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. 

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.

Starting in the 1950s, a period when America was still in the throes of segregation, the Highwaymen defied all odds. A prodigious group of twenty-six African-American painters who plied their trade painting Florida’s landscapes, the Highwaymen discovered success in simplicity, finding a niche to call their own, producing more than 200,000 works, and achieving incredible widespread popularity in the process. This large-scale academic exhibition drawn entirely from the Woodsby family's private collection revisits the Highwaymen, examining their legacy and key place in art history, studying the complete story of their rise and seeking answers for their unexpected mass appeal. Finally, Florida art that was once deemed lowbrow and rejected from museums and galleries but celebrated widely by eager consumers receives its moment in the sun, right here in Lakeland.

A star of the New York art world, John Pinderhughes (b. 1946) has established himself over the past half-century as the ultimate observer and narrator of the communities all around him. This Fall, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College presents an original, extraordinary retrospective exhibition, years in the making, showcasing Pinderhughes’ broad reportorial eye and his ability to find meaning and value in everything — and every person — he photographs. Through Pinderhughes’ powerful camera lens, he makes clear that every human subject and every still life object has a story worth telling.

Thank you to our Exhibition Sponsor:

Exhibition Supported by:

Mischelle Anderson

Yvonne M. McShay

Anonymous gift in honor of Clara Beatrice Pinkston

Featuring more than 50 works in various media on the theme of children and animals in American figurative art, this original exhibition promises to delight the child in all of us. When We Were Young focuses on two of the most timeless and limitlessly explorable motifs in art — children and animals — both popular subjects of art history for as long as art has been produced. The exhibition features nearly the entire art collection of the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples (CMON) and takes the importance of visual literacy as its jumping-off point to engage learners of all ages.

Thank you to our Exhibition Sponsors:

Josephine Sacabo’s art is both of our time and embedded deeply in a time past. She is an acclaimed, New Orleans-based contemporary photographer whose body of work seems infused with a powerful nostalgia for the non-digital photographic forms and techniques of photography’s nascent years as an artistic medium in the previous two centuries. As visitors to Those Who Dance, an original exhibition of Sacabo’s most recent series, will quickly realize, Sacabo (b. 1944) is one of the most poetic photographers actively working in the United States today and one whose ethereal and moving photographs look nothing like those of any other artist.

Through the four recent series that form the core of the exhibition (Those Who Dance, Disquiet, Cuentos, and Le Diable au Corps), Sacabo conjures a world of mystery and mysticism in her work, excavating stories about lives lived in secret struggle or without inhibition, reviving traditional processes of photography like photogravure and tintypes, and giving much-needed voice to women of the past whose legacies still inspire and haunt the artist to this day.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec  (1864-1901) is one of the most familiar names of the Post-Impressionist era, and his depictions of life in fin-de-siècle Paris remain among the most popular and recognizable today. Indeed, Toulouse-Lautrec's own biographical renown may be outshone only by the renown of his most reproduced imagery, namely his posters representing the world of bohemian Parisian nightlife in the final decade of the 19th century, the so-called Belle Époque. If you think of the Moulin Rouge or the dance hall as the places to be in 1890s Paris, it is because Toulouse-Lautrec's famed drawings and lithographic posters make us certain of it.  

A master painter, printer, and illustrator — a true exemplar of the craft of draftsmanship — Toulouse-Lautrec saw no line between fine and commercial art. From his paintings and drawings to the advertisements he was commissioned to produce to entice customers to his own favorite nightspots, in his pictures of the Belle Époque Toulouse-Lautrec created the timeless scenes of France's cabarets, concert halls, and theaters we still cherish today. This February, Toulouse-Lautrec promises to lure local audiences into his world, albeit much closer to home, as he takes over the Polk Museum in the form of an international exhibition that includes more than 230 works of art and artifacts from the artist's startlingly brief but transformative decade-long career. 

Have you ever wondered about what is going on in a painting? What that daydreaming figure is thinking about? What story the artist is trying to tell? In this original Polk Museum of art exhibition, visitors will be invited to use their own imaginations to look beyond the canvas, asked to envision the unwritten – and unpainted – stories in works of art with open-ended narratives. Featuring more than forty works from the Museum’s permanent collection, this show places each viewer into the essential role of narrator, providing creative answers to the questions the art itself poses but can never reveal.

The 17th century was a period of great wealth and cultural achievement for the Dutch people. In what was then already called a Golden Age, the Netherlands was a world power whose military fleet was growing and where trade, science, and the arts flourished as never before. Of particular note, the pleasures of music and dancing were a fundamental part of life in both the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands, as reflected in the strikingly high number of Dutch and Flemish paintings that include dancing figures, groups of musicians, and compositions of musical instruments.

This exhibition, custom-curated for the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College by the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation of The Netherlands, showcases 27 Dutch and Flemish paintings from the 17th century, selected and organized around the unifying visual theme of music and dance. All the Masterworks in the exhibition come to the Museum from private European Collections and have not been seen by the wide public before. Visitors will thus have the rare opportunity to see for themselves how brilliantly the Old Masters were able to capture the spirit of the Golden Age in their paintings, revealing in vivid color the insatiable Dutch appetite for singing songs, forming ensembles, and moving to melodies.

Exhibition Sponsors:

Over the course of four decades, Dr. Alan and Linda Rich have displayed a passion for helping others, traveling the world and bringing medical care to those in need. With his profession as an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon and hers as an occupational therapist trained to help Alan in clinics and in surgeries, the Riches worked together to transform the lives of many in need of critical eye care. While working in clinics in Papua New Guinea and throughout Africa, the Riches also immersed themselves in the diverse artistic cultures of the countries they visited.  Along the way, they acquired a collection of ritual and ceremonial objects that fill their home today.  In this Polk Museum original exhibition, these artifacts, most of which speak to the close spiritual communion between humans and animals, will be displayed publicly for the first time.

This two-gallery, two-part installation highlights the important contributions and strides female artists made in the art worlds of the 1980s and 1990s. Selected from the Museum’s permanent collection and situated adjacently in Gallery II and the Perkins Gallery, these thematically related exhibitions present an instructive visual dialogue with one another, allowing viewers to engage with art not merely from two decades but also through an exclusively female lens.

Will Barnet (1911-2012) was an American original. While he may not be a household name today, his nine-decade influence as an artist, teacher, and exemplar of inimitable American modernism was profound. With more than 80 one-man exhibitions at major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim and a body of work that, despite its stylistic variety, is always recognizably his own, Barnet achieved wide acclaim during his lifetime. In this installation of 22 recently gifted and loaned works by Barnet from the permanent collection, we can begin to see why.

Indeed, Barnet forged a unique path through 20th century art history. At once a dedicated realist and figurative artist when pure abstraction was the norm and an experimenter in abstraction when other artists renewed their interest in representation, Barnet defied expectations about how modern artists should produce art, refusing to bend to the whims of any contemporary trends.