Murray and Ledger Galleries
This exhibition will highlight some of the artworks collected by the Polk Museum of Art during the last two years. Included in the exhibition will be works by Paul Brach, Robert Mapplethorpe, Miriam Schapiro, and Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Dorothy Jenkins Gallery
The Polk Museum of Art has organized the first American museum exhibition of the work of the MADI movement. This exhibition presents an intensive investigation of one of the most enduring art movements today. MADI began in Argentina in the early 1940s under the leadership of Carmelo Arden Quin. Originally from Uruguay, Arden Quin was a leading young member of the Argentinian Avant Garde in the late 1930s and early 1940s, working most notably with Joaquín Torres-García. He was particularly attracted to Torres-García’s movable toys, and began breaking with rectangular forms. MADI was originally part of the Latin American concrete art movements that were the most innovative movements of the 1940s. However, MADI’s ingenuity and sense of fun finally led Arden Quin and the MADI artists to separate themselves from the more rigid fundamentals adhered to by most other concrete artists. Relying on geometric forms rather than organic or even abstracted forms, MADI artists created (and continue to create) paintings that assert their own objecthood as frames were eliminated and canvases were reshaped to suit the artists’ aesthetic desires, years before the works of Ellsworth Kelley and Frank Stella that defined geometric abstraction during the 1960s.
After a few years of working with his small MADI group, Arden Quin moved to Paris where he met artists such as Hans Arp, Francis Picabia, and Nicolas de Staël. MADI was rekindled when Arden Quin met Volf Roitman in 1951. Together they founded the MADI Research and Study Center, an experimental, loosely-formed association of artists and writers that has, over the years, evolved into MADI International, a movement which today consists of more than 60 members working on four continents.
The exhibition will focus primarily on the works of Arden Quin and Roitman from the collections of Bill and Dorothy Masterson of Dallas and Mark and Scarlett Lenherr of London. Also featured are the works of nine artists who represent the geographic, stylistic, and age diversity that defines the movement. Artists from France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States are included. The exhibition will open at Polk Museum of Art on August 18, 2001 and run through October 21. It will then travel to the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo where it will be on display from November 30, 2001 through January 27, 2002.
Emily S. Macey Gallery
In the midst of a three-year grant awarded by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, Tarpon Springs native Rocky Bridges has produced, during two intense periods of work, his most thoughtful and aesthetically dynamic artworks to date. Proceeding from the idea that clarity can be found within apparently random combinations of things and ideas, Bridges creates assemblages, paintings, and collages that are unexpectedly complete and harmonious even as they make us reach for the conception that unites them.
As part of his grant award, Bridges will spend the summers of 2000-2002 immersing himself in the production of art in Miami. Culling from the work he has produced during his first two summers, the Polk Museum of Art is presenting a selection of Bridges’ work that reveals the impact that the South Florida environment has had on his style. The scale of his work has increased significantly due in no small part to the roomy studio he has used. By spending more of his time working inside, he has also been able to incorporate more fragile materials into his work. Most subtle, yet perhaps most significant, have been the alterations in Bridges’ compositions and use of color. The light-colored skies, clear water, and host of exotic cultural debris have brought an airiness to his work that elevates it to a transcendental plane even as it continues to touch on the assemblage style of Robert Rauschenberg.
Rocky Bridges is currently a faculty member at the Harrison Center for the Arts in Lakeland. He is a graduate of The Cooper Union in New York.
Dorothy Jenkins and Emily S. Macey Galleries
This exhibition, organized by the Yellowstone Art Museum, presents approximately forty-five paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by Montana rancher and artist, Theodore Waddell. Waddell creates images that are both personal and authentic without succumbing to the nostalgic, popular romance which has overcome so many artists who have chosen to live and work in remote places. His paintings of his cattle and horses are true both to them – their shapes, the poses they strike, the larger clustered forms of the herd – and true to the physical realities of painting – the plane of canvas, the texture of paint, the movement of the artist’s hand. Waddell’s paintings are deceptively accurate, but detail is suppressed by the intensity of his love of rich painted surfaces. Waddell received an MFA from Wayne State University and later served as Associate Professor and Sculpture Area Chairman in the Department of Art at University of Montana.
Perkins Gallery
This exhibition highlights major international, American, and regional artists whose works are in the Museum’s Permanent Collection. During the 1970s the art world finally began to acknowledge women artists. Women have been at the forefront of many of the most fascinating artistic innovations throughout art history. For decades art historians relegated the existence of women in the art world to the position of objects of the male artists’ gaze. Now women have opted men’s illogical position of domination of the art world and are exploring many issues often more intensely or more creatively than many male artists have. The artists in this exhibition, including Lenora Carrington, Arline Erdrich, Ann Turnley, and Maria Castagliola, examine their unique artistic and individual heritages through issues such as self-identity, self-reflection, and personal relationships with others.
Murray and Ledger Galleries
The Museum’s fine collection of 20th century Japanese ceramics is presented in this exhibition. Emphasis is placed on tracing the natural and artistic roots of the forms and styles.
Dorothy Jenkins and Emily S. Macey Galleries
The work of Donald Sultan is voluminous and varied. Since 1975, when he arrived in New York, Sultan’s creative energy has manifested itself in the media of paint, printing, and sculpting. His extensive body of work has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art, where he has become best known for his ability to successfully merge the best of yesterday’s artistic tradition with a fresh, modern approach that is unique. Donald Sultan: In the Still Life Tradition focuses on Sultan’s untraditional approach to a traditional theme: Still Lifes. Featured are twenty of the artist’s large-scale paintings (8′ x 8′), including his well-known vases and flowers, lemons, dominos, and buttons as well as his latest works of red tomatoes.
Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. Sultan has been given numerous exhibitions dedicated to his work, as well as having been included in a number of group shows. His work is included in the permanent collection of many prestigious institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Donald Sultan: In the Still Life Tradition was organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, and curated by Dana Holland-Beickert. This exhibition is circulated by Pamela Auchincloss, Arts Management. Funding for the national tour and catalogue is provided by FedEx.
Perkins Gallery
The Polk Museum of Art presents an exhibition by Florida artist Lise Drost. Drost is an assistant professor and the head of printmaking oat the University of Miami. She creates large-scale, mixed-media prints and drawings using layers of images, colors, patterns, and surfaces. By gathering images from her surroundings and combining them within real and imaginary spaces, Drost is able to gain new insight into her relationship with the world around her. Her goal is to create complex imagery that serves as a starting point for the viewer’s own thoughts, and she strives to make artworks that keep the viewer occupied and engaged over a long period of time, revealing different images as time progresses.
Dorothy Jenkins and Emily S. Macey Galleries
Wilderness photography with a focus on preservation.
The Polk Museum of Art opens its first exhibition of the real “new millennium” with a beautiful vision for the future. Clyde Butcher has established himself as a premier photographer of Florida’s wilderness. His intent has been to draw attention to the hidden beauty that still lies at the core of state, thereby bringing renewed interest in natural preservation. In Visions for the Next Millennium, Butcher has broadened the scope of his mission by including photographs that he has taken throughout the United States. The thirty-seven stunning black-and-white images range from the relatively modes size of 3′ x 4′ up to a breathtaking 5′ x 9′.
Ledger and Murray Galleries
This exhibition is the last in of a series of exhibitions over the past two years that demonstrated the role of the Principles of Design within artworks from the Museum’s Permanent Collection. This exhibit will focus on unity, which is what occurs when all of the other principles of design have been applied correctly. It creates a sense of order and makes the work feel complete.
Contemporary works by James Bassham, Jane Jaskevich, Fonchen Lord and Michael Mick are featured in the Museum’s permanent outdoor exhibition space. During school tours, our waterwall is turned on to provide a stimulating backdrop for the works on display.
David and Lucia Taxdal Pre-Columbian Gallery
Permanent Exhibit
Ancient Art of the Americas, a refocused installation of the Museum’s collection of Pre-Columbian artworks which was completed in December, 2000, and updated with recent acquisitions in March, 2003, features a comprehensive overview of artifacts from Mexico, Central America, Colombia and Peru. The gallery is divided into three themed rooms. Warriors, Priests, and Rituals presents effigies related to either of those three categories, including bound prisoners, warriors ready for battle, and priest figures. The Pre-Columbian Woman is a display of artifacts and sculpture of or related to the daily activities of women in Pre-Columbian societies. This room also features a hands-on activity area for children to explore. The third room is arranged geographically, with artifacts grouped according to the current name of the country in which they were found. This arrangement allows visitors to see how cultures that were geographically close influenced each other. This room also contains an archaeology display which explains how scientists uncover and interpret artifacts like those in the gallery.
Marks Gallery
Permanent Exhibit
For the first time in history, more people are overfed than underfed. And while some people still have barely enough to eat, others overeat to the point of illness. To find out how mealtime is changing in real homes, authors Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio visited families around the world to observe and photograph what they eat during the course of one week. During their project, they sat down to eat with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries.
As Peter and Faith ate and talked with families, they learned firsthand about food consumption around the world and its corresponding causes and effects. The resulting family portraits, which are displayed in this exhibition, offer a glimpse into the cultural similarities and differences served on dinner plates around the globe.
This show joins Material World: A Global Family Portrait in the Marks Gallery to stimulate further thought and discussion about cultural commonalities and differences.
Marks Gallery
Permanent Exhibit
The Material World: A Global Family Portrait exhibition is the result of American photojournalist Peter Menzel’s project to help viewers grasp a sense of cross-culture realities and to celebrate our common humanity. Sixteen of the world’s foremost photographers traveled around the world, visiting thirty different countries to live for a week with families that are statistically average for that nation. At the end of each visit, the photographer and subjects collaborated on the Big Picture, a remarkable portrait of the family outside of its home, surrounded by all of its possessions. This exhibition is an attempt to capture through photos and statistics, both the common humanity of the peoples inhabiting our Earth and the great differences in material goods and circumstances that make rich and poor societies.
Dorothy Jenkins Gallery
Michaels has created a phenomenal series of large sepia-toned and black-and-white oil paintings. The Polk Museum of Art owns one of these, 15 Men, which Museum visitors recently voted as their favorite artwork in the permanent collection. This exhibition will bring a large number from the series together, a series that features dramatic tableaus of figures that recall Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings though they are decidedly contemporary. Monumental both in scale and impact, the fifteen paintings in this exhibition are complex combinations of expressive and controlled brushwork, historic and contemporary imagery, religious and secular symbolism, and personal and cultural references.
Michaels was born in Brooklyn and came to the Tampa Bay area in 1971. After years as a successful commercial artist, he changed direction in 1980 to become a fine artist. By 1986 he received a national fellowship from the Awards in the Visual Arts. In addition he has received the Best of Show award at the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the State of Florida.
