Category: Past Exhibitions

When it comes to art, the Rice Family’s first visit to Cuba in 2013 was as memorable as it was pivotal to their vocation as collectors. Cuban art became a gateway to embrace the heart and mind of a fascinating culture and its people. Collecting was no longer a hobby, but a passion, and over time the Rices would fall completely “under the spell” of Cuban art. For a decade, Susie and Mitchell’s Cuban Art Collection has been growing consistently in scope and quality, now treasuring the works of more than seventy artists from different generations and aesthetics.

The exhibition deviates from a traditional historical narrative and is presented as a compass rather than a timeline―a map for a journey through the varying themes, genres, and styles that align with the sensibilities of two generations of collectors in the Rice family. This first of six sections, The Language of Forms and the Forms of Language includes early works that demonstrate an affinity for abstraction among some Cuban pioneers of modernism in the late 1940s. The works in The Prophet’s Dream delineate both political and social awareness and the critical communal identity present in Cuban art through generations subsequent to the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

Cuba is described as an island-nation, a term that refers not only to its physical and geographic properties―the cluster of islands, islets and keys that form the biggest archipelago in the Antilles―but also the people who inhabit it. The works in The Great Journey: Archives express the trauma of national exile and the artists’ relationship to Cuba. The section Sensory Landscapes of Memory and Desire delineates the more hedonistic and whimsical imagery that percolates through Cuban contemporary art. These works exude eroticism, playfulness, intimate longings, and explorations into the depths of memory.

The Musings of Narcissus: Through the Looking Glass and What the Artist Found There, the fifth thematic section, examines a range of self-referential works of art and offers a glimpse into the process and philosophy of Cuban artists exploring self-representation and the body. Lastly, The Spirit of the Real, the Reality of the Spirit presents work born of the artists’ spiritual experiences. In most of the works in this section, mythological and symbolic elements from African-Cuban religions underlie or are at the foreground of both the narrative and the visual structure of the artworks.

Under the Spell of the Palm Tree: The Rice Collection of Cuban Art features the work of:

Abel Barroso
Adrián Fernandez
Alberto Lago
Alex Hernández
Alexi Torres
Alfredo Sosabravo
Ángel Ramírez & Jacqueline Maggi
Antonio Vidal
Belkis Ayón
Carlos Enríquez
Carlos Garaicoa
Cundo Bermúdez
Duo Ponjuán (René Francisco & Eduardo Ponjuán)

Emilio Sánchez
Enrique Riverón
Ernesto Javier Fernández
Ernesto Leal
Esterio Segura
Frank Mujica
Glenda León
Inti Hernández
Iván Capote
Jesús Hernández-Güero
Jorge Lavoy
José Alberto Figueroa
José Ángel Toirac
José Ángel Vincench

José Bedia
José Rosabal
Juan Roberto Diago Querol
Kádir López
Lázaro Saavedra
Liset Castillo
Mabel Poblet
Manuel Mendive
Marco Castillo
Mario Carreño
Pedro de Oraá
Pedro Pablo Oliva
Rafael Soriano

René Francisco Rodríguez
Rene Portocarrero
Reynier Leyva Novo (Chino Novo)
Ricardo Miguel Hernández
Roberto Diago
Roberto Fabelo
Salvador Corratgé
Sandra Ramos
Tania Bruguera
Tomás Sánchez
Waldo Díaz-Balart
Wifredo Lam

Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration is a celebration of artistic practices in the Tampa Bay region, as it is a collaboration between five institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design; the Tampa Museum of Art; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. Working together, curators from each institution offer context for the diversity of art being made in Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties.

In the summer of 2021, we mounted the triennial exhibition Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration across four venues, a full year later than its original June 2020 date. Skyway 20/21 offered a reprieve from the new normal of daily uncertainty and the effects of a global pandemic. During those paused months of the pandemic, it felt like life might not ever return to normal. If it did, what would life look like? Could we return to our old selves? What needed to change, and what did we need to do to thrive again, both as individuals and as a community?

In preparation for Skyway 2024, the six-person curatorial team met with artists over Zoom and in person. During my studio visits, we talked about emerging from the cocoon of artistic isolation and how this impacted their work. Artists shared how they made art during an unprecedented period of uncertainty. Our conversations revealed what making art means today and how COVID-19 forced an alteration of their process. Many artists used this time as a period of reevaluation of practice and self. Thinking about the future included a reflection of the past, with a common goal of pushing towards something new. Conceptually, the year 2020 reset the clock, allowing artists to experiment and explore materials, techniques, and ideas with abandon.

The eighteen artists selected for the Tampa Museum of Art’s Skyway 2024 exhibition are showing their work for the first time in our regional triennial. They represent a range of backgrounds-from MFA students and self-taught artists to creative makers with established careers. Notably, the art in this iteration of Skyway is deeply personal and introspective, with work referencing lived experiences and observations of the changed, chaotic, charged world around us. The works allude to heroes and heroines, friends and family, self and the body, and the fragile line between life and death. Viewed together, the art reveals a creative zeitgeist informed by our post-pandemic world.

Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls represents Suchitra Mattai’s (Guyanese, b. 1973) first solo Museum exhibition on the East Coast and in Florida. Compromised largely of new works, the show focuses on three themes central to Mattai’s practice: migration, motherland, and materiality. Within these themes, Mattai explores her own family’s history and identity, as well as the narratives of Guyana’s Indo-Caribbean community. Mattai’s work references historical moments, such as the migration of indentured laborers from India to the shores of Guyana, and also examines the physical and emotional relationship to home and motherland. Mattai creates artworks that flip traditional mythologies by placing South Asian women and Brown bodies as the central figures in her vibrant compositions. These unique histories – from surveying Guyana’s colonial past to shared Indian traditions against the lush backdrop of the Caribbean, and the familial bonds between matriarchs, mothers, and daughters – anchor Mattai’s art. 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.

Born in Georgetown, Guyana, Mattai has lived across continents yet retains close ties to the South Asian communities in the Caribbean and the 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. Over the last five years, her work has shifted from painting to sculptural textile installations. In addition to Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls at the Tampa Museum of Art, in 2024, Mattai’s art is the focus of solo exhibitions at the ICA San Francisco; Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. She has been featured in group shows at the MCA Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the MCA Denver, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Mattai lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

 I’m interested in the look of things and the quality of being there. A moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass.

                                                                                                                                                      Rod Penner

In the late 1960s, a new genre of realist painting emerged in New York City and San Francisco. While Pop art and abstraction remained the dominant forms of painting at the time, a group of artists explored the convergence of photography and painting. Dubbed “Photorealism” by the gallerist Lou Meisel, a cohort of artists used their own photographs to create landscapes, portraits, and still lifes in exact detail. To create such precise paintings, the Photorealists often employed projectors to enlarge their images onto canvas and utilized novel tools, such as spray guns, to render works with smooth surfaces. Brushwork, particularly bold gestural mark making, was abandoned in favor of a look that mirrored the quality of the photograph. The pictorial content varied but typically the West Coast artists favored everyday scenes of daily life. East Coast artists captured the shiny allure of chrome objects, such as diners, trucks, cars, and the typography of signs and advertisements. Artists on both coasts emphasized light and reflection in their paintings, which remains a signature element of Photorealism.

Rod Penner’s photo-based work inherits the legacy of Photorealism but also challenges the aesthetic of the genre. For nearly 40-years, Penner has painted America’s small towns. While much of his work portrays communities in Texas and New Mexico, Penner’s paintings explore the beauty in absence and decay that inhabit the once bustling corridors of Main Street, America. In this selection of eight paintings, Penner details deteriorating building facades, aging signs, and vacant streets devoid of people. Brooding clouds and expansive skylines loom above the one and two-story buildings, further highlighting the spectral quality of the town. Penner’s use of light and shadow, as well as reflections in puddles, create both a sense of drama in the composition and emphasize the passage of time.

To create his paintings, Penner uses his own reference photographs and videos to render precision of subject, light, and form. Unlike the Photorealists, he is not interested in recreating the photographic image, rather he uses the photo as a sketch. He photographs sites in the evening or Sunday mornings, finding inspiration in the solitude and quietness of the moment. In the studio, Penner uses a small paintbrush to laboriously render the details and visual textures of each scene. Although from a distance the works may appear as a photograph, close inspection of Penner’s paintings reveal his carefully placed brush marks. Each painting represents the artist’s poetic interpretation of Americana and the enduring presence of the past.

Frontiers of Impressionism: Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum includes 53 works by over 30 artists—including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Max Slevogt. Together, they demonstrate Impressionism’s international allure and its national adaptations captured in subjects from Monet’s famed Giverny lily pond to the natural wonders of the Grand Canyon.

In 2024, the term “impressionism” celebrates its 150^th anniversary. Such a significant occasion inspires reflection on the profound impact that a relatively small group of artists in Paris made by positing a new mode of painting: one that favored painting outdoors over in a studio, immediacy over planning, the everyday over the grand, and the fleeting over the eternal. In doing so, the impressionists upended centuries of traditions in European art. This exhibition explores the radical impulses behind impressionism and its seemingly endless adaptability, as artists from around the world came to Paris to study and returned to their homelands, assimilating what they had absorbed and propelling the movement further. 

The Worcester Art Museum pioneered new artistic horizons by embracing impressionism early in its history. The French and American impressionism collections at the Worcester Art Museum have long drawn visitors to the galleries. The first directors purchased works by Monet from his Parisian dealer, Durand-Ruel, as well as directly from American impressionists, making the Museum one of the first in the United States to collect impressionism actively as contemporary art. Over the past 125 years, this collection has grown, encapsulating the story of the movement’s roots and emergence in France and its subsequent expansion to the United States, Germany, Scandinavia, and beyond. Highlighting more than 30 artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Max Slevogt, this exhibition demonstrates impressionism’s international allure, captured in subjects as far-flung as Monet’s famed Giverny lily pond to the natural wonders of the Grand Canyon.