A perennial audience favorite, Hunt Slonem is known as the painter of bunnies, but his body of work includes so much more. Slonem’s heavily-impastoed, brightly-colored paintings have delighted visitors across the world — and to our Museum — for decades. In fact, in our collection alone, we hold an incredible 40 paintings by Slonem, each of which exemplifies the breadth of his career while also underlining the immediate recognizability of his inimitable style. This buoyant Summer exhibition promises a visual Neo-Expressionist feast like no other and embraces the familiar (yes, there will be bunnies!) alongside the lesser known sides of Slonem’s oeuvre, including portraits of celebrities, presidents, and the artists’ acquaintances as well as a few surprises like Slonem’s religious iconography dating back as early as the 1970s. Literary, political, and zoological, and everything in between, Slonem’s cast of characters and tactile paintings promise a Summer of fun in our galleries.

This Summer, we invite you into the world of Mally Khorasantchi, who has established herself as an artist whose abstract visual language has been featured in more than a dozen solo shows here in Florida, New York, and her native Germany. Born in Post-Second World War Düsseldorf, Khorasantchi came of age — and became an artist — in a country deep in turmoil and historical reckoning, re-imagining itself and its place in the world following the horrors of its immediate past. Now based in Florida for more than three decades, Khorasantchi tries in her colorful and complex compositions to reconcile the stoic nature of her German upbringing with a cheery dose of American optimism. Indeed, filled with earthly creatures and imbued with the contrastive themes of order versus chaos, Khorasantchi’s vibrant paintings examine the interrelationships between us and the co-inhabitants of the world around us.

Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth were two of the biggest names in American art of the 20th century. This original, large-scale exhibition — exclusive to the Polk Museum and taking over our main first-floor galleries — features 40 original paintings by Rockwell and Wyeth, two singular and beloved American icons who created their most familiar images full-size in paint before the scenes were scaled for print publication. In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes an installation of the complete, spectacular array of the 321 Saturday Evening Post covers to which Rockwell contributed between 1916 and 1963.

Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana is curated and organized in partnership with the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. www.AmericanIllustration.org, and the American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY. www.AmericanIllustrators.com

Single Source Exhibition organized by: PAN Art Connections. www.pan-art-connections.com.

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. 

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.