Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth
On view February 17, 2024 through July 28, 2024
During the 1970s, artists in Los Angeles and New York challenged convention by pushing the boundaries of form, color, and meaning. While Conceptualism, Pop Art, and Minimalism gained significant attention and acclaim, other artists reveled in the handmade and sought to legitimize aesthetic ideas beyond those that preoccupied the mainstream art world. Even though the movement itself was loosely construed, artists affiliated with Pattern and Decoration sought to challenge established hierarchies and gendered assumptions in the art world.
Embellish Me: Works from the Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is organized by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at FIU and presented in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art
Vaughn Spann: Allegories
On view now
Abstraction and figuration converge in Vaughn Spann’s monumental paintings. Marked Men, an ongoing series, features a prominent X at the center of the canvas. Rendered in vibrant paint swaths—from sapphire to sky blue, crimson red and marigold yellow, to blush pink and emerald green—the X creates grids of kaleidoscopic colors. A stand-in for the body, unknown, or the anonymous, Spann’s X signifies both individual and collective experiences. The suite of four large-scale paintings on view demonstrates Spann’s exploration of personal, political, and art historical narratives.
14th Congressional and Next Generation High School Art Competition 2024
On view February 3 through April 14, 2024
This annual high school art exhibition features exemplary work created by high school students throughout the 14th Congressional District and Hillsborough County.
Young at Art K-8 Student Exhibition 2024
On view January 13 through March 17, 2024
Each year, the Tampa Museum of Art invites Hillsborough County art teachers to submit a student’s artwork for the Young at Art Student Exhibition. The Museum celebrates the creativity of this year’s submissions from students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
The Last Picture Show: Paintings by Rod Penner
On view November 22, 2023 through September 1, 2024
The Last Picture Show presents a small selection of paintings by the realist painter Rod Penner (American, b. Canada, 1965). Based in Texas, Penner’s work captures the visual dichotomy of forgotten towns in southwest America. Painted in excruciating detail, these cinematic paintings explore the desolation and serenity of rural Texas and New Mexico.
A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections
On view August 17, 2023 through March 17, 2024
A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections looks at the art and dedication of collecting Haitian objects through the Albrecht and Heller Collections. Organized by guest curator Edouard Duval-Carrié in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art, Reframing Haitian Art and A Passion for Haitian Art present a rare opportunity to view master artists of Haitian painting.
Garry Winogrand: Women are Beautiful
On view now through April 21, 2024
In the early 1980s, the Tampa Museum of Art established photography—with an emphasis on work created after 1970—as a primary collecting area. The collection now comprises more than 950 photographs and demonstrates how the medium evolved throughout the 20th-century. TMA’s photography collection includes works by John Baldessari, James Casebere, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the candid photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andy Warhol, and Winogrand.
Exhibition Sponsor: David Hall and Judy Tampa
Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic
On view now through May 19, 2024
The Tampa Museum of Art will present the exhibition Pepe Mar, a 15-year survey of the artist’s work. It will include fifty objects from Pepe Mar’s (born 1977, Reynosa, Mexico) diverse practice in collage, sculpture, ceramics, and painting. Mar has developed a highly unique personal style in which he equally mixes and innovates craft, Op art, painting, and identity politics. The artist often explores themes related to cultural isolation and identity, rituals and mythologies, and consumer consumption and excess. Recent projects illuminate cultural history and icons—the places, events, and people often overlooked or marginalized in historical narratives. His work has been exhibited throughout the US and abroad and is included in private and public collections. Mar received his BFA from California College of Art, San Francisco and his MFA from Florida International University. Mar lives and works in Miami.
Contributor Sponsors: Dr. Charles Boyd, David Castillo, Elizabeth Dascal Spector & Vladimir Spector, Leslie & Gregory Ferrero, Amy & Harry Hollub, Alexa & Adam Wolman
Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection
On view now through June 23, 2024
The Arthur R. Albrecht Collection includes over 75 artworks from Haiti’s most prominent painters including Riguad Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, Préfète Duffaut, and Philomé Obin. Rarely seen by the public, the works present an overview of the major developments in Haitian painting from the 1960s-80s. Highlights from the Albrecht Collection include paintings by the first generation of artists to train at Le Centre d’Art, Haiti’s premier art school in Port-au-Prince, and a selection of Cap Haitian works by the Obin Faimily.
Sequin Arts: The Flagmakers of Haiti
On view now
The second presentation of the Tampa Museum of Art’s Haitian flag collection highlights Erzulie, one of the most powerful and beloved Lwas or gods of the Vodou pantheon. Erzulie represents a family of goddesses who are also referred to as Ezili or Ézili. Erzulie Freida and Erzulie Dantor symbolize the two most recognizable forms of Erzulie. Considered sisters and rivals, Erzulie Freida and Erzulie Dantor both embody love but show it in different ways. Erzulie Freida exudes love through passion and sensuality, whereas Erzulie Danthor guards and defends the people she loves. Both manifestations of Erzulie are represented by hearts pierced with daggers. As demonstrated by the fifteen flags on view, Erzulie continues to captivate and inspire the artists of Haiti.
C. Paul Jennewein
On view now
C. Paul Jennewein’s (German-American, 1890-1978) artwork reveals the inspiration of the ancient world while also engaging with the new sculptural styles of his time, merging Art Deco with the neo-classical tradition. In 1978, the Tampa Bay Art Center, predecessor of the Tampa Museum of Art, received a bequest of 2,600 objects including finished artworks, as well as preparatory drawings, plaster casts, and molds for the numerous commissions Jennewein received during his prolific career. Starting in Fall 2022, the Museum will present Jennewein’s early sculptures for an extended two-year display.
Identity in the Ancient World
On view now through March 23, 2025
This two-year presentation centers around the theme of identity in the ancient world. Across the ancient Mediterranean, people will have felt some sense of group identity such as belonging to a tribe, race, culture or civilization. They will have recognized differences between men and women, and will have experienced desires and moral constraints. Feelings of identity could also be expressed in opposition to other groups, such as Greeks vs. Persians or Scythians, Romans vs. Gauls or Germans, men vs. women. In our modern society, many more expressions of identity are recognized that may invoke a sense of belonging or form exclusive alliances. In the ancient world, expressions of identity could not always be articulated explicitly because the terminology for voicing thoughts about personal, cultural and national frames of identity did not exist. Identity in the Ancient World will illustrate some of these aspects based predominantly on the Museum’s own Antiquities Collection, supplemented with some prominent long-term loans from other museums and private collections.
Identity in the Ancient World is one of several new exhibitions dedicated to the Museum’s permanent collection that will be on view for long-term displays over the next five years.
Esterio Segura: Goodbye My Love
On view now
A new acquisition to the Museum’s permanent collection, Goodbye My Love represents Esterio Segura’s (Cuban, b. 1970) ongoing exploration of the meaning of airplanes and flight. Produced in multiple editions at different scales, this version is nearly the largest. In describing the series, Segura explained, “In this work, the reference to the airplane hybridizes with a reference to another well-known universal symbol: a simplified image of the heart…With this work, I reference the experience of uprooting, nostalgia, memory, loss—how we experience the breakdown of everything we love.”
Life & Death in the Ancient World
Introduction to the Antiquities Collection
On view now
The Tampa Museum of Art purchased its first ancient artwork in 1981, a black-figure column krater, perhaps depicting the wedding procession of Peleus and Thetis. Five years later, the Museum’s antiquities collection quadrupled in size with the single acquisition of the prominent collection of Joseph Veach Noble. The permanent collection currently holds about 575 ancient artifacts, in addition to over 100 long-term loans from private collections. More than three-quarters of the Museum’s antiquities are representative of ancient Greece and Italy, particularly Athens and Rome. The ancient world encompassed a much wider diversity of traditions, however, of which some can be encountered in this introduction to the Museum’s Antiquities Collection. The gallery display will highlight aspects of daily life and death, as well as human and animal figures, beauty ideals and eroticism, athletics and theater, wine consumption and vase production, religion and mythology, trade and politics.
Life & Death in the Ancient World is one of several new exhibitions dedicated to the Museum’s permanent collection that will be on view for long-term displays over the next five years.
Purvis Young: Redux
On view now through June 29, 2025
Inspired by the success of the exhibition Purvis Young: 91 in 2019, the Tampa Museum of Art will remount its Purvis Young collection as one of the first of several long-term displays of the permanent collection. In 2004, the Rubell Family Foundation gifted 91 artworks to the Tampa Museum of Art by Young (American, 1943-2010). Based in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida, Young’s paintings reflect his observations of daily life and the fight for social justice, hope for his community, immigration and otherness, as well as the fragile balance between life and death. He rendered his work from found objects—items he discovered in his neighborhood. Discarded wood, windows, furniture fragments, cabinets, doors, carpet, fabric, string, and cables. Although his means were limited, Young was recognized throughout Miami, and now across the globe, for his remarkable painting practice and his contributions to the cultural landscape of South Florida.
Jacob Hashimoto: This Particle of Dust
On view now through 2025
The Tampa Museum of Art’s atrium is transformed by Jacob Hashimoto’s site-specific installation This Particle of Dust. Hundreds of white and navy blue kite-like disks is suspended from the Museum’s ceiling. Installed at various heights, viewers will experience Hashimoto’s sculptural installation at different vantage points from the lobby to the 2nd floor galleries.
Prelude: An Introduction to the Permanent Collection
On view now
Prelude: An Introduction to the Permanent Collection presents the Tampa Museum of Art’s main collecting areas in ancient, modern, and contemporary art. The exhibition features artworks exploring themes of site, power, and the body in ancient vessels, tools, and jewelry, as well as sculptures, painting, and photography. Viewed together in dialogue with each other, the objects speak to shared experiences across time and place. An ongoing exhibition, Prelude includes both familiar works and recent additions to the permanent collection.
Air Fer Mer: Dominique Labauvie
On view now
Artist Dominique Labauvie (French, b. 1948) unites language, both his native French and English, with image in his architectonic steel sculptures. Although his medium of industrial steel suggests a sense of permanence, Labauvie aims to capture fleeting moments in his sculpture—from the movement of light and shadows, to the passage of time and life unfolding around us. “Air Fer Mer” also translates to iron, air, sea—a fitting description of the objects’ relationship to the natural world. In this unique setting, three of Labauvie’s sculptures exist in harmony with the Hillsborough River and Tampa skyline.
Laura with Bun
On view now
Jaume Plensa is an internationally acclaimed artist who has exhibited his sculptures in museums all over the world. In locations as diverse as Seoul, Paris, Chicago, Bordeaux and London, Plensa’s monumental sculptures have reaffirmed the power of art to transform a public space into a community.