Jean Blackburn,  Jazz Leeb, Debbie Rubin, Larry Gerber, Kareen Robinson, Nan Liu,  Alvin McBean, Jeanette Ramage, Stephen Holm,  Carolyn Kossar,  Sophia Livingston,  Karen Tucker Kuykendall, Charles Gillespie, Susan Turconi, Rene Guerin,  Betsy McKean, Elodia Fanjul,  Philip Harris, Brennan King,  Dan Leahy,  Erica Rukin, Tom Whitton, Irina Dakhnovskaia-Lawton,  Elaine Kahn,  Jami Nix Rahn, and  John Sanchez.

“Hosting the All Florida is a rigorous but rewarding experience,” said Kelli Bodle, Boca Museum Assistant Curator and exhibition curator. “It is an honor to showcase work from across the 65,000 square miles that make up Florida, revealing the artists’ response to each unique region and society.”

An opening reception for Museum members, artists, and their guests will be held on Tuesday May 7th, 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm. “All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition” will be open to the general public on Wednesday May 8th, at normal Museum hours. For more information call 561.392.2500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org

The Cornell Fine Arts Museum Receives Prestigious Kress Foundation Interpretative Fellowship

raisa — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:43:21 +0000

Cornell Fine Arts Museum, 2012. Photo: Scott Cook.

The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College has been awarded an Interpretive Fellowship at Art Museums from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The museum is one of only seven recipients nationwide given this honor, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, both in New York City; the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Portland Art Museum.

“We are enormously proud to have been chosen for this prestigious fellowship which gives us the opportunity to make strides on two of our top priorities: researching our permanent collection and mentoring future museum professionals,” said Ena Heller, the Bruce A. Beal Director of the Cornell.

Kress Interpretive Fellowships provide competitive grants in the amount of $30,000 to American art museums that sponsor supervised internships in art museum education. The program is intended to encourage students to explore interpretive careers in art museums; to strengthen the profession of museum educator within the art museum community; to strengthen ties between museum educators and curators in the shared task of interpretive programming in art museums; and to expand the range of promising career options available to students of art history and related fields. At the Cornell, the Kress Interpretive Fellow will conduct research and develop interpretive materials based upon the permanent collection, as well as develop an original exhibition concept.

“The Samuel H. Kress Foundation is extremely pleased to have awarded an Interpretive Fellowship to the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College for the upcoming year. We firmly believe that the strength of the Museum’s collection - which contains two works from the nationally distributed Kress Collection - coupled with the experience and vision that recently appointed Director, Ena Heller, brings to the institution will ensure an excellent training opportunity for the Kress Interpretive Fellow, one which we hope will be equally beneficial for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum as it strengthens scholarship on the art in its permanent collection and aims to more fully engage audiences with these outstanding works,” stated Max Marmor, President of the Kress Foundation.

The Cornell Fine Arts Museum is the only teaching museum with an encyclopedic art collection in the greater Orlando area. Its collection totals over 5,000 objects ranging from antiquity through contemporary, including Old Master paintings and a comprehensive collection of prints, drawings, and photographs. Located on the campus of Rollins College near downtown Winter Park, the Cornell’s public hours are: Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday, 12 to 5 p.m. The Cornell Fine Arts Museum is offering free admission to all in celebration of its 35^th anniversary. For additional information, please call 407.646.2526 or visit cfam.rollins.edu

Michael Aurbach

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 05:13:22 +0000

Michael Aurbach, Critical Theorist, 2003. mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

Museum of Contemporary Art - Jacksonville

By Claire Fenton

The UNF Gallery at MOCA Jacksonville is presenting an exhibition of the distinguished sculptor Michael Aurbach. His sculptures, inspired by social themes have been exhibited throughout the United States and have appeared in leading specialized publications. This exposition included a workshop in which the artist worked with UNF students.

Aurbach’s oeuvre always offers a commentary full of humor regarding topics such as death, identity, and also issues of economic and social interest like white collar fraud, as well as academic politics and institutional behavior.

His sculptures are generally large-format pieces of complex manufacture on which the artist has worked several months and even years. They are polished pieces in which he makes use of a play on metaphors by creating somewhat absurd situations that call upon the viewer to reflect.

In creating these situations that call for laughter, Aurbach exposes the superficiality and insincerity evidenced by many theories and tendencies in the fields of economics and politics, as well as critical thinking in the academic world, which far from facilitating access to knowledge, only serves to feed egos. Through April 29, 2013.

César Rey: Lightness

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 05:11:23 +0000

César Rey, Variation # 8, 2012 (Detail), aluminum, glass, plastic, 27"x27"x20". Courtesy of the artist and Aluna Art Foundation.

Aluna Art Foundation - Miami

By Raisa Clavijo

This exhibition of the sculptor César Rey is one of the most interesting I have seen recently. He totally reconstructed the project room of the Aluna Art Foundation, creating the immersive environment of a marine cavern. It is the perfect scenario in which to place his beautiful sculptures of fanciful abstract forms that appear to float in space. At first glance, the works do not evidence direct references to reality; instead, they challenge the imagination of the visitor to make multiple associations.

Rey’s allusion to marine worlds, to unknown liquid universes that were his obsession as a child and that he only came to know in adulthood is no coincidence. The artist populates this “cavern” with weightless beings, silver-toned sculptures and surfaces through which light is filtered made out of scraps. They are works in which wires, cables and plastics rescued from the trash acquire a sublime aura. His training as a designer has allowed him to master the infinite uses of a material and taught him how the wise use of light can awaken the most diverse emotions. The works of César Rey are only completed when the visitor circulates among them. It is then that the pieces appear to transform themselves into live beings that vibrate and move as a result of the magnetic field created due to the proximity of the visitor’s body. Each visit, each interaction with these “live” works appears different and unique. We leave the exhibition with the sensation that beauty can be found where we least expect it; we just have to look for it. Through May 11, 2013.

José Manuel Ballester: Concealed Spaces

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 05:00:52 +0000

José Manuel Ballester, The Uninhabited Garden, 2008, Tryptich, photography printed on canvas, 80.31” x 151.26”. Courtesy Frost Art Museum.

Frost Art Museum - Miami

By Denise Colson

“Concealed Spaces” is Spanish artist José Manuel Ballester’s first exhibition in the United States. It includes 24 large-format photographs, inspired by masterpieces from the history of universal art. The author manipulated the images of various paintings from the Museo del Prado using Photoshop, erasing all representation of live beings, and creating scenarios in which nature and architecture are the protagonists.

In this fashion, these paintings become intervened landscapes. Before Ballester transformed them they did not have the same connotation, since they were not landscapes per se, but rather mere backdrops. The artist has focused on the 16th and 17th centuries, a crucial period in landscape tradition, during which artists mainly from the Netherlands and Italy modernized the landscape genre.

With this exhibition, Ballester calls on us to reflect on the transformation of art throughout history by making such meaningful and well-known work timeless, and thus modifying our way of seeing them. Through June 23, 2013.

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:58:15 +0000

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait, 2006. Courtesy Pace/MacGill, New York. Made in collaboration with David Adamson Editions. Exhibition organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

Florida Museum of Photographic Arts - Tampa

By Suzanne Cohen

This interesting exhibition organized by Aperture Foundation included 15 daguerreotypes by Chuck Close, many of them portraying prominent contemporary artists like Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, Lisa Yuskavage, Ellen Gallagher, Kiki Smith, James Turrell, Andrés Serrano, among others. Each daguerreotype offers an intimate portrait of each subject as a testament to the hyperrealist portrait tradition of which Close is a master.

In the 1960s, Close was one of the first artists to utilize photography as a starting point for his paintings. He developed a gridded painting system based at first on gelatin-silver prints and dye transfers, then on 20-by-24-inch Polaroid images, which enabled him to scale up his portraits to colossal size. Since the end of the 1990s, Close has intensified his experimentation with daguerreotypes, the starting point for many of his later works. A typical characteristic of Close’s oeuvre is his continual interest in experimenting with new media.

The exhibition also included a collection of poems by Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, since many of these portraits arose almost side by side with the poems, the product of the close friendship between the creators.

Gustavo Acosta: Postcards from Havana

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:55:41 +0000

Gustavo Acosta, Holding my Breath, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 72” x 84.” Photo: Gory. Courtesy of the artist and Pan American Art Projects.

Pan American Art Projects - Miami

By Ashley Knight

The exhibition “There: Postcards from Havana” of Gustavo Acosta includes a collection of paintings from different periods in his career that share a recurring theme: the city of his birth. The city serves him as a pretext to comment on social themes, or simply to express his emotions and memories of the place where he spent his youth.

The recurrence of this theme in his work, could owe itself to his status as an emigrant, which has led him to live in several cities in the world, where he invariably searches for something that identifies him with his native land. In the paintings of Acosta, the city appears empty; a human presence is only implicit. They are spaces where tension and intensity are contained, trapped by the very rationality of the composition. Acosta’s “postcards” are like images of the past, fragments of a dream that no longer has a chance of becoming tangible. Postcards of a city are fragments of a cosmetic reality that is constructed solely for the eyes of the tourist, or the traveler, who wishes to take away a souvenir of his experiences. Acosta reinforces this idea with his usage of colors in these pieces that are reminiscent of those old hand-colored postcards through which we mentally travel through time. Through April 13, 2013.

Terrestrial Paradises

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:51:46 +0000

An Exact Representation of the Death of Captn. James Cook, F.R.S. at Karakakooa Bay, in Owhyhee, on Feby. 14, 1779. Accurately Engraved from a Drawing made on the spot purposely for this Work by A. Hogg. Courtesy Lowe Art Museum.

Lowe Art Museum - Coral Gables

By Denise Colson

This exhibition assembles a collection of illustrations that covers the travels of Captain James Cook, who at the beginning of 1768 undertook three historic voyages of exploration around the world. Although he was not the only European to investigate many of the places he visited, the bulk of his work played an essential role in defining the vision of the West with respect to far away and little-known cultures of the time, such as those of the South Pacific.

During each of these voyages, the artists who accompanied him created sketches, drawings and paintings based on the first observations of these ethnic groups. Among the artists who accompanied Cook were: Sydney Parkinson, Alexander Buchan, William Hodges, John Webber and William Webb Ellis. Upon returning to England, their works were reproduced in engravings and published to recount the history of these voyages.

It is interesting to see the European artists’ interpretation of these cultures, seen as exotic and primitive, “noble savages” in the words of Rousseau. The exhibition uses Captain Cook’s expression in defining the lands as “terrestrial paradises” inhabited by individuals “not yet contaminated” by the civilized world. Through February 9, 2014.

Dana Popa: Not Natasha

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:49:50 +0000

Dana Popa, Untitled, from the series “Not Natasha.” Maria was abandoned by her husband on the grounds that the baby she gave birth to after she escaped sexual slavery was not his, archival pigment print, 15"x23.”

South Florida Museum of Photography - Daytona Beach

By Suzanne Cohen

Natasha is the nickname often used for prostitutes with an Eastern European look. It is a nickname hated by the women, who have been victims of sex trafficking. Dana Popa, a Romanian photographer based in London, uses it in the title of one of her series that she started in 2006 and that is being exhibited in Daytona Beach.

Not Natasha is a heartrending series that reveals the face of sex trafficking, which victimizes thousands of girls in the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Popa was in Moldavia during the summer of 2006 working with an international organization that provides support to the victims and she had the opportunity to document the experiences of 17 women, many initiated into prostitution as young girls. Popa captures the psychological drama of these girls, many sold by their families, with their lives destroyed, many rearing children resulting from rapes. Also included in the exhibition are pieces that she created in 2008 when she returned to Moldavia to document the history of many of these female victims of sex trafficking who have disappeared after moving to big cities in search of better opportunities. In this oeuvre, the artist captures, like no one else, the feeling of loss that remains in the home after the disappearance of a loved one, where the only vestiges of her passage through this world are the objects she left behind. Through May 12, 2013.

Carlos Gonzalez: Natural Mechanic

raisa — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:46:14 +0000

Carlos González, Tumbler, 2012, wood, Corten steel, fabric and bee wax, 72” x 52” x 50.” Photo: Gory. Courtesy of the artist and Pan American Art Projects.

Pan American Art Projects - Miami

By Ashley Knight

Carlos Gonzalez presents a new series of sculptures in which he establishes a parallel between nature and the social behavior of the human being. The pieces reveal his interest in exploring nature’s infinite capacity for adaptation and mutability in order to survive the most adverse conditions.

The sculptures of González, mainly in large format, have been created to dialogue with the space in which they will be placed. They are organic forms, beautiful thanks to their simplicity. They are works in which the sculptor has exploited the aesthetic possibilities offered by the textures and tones of the material.

His works reproduce in wood and steel natural forms like seeds and plants, whose behavior demonstrates their capacity to mutate and compete among themselves in order to survive. This is more or less what we human beings do. Our lives are made up of “social rituals” that drive us to adapt, move, insert ourselves and on occasion migrate and reconstruct our own space in a new context. Through April 13, 2013.