In our galleries this Fall, see how a storybook comes to life via the imaginative mind of visual artist Ahmad Taylor. We all love a children's book, but how many of us know how a book's illustrations move from abstract concept to colorful publication? In this exhibition, Illustrations from the Mirror, Taylor, an Atlanta-based artist who created the illustrations for the book El's Mirror, invites visitors to learn about the illustration process, from initial storyboarding to character studies, while immersing them in El's world.

It is no great revelation that, in the history of art, female artists have been consistently overlooked and underrepresented. That same history has also placed far greater esteem on paintings and sculptures — seemingly examples of "finished" or "final" works of art — than on works on paper.  Indeed, the arts of drawing and printmaking are commonly viewed as studies for something yet to be completed or, in the case of prints, as multipliable and thus not singular or original.  But rather than inferior, unfinished, or unoriginal, works on paper can be instructive and revelatory precisely because they offer an intimacy that other art forms do not, minimizing the distance between us and the artist, highlighting her careful hand and line-work, and offering immediate access to her process and experimentation. 

Whether sketches, etchings, or printed books, works on paper gain their value as showcases for their creators' expertise in what we call draftsmanship, the drawing skill-set that forms the root of all traditional two-dimensional art and a problematically gendered term in itself.  In this installation, we take the enormous talents of draftswomen — or, better, draftspersons — as our subject, bringing both women artists in our collection and their equally worthy works on paper to the fore. 

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839 – 1892) is widely regarded as the last great master of the ukiyo-e tradition in Japanese printmaking. He witnessed the great transition of Japan from the traditional Edo period to the westernization of the Meiji period, and the struggle between the two can be seen in his works. Much of his work served as reminders to the Japanese people of the importance of their historical and cultural heritage.

This series, Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners, was produced in 1888 and remains one of his most respected bodies of work. His unique ability to express genuine emotion in his portrayal of his subjects has been highly praised.

Featuring the work of Cuban-born Reynier Llanes, this exhibition showcases why Llanes is a fast-rising art world star, whose symbolist narrative paintings and mixed media works underline not merely his immense talents as a realist but also his ability to conjure alternate yet convincing realities of his own imagination. Timeless Origins will feature recent works by the artist, whose memories of his roots in Cuba intertwine with his mystical, audience-engaging visions of the present and future.

Click the button below to hear the artist talk about his work and career.

Born in 1933 in Vilna, Poland, on the eve of the Second World War, Samuel Bak is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. In the nearly eight decades since the end of the war, Bak has established himself as a celebrated artist who uses his vibrant, often haunting yet hope-filled paintings as catalysts for conversations on identity, memory, and social change. This exhibition, Remembering Vilna, named for Bak’s birthplace, aims to shed eye-opening light not only on the childhood experiences that have shaped Bak’s life and art but also on the importance of reconstructing and retaining historical memory for future generations. Indeed, perhaps more than an artist, Bak can be considered an essential visual storyteller, using his paintings to examine Jewish experience of the Holocaust specifically — and the terrors humans can inflict on each other universally.

For the past 51 years on Mother’s Day Weekend, the Polk Museum of Art has presented its annual Mayfaire by-the-Lake fine art festival on the shores of nearby Lake Morton.The two-day fair — a staple of the Spring season — draws thousands of visitors from near and far who browse hundreds of artist tents, purchase art, listen to live music, eat classic festival food, and immerse themselves in a weekend of culture.

To be certain, Mayfaire is a lot of fun, but it is also about so much more. Mayfaire aligns with the core of the Museum’s educational mission: to bring exceptional art experiences to our entire community. Thus, while much of the history of art and museum exhibitions focus necessarily on artists of the past, Mayfaire also spotlights the importants of museums — and our museum’s — ongoing support of living artists. Indeed, the artists who exhibit at Mayfaire come from across the country to showcase their talents — and ideally get their work into the hands of collectors. The Museum has traditionally been one such collector of Mayfaire art.

This installation features a selection of some of our favorite Mayfaire artists, award-winning exhibitors whose work we have added to our own permanent collection over the decades. We dug into our archives so you can join us as we take a look back. Enjoy this Blast from the Past.

Just what is it about Steven Kenny’s art that makes it so uncanny — and so very engaging?  Perhaps it is the tightly-painted Old Master manner in which he renders his works or maybe it is the way his figures and creatures seem both of our world and completely outside of it at the same time. 

Truly, in Kenny’s mind’s eye, the natural world we think we know meshes seamlessly with a version of a natural world we know we do not. Inspired stylistically by Dutch and Flemish masters of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, Kenny’s paintings are not merely eye-catching for their display of the artist’s careful, logical, and classical hand but also for their simultaneous mix of the rational and the irrational. Indeed, Kenny has become a star in the art world for his ease at evoking the manners of the past with Surrealist themes that mark them as artworks decidedly of the present.  

Kenny’s fantastic realities are filled with inversions of our understood world order; as opposed to anthropomorphizing and giving human traits to animals, Kenny conjures humans who sport wings, feathers, and fish scales. Whereas we humans may ask too much of nature in our real world, in Kenny’s paintings nature does not bend to human whims. Instead, creatures of all forms — and all sizes — bend to nature, living in strange symbiosis with their environments.

In this exhibition of his work from the past two decades, Steven Kenny invites us to enter his imagined world— and inspires us to re-consider our place in our own. 

This Spring and Summer, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College is excited to welcome the work of one of the most celebrated photographers in the history of art to Lakeland. The exhibition, Seen & Unseen: Photographs by Imogen Cunningham, features 60 photographs by Cunningham, whose life — and career — traversed nearly a century.

When looking at the photographs of Cunningham (1883-1976), we encounter images that reflect vital developments in 20th century art and photography — as well as the voice and eye of an undersung master of the camera. Cunningham was a female member of the male-dominated f/64 group of photographers and, despite the art-world’s tendency to overlook women artists, left her indelible stamp on the history and development of modern photography. Alongside Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Cunningham helped pioneer a distinctively West-Coast style of photography, with iconography and compositions that purposefully contrasted those of the East Coast photographers who had defined American photography in the earliest decades of the century.

In this exhibition, featuring work from across Cunningham’s expansive seven-decade career, we invite you to see why this American artist is heralded as one of the most important pioneers of photography — regardless of her gender.

This Spring, Florida Southern College undergraduate students pursuing degrees in disciplines as wide-ranging as Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Business, Graphic Design, Studio Art, and Art History and Museum Studies enrolled in a brand-new course offering called “The Art of Curating.”

As part of their coursework, students had the opportunity to contribute collectively to an actual exhibition here at the Polk Museum of Art, their College museum (and academic home to the Department of Art History and Museum Studies).  This exhibit, aptly titled New Eyes on the Permanent Collection, features highlights from the Museum’s collection of nearly 3,000 works and offers visitors a novel set of lenses and voices through which to experience (or re-experience) familiar and lesser-seen treasures from our collection. 

Indeed, in this installation, we have asked these curators-in-training to give us new educational, art historical, and personal insight into a handful of objects, seen freshly through their individual 21st-century eyes, research, and writing. Once the students have completed their assignment, you’ll find not just one but three sets of interpretive labels per work. The concept:  as opposed to a singular curatorial voice, let’s create exhibition text that engages and encourages understanding of art from several curatorial vantage points at once. 

With this unique, student-driven exhibition, we look excitedly toward the future of museums and the diverse voices that will contribute to our understanding of art, culture, and museums’ vital roles in our world.  These student curators offer us an amazing preview.

Inspired by nature and the desire to create “Super-Real” effects in her paintings, Susan Martin has made flora — and the flora of Florida, in particular — her subject matter for decades. Painting as if through the lens of a macroscopic camera (she trained under renowned photographer Russell Lee), Martin renders astonishingly detailed and crisp images of the natural world around her. Not quite a landscape painter — her views zoom in so closely that the entire composition is occupied by petals and leaves — Martin takes the tradition of landscape, with all of its awe-inducing qualities, and makes it her own.

Based out of Merritt Island, Florida, Martin caters in sharp edges and contrastive colors, deploying acrylic for its flexibility and ability to dry quickly, granting her the degree of control she seeks to produce work that examines plant-life in hyper-real ways the human eye alone cannot. Indeed, viewers are invited to admire not merely the beauty of the natural world but also the intricacy of Martin’s technique. Hovering somewhere between realism and photorealism and ethereality and science, the works in Efflorescence transcend easy categorization; Martin homes in literally on the simple subject of plant life and asks us to reconsider the ways we, too, see, or perhaps take for granted, our familiar environments.

Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collections

Celebrated as the greatest sculptor of the 19th century, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) revived for the modern world a new appreciation for the ageless beauty of bronze sculpture, mastering and modernizing a technique long associated with ancient Greek art. At the same time, with works like The Thinker and The Gates of Hell, he breathed new emotional and psychic life into the human figure as never seen before in sculpture. Forgoing idealization for astonishingly naturalistic representation, Rodin created sculptures that draw their power from physical and psychological truth, capturing human pathos, drama, tragedy, mindfulness, and hope through the sculpted form. The largest installation of sculptures in the Museum’s history — with more than 40 of Rodin’s works filling the Museum’s main galleries — this incredible exhibition brings one of art history’s most famous and most renowned French masters to Florida.