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.

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.

In this two gallery, two-part installation, Nan Liu, a Chinese-American professor at Florida A&M University (FAMU), brings to his art an intriguing and intricate mix of his cultural and professional past and present — what he sees and what he knows. Born in Tianjin, China, in 1974, Nan Liu is an artist of a realist bent — and at the core of realist art is observation of one’s immediate world and the people who inhabit it.

As Liu explains:  “My vision reflects the multicultural nature of contemporary America. I depict a primarily African-American world as seen through Chinese-American eyes, with a sensibility that has been fused within both contemporary and classic influences from East and West. In my recent work, I attempt to create a series of life-size figurative paintings with ink medium. My chosen subjects are the students I walk amongst every day on the FAMU campus. Teaching at a historically Black college, most of my students are African-American.

During the last ten years, I have created over forty large-scale figurative ink portraits of FAMU students using traditional Chinese brush and colored ink, applying the traditional Xie Yi painting style, which emphasizes spontaneity of ink and color washes on Xuan paper (similar to American rice paper). In this series, I attempt to apply traditional Eastern painting media and concepts to represent the lives and world of my contemporary American students.”

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: