Category: Current Exhibitions

The Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection of art continues to grow at a feverish pace. Many recent acquisitions highlight art made by women who are celebrated both nationally and locally for their creative achievements. The exhibition Avant Garde: Remarkable Women in the Permanent Collection features recent additions to the collection with works by Selina Román, Ya La’Ford, Nneka Jones, Wendy Babcox, and Lorraine Genovar—all artists with roots in the Tampa Bay area. Avant Garde also features artists new to the museum’s holdings, including Tao Lewis, Mika Rottenberg, Hannah van Bart, Kirsten Hassenfeld, and Quisqueya Henriquez, alongside artists such as Alma Thomas, Niki de Saint Phalle, Marisol, Mernet Larsen, and Elisabeth Condon. Viewed together, Avant Garde: Remarkable Women in Permanent Collection will highlight the artists’ explorations of home, self, history, and womanhood through figuration and abstraction.

Avant Garde: Remarkable Women in the Permanent Collection celebrates the growing presence and impact of women artists in the Tampa Museum of Art’s collection. Over time, museums across the country have worked to better represent women in their collections. However, there is still progress to be made. This exhibition highlights the Museum’s continued effort to collect, support, and share the work of women artists from many backgrounds and experiences.

The exhibition brings together artists from across generations and around the world. It includes both well-known figures and artists with strong ties to the Tampa Bay area. Together, their work explores important ideas about identity, history, creativity, and daily life.

The exhibition is organized into seven sections, each offering a different way to experience the work.

In Our Bodies, Ourselves, artists explore how women see themselves and how others see them. Some works show strength and joy, while others challenge ideas about beauty and identity. These works reflect changing views of womanhood over time.

Florida! focuses on the landscapes and natural beauty of our region. Artists capture familiar scenes such as coastlines, plants, and everyday life in Florida. At the same time, many of these works remind us of the importance of protecting our environment.

In Abstraction and Gesture, artists use color, shape, and movement to express ideas and emotions. These works may not show clear images, but they invite viewers to reflect on space, memory, and imagination.

Artist to Artist highlights how artists learn from and respond to those who came before them. Some works are inspired by art history, while others reimagine older styles in new and creative ways.

The section called Home looks at the idea of home in many forms. For some artists, home is a place of comfort. For others, it can reflect history, responsibility, or personal experience.

In Mythologies, artists draw from stories, memories, and cultural traditions. These works often blend imagination with real life, exploring themes of identity and belonging.

Across all sections, the artists in Avant Garde show courage, creativity, and a willingness to explore new ideas. Many balance multiple roles in their lives as artists, leaders, and members of their communities.

Featured Artists: Wendy Babcox, Hannah van Bart, Akea Brionne, Elisabeth Condon, Jane Corrigan, Elena del Rivero, Janet Echelman, Carole Feuerman, Lorraine Genovar, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Quisqueya Henríquez, Nneka Jones, Angela Kullman, Mernet Larsen, Tao Lewis, Marcia Marcus, Carol Mickett, Ya La’Ford, Claudia Ryan, Kelly Rysavy, Selina Román, Robert Stackhouse, Alma Thomas, Francine Tint, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jane Wilson, Marisol, Mika Rottenberg

This exhibition is also supported by Avant Garde, the Museum’s women’s affinity group. Through their support, the Tampa Museum of Art continues to expand its collection and create opportunities to share these important voices with the community.

On May 5, 1883, two ships left India with indentured laborers and headed to the shores of Guyana, a British colony on the east coast of South America. Over an 80-year period, from 1883–1917, the British Empire transported 250,000 Indian men, women, and children to work on Guyana’s sugar plantations. Sugar, especially crops from Guyana, produced trade riches for the Crown and received the nickname “White Gold.” The sugar trade resulted in generations of Indian migrants settling new homes in the Caribbean. Despite adverse treatment and challenging living conditions, they established cultural traditions in their new tropical environment. Suchitra Mattai’s artwork to leave a trace evokes the complex history of migration that transformed the lives of her family and thousands of others.

Ships and the sea appear in several of Mattai’s artworks as explorations of self and community. She uses materials familiar to her—such as vintage saris, bindis and beading, and Hindu relics—to reclaim history and give prominence to voices silenced or ignored throughout time. The artist’s monumental installation to leave a trace (2024) re-envisions the Trans-Atlantic journey from India to Guyana. Mattai represents the ship’s hull with an elongated post wrapped in braided gold rope. The sails, comprised of vibrant saris and seagrass, serve as stand-ins for the female figure and land. Each sari sail features a dark and light side, a nod to the dual identities inherent to the Indo-Caribbean population, especially women. Mattai protects the ship with mastheads of the Roman goddess Diana and the Hindu deity Devi to protect and provide safe passage for the travelers.

About the Artist 

Born in 1973 in Georgetown, Guyana, Mattai has lived across continents yet retains close ties to the South Asian communities in the Caribbean and US. The artist earned her MFA in painting and drawing, as well as an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In addition to the Tampa Museum of Art, Mattai has received solo exhibitions at the ICA San Francisco; Seattle Art Museum; Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York; Joselyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. In 2025, Mattai’s art was selected for the Saõ Paulo Biennial exhibition entitled Not All Travellers Walk Roads. Suchitra Mattai lives and works in Los Angeles, California 

Filmed from the balcony of Atlas’s temporary apartment on Captiva Island, the artist captured the breathtaking sight of the Florida sunset and Gulf shores over several weeks. An abstract landscape, Atlas created a grid comprised of 36 sunsets that captured the brilliant orange sun dipping into, and ultimately beneath, the horizon. A pensive soundtrack accompanies the video installation, emphasizing the culmination of the day. The video features a sculptural component—an illuminated clock that counts down from 18 minutes to zero, a representation of the time it takes the sun to set. Kiss the Day Goodbye alludes to the passage of time and sentiments related to endings. When the countdown clock strikes zero, the video restarts and the sun begins its descent once more, a metaphor for the cycle of days and events that shape our lives.

The presentation of Kiss the Day Goodbye at the Tampa Museum of Art coincides with the 1-year anniversary of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which arrived on the Gulf Coast as category 4 and category 3 hurricanes two weeks apart from each other in the fall of 2024. The catastrophic weather harmed the region’s coastlines and damaged swathes of neighborhoods in the Tampa Bay area. Atlas’s Kiss the Day Goodbye, created by the artist 10 years ago, reminds viewers of the timeless beauty of the Gulf’s shorelines, the enduring wonder of its ecosystem, and the fragility of our coastal environment. Hurricanes Helene and Milton upended life in Tampa Bay. Yet with each ending comes beginnings, a sentiment that has strengthened our sense of community. Each breathtaking sunset serves as a reminder of why we call Tampa Bay home.

The Tampa Museum of Art acquired its first drapo Vodou, or Vodou flag, over twenty-five years ago. Myrlande Constant’s flag Papa Zaka/St. Isidore was gifted to the collection by notable Haitian art collectors Kay and Roderick Heller. An early work by Constant, the flag reflects the customary size and imagery associated with this most beloved tradition of Haiti’s sacred arts. At the center of the composition is a depiction of a lwa, or deity, from the Vodou pantheon and a geometric border frames the image. Over time, Constant’s flags have increased in scale and visual complexity. Constant’s work represents a different approach to flagmaking—notably she is one the few women working in a medium traditionally associated with Vodou priests and male artisans. For the past 30 years, she has pushed the boundaries of the medium with her approach to color, light, and pattern. Today, Constant is celebrated as one of Haiti’s most accomplished contemporary artists and her art is exhibited across the world.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Constant was raised by her mother Jane Constant, a seamstress. In her teens, she worked with her mother in one of Haiti’s textile factories that made wedding dresses for brides in the US and Europe. Poor conditions and minimal wages caused her to quit, and she pursued the craft of flagmaking. Although she is versed in Vodou practices, Constant views her art in relation to textiles and painting, rather than as ritual flags. Distinct from her male contemporaries, Constant’s flags incorporate the tambour stitch, a technique she learned at the textile factory that allows her to create different textures and depth with sequins and beads. She also works in reverse—after drawing the image on cloth attached to supports, Constant and her assistants sew each bead from the underside and out of their view. The final picture is revealed once the cloth is turned over for inspection.

The Etruscans are a fascinating ancient Italian people about whom much remains a mystery. They inhabited an area of central Italy – present-day Tuscany and beyond – immediately north of Latium where the city Rome later rose to power. Emerging from the Iron Age “Villanovan” culture (ca. 900-700 ʙᴄᴇ), the Etruscans reached their zenith in the second quarter of the first millennium ʙᴄᴇ. Over the centuries, Etruscan art and culture retained its distinct identity. Yet, they were variously influenced by Celtic and Central European, Roman and Greek, Punic and Phoenician civilizations. The Etruscans were gradually subsumed by Rome over the course of a long process of acculturation (ca. 5th-1st cent. ʙᴄᴇ).

The permanent antiquities collection of the Tampa Museum of Art holds some 70 Etruscan objects covering a period of about 750 years (ca. 9th-1st cent. ʙᴄᴇ). This ensemble, the largest public collection of its kinds in the southeastern United States, has never been displayed together before. Comprising jewelry and cosmetics, bronze statuettes and metalware, terracotta figurines and earthenware, including cinerary urns, these objects illustrate aspects of everyday life and death, pottery production, myth and religion. The presentation of the Etruscan Collection is part of a series of long-term exhibitions highlighting the Museum’s permanent collection.

What little is known about the ancient Etruscans inhabiting central Italy and beyond is largely due to their interactions with the Romans. No historical accounts of their own have come down to us. Their language can be deciphered and is partially understood, but its origin remains uncertain. Etruscan is considered a Paleo-European Language, predating and thus unrelated to Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin. The Iron Age “Villanovan” culture (ca. 900-700 ʙᴄᴇ), first discovered in the north Italian town of Villanova near Bologna, is now considered the earliest appearance of a distinct Etruscan culture. The Etruscan city-states in central Italy reached their pinnacle in the Archaic and Classical periods (ca. 700-350 ʙᴄᴇ), after which the Etruscans were gradually acculturated by the growing power of Rome.

Etruscan states maintained contact and were variously influenced by surrounding civilizations in central and southern Europe as well as northern Africa, particularly Greece and Rome, Carthage and Egypt. Gaining their wealth through international copper and iron trade, independent city states joined into an Etruscan federation. The Etruscan nobility participated in an elite culture of exchange, involving lavish banquets and gift-giving, connecting Etruria to south Italy and the Greek world. The elite’s wealth was displayed in rich jewelry; their military power was reflected in impressive armor. Etruscan art and artifacts include bronze and terracotta statues, architecture and ornaments, metalware and glossy black-slip ceramics. Their culture is best known today from surviving tombs and sanctuaries. Tombs held human-form coffins or ash urns, conveying a prominent position of noblewomen. Elaborate frescoes adorned tomb walls, depicting mythology, banquets, and daily life, emphasizing the Etruscans’ belief in the afterlife and the importance of commemorating the departed. Etruscan pantheon gradually incorporated elements of Greek, Roman, and other influences. Priests played a significant role in interpreting the will of the gods through divination.

In a recent interview, artist Vaughn Spann (American, b. 1992) remarked, “Abstraction maps reality.” The four monumental paintings on view, all from the series Marked Men, represent the convergence of abstraction and figuration in Spann’s art. Rendered as a grid, each panel features a prominent ‘X’ at the center of the composition. Vibrant paint—from sapphire to sky blue, crimson red, fire orange, and marigold yellow, to blush pink and emerald green—emphasize Spann’s lattice of kaleidoscopic color. A combination of pigment and housepaint, the artist works the surface of the painting on the floor of his studio, building texture withing the picture plane, and then completes the work upright on the wall.

The X serves as a stand-in for the body and represents both personal and collective experiences. Created in a variety of hues and form, the X ranges from prominently visible to camouflaged or hidden. In Spann’s paintings, the X serves as a portrait of the everyman who has been targeted in racial profiling. It reflects self as well as the unknown or anonymous person. In discussing the inspiration for the Marked Men series, Spann shared: “I was stopped and frisked for the first time while I was an undergrad student…I was walking home from studying at a friend’s house. Cops pulled me over. Four other cop cars came by. They put me against a gate, and my hands are up, split. That same gesture echoes the X. And, for me, that’s such a symbolic form, and so powerful to this contemporary moment.”

Spann’s paintings illustrate a breadth of art historical and contemporary art influences, from the colorful abstract paintings by Stanley Whitney and Brice Marden’s lyrical yet minimal canvases, to Pop art icon Andy Warhol. Although each painter offers a uniquely different approach to art making, the grid and notion of repetition or seriality unites the artists. Both a formal and narrative choice, the containment of the grid heightens the image’s meaning or allegory. In discussing his grid paintings, Whitney once remarked, “There is freedom in setting limits for one self.” Spann, greatly inspired by Whitney, builds on this sentiment and adds, “…with freedom comes responsibility.” In this gallery, Spann’s Marked Men series signifies the artist’s dedication to social activism while paying homage to art history.

Born in Orlando, Florida, Vaughn Spann received his BFA in studio art from Rutgers State University and earned his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University’s School of Art. His art has been exhibited across the globe, with exhibitions mounted at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Rubell Museum. Spann’s work resides in the collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and others.