Category: Past Exhibitions

The U.S. democratic constitution was in large part inspired by the popular government of Classical Athens, as well as the Roman Republic and the French Enlightenment. During the 2024 Presidential Elections, the Tampa Museum of Art will highlight the ancient Greek city-state Athens, as the birthplace of democracy. There, between the 6th and 4th centuries bce, male citizens gained power in a form of government based on the rule of law.

The exhibition is based on the Museum’s extensive collection of 19th century photography, paired with a dozen antiquities from the permanent collection as well as some significant loans. Ancient Athens: Birthplace of Democracy illustrates archaeological site such as the Acropolis, the arts and culture of Classical Athens such as sculpture and ceramic vases, theater and athletics, as well as the gods and goddesses worshipped in the city. The exhibition allows visitors to contemplate the ideals of the society that gave birth to democracy.

From the sixth through the fifth century bce, political reforms broke the power of the nobility (aristokratia) and eventually gave way to popular government (dēmokratia) in ancient Athens. Organized into an independent city-state (polis) that included the countryside of Attica, Athens became the bastion of freedom and democracy, and the beacon of Classical civilization at the height of Greek art and culture. Only one of the hundreds of city-states across the Greek world that witnessed the rise of popular government, Athens may rightfully be considered the birthplace of democracy not only because it is the most famous and best-documented case but also because it was the state with the largest population at the time in which democracy reached its most radical form.

During the Presidential Election in the United States in 2024, the birth of democracy in ancient Athens gains additional historical relevance. The legacy of Classical Athens goes back two and a half thousand years. Its art continues to inspire contemporary artists. Greek myths and legends, tragedies and comedies inspire modern literature, cinema and theater. This exhibition aims to examine what the original ideals of democracy, liberty and justice for all, equality before the law and the pursuit of happiness still mean today.

Ancient Athens: Birthplace of Democracy is sponsored in part by:

the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs Cultural Endowment Fund, the Frank E. Duckwall Foundation, the Tampa Museum of Art Foundation’s Richard E. Perry Cultural Endowment Fund, the Gus Lemonopoulos Fund of the Tampa Bay Community Foundation, and William Knight Zewadski.

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.

The Tampa Museum of Art’s inaugural multi-media exhibition in the Bronson Thayer Gallery celebrates two female trailblazers: scientist Marie Curie (Polish-French, 1876-1934) and artist Jennifer Steinkamp (American, b. 1958). Curie remains the only woman awarded two Nobel Prizes for her groundbreaking scientific discoveries and research. Born nearly a century later, Steinkamp is internationally recognized for her monumental installations that unite art with technology. Pioneers in their respective disciplines  – science and art  – the exhibition Jennifer Steinkamp: Madame Curie highlights the remarkable work of both women. This presentation also launches the Museum’s new media and immersive art initiative, a milestone in our institution’s programming history.

Like Marie Curie, Steinkamp has long been inspired by science and how science transforms humanity. For over 30 years, she has been making site-specific art exploring the relationship between nature, power, and gender. With advances in technology and her affinity for design and coding, Steinkamp viewed the computer as a tool to make art. Madame Curie, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2011, was informed by Steinkamp’s investigations into the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station, a decommissioned power plant located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. Her research inevitably led her to Marie Curie’s trailblazing work in physics and chemistry, specifically Curie’s revolutionary research on radioactivity and the discovery of polonium and radium.

While reading Curie’s biography, authored by the scientist’s daughter Eve Curie, Steinkamp noticed flowers and gardening were mentioned throughout the book—a passion that coincided with her love of science. Steinkamp created animation renderings of over 40 flowers mentioned in Curie’s biography. In Steinkamp’s Madame Curie, billowing stems of apple blossoms, daisies, eucalyptus, passion flowers, periwinkle, and wisteria float, tumble, and cascade across the gallery’s walls. The layered blooms create the perception of infinite space and continuous time. For the Tampa Museum of Art’s exhibition of Madame Curie, Steinkamp created a version of the animation specific to the gallery’s architecture. In this immersive installation, Steinkamp emphasizes the beauty of nature and how it brought Curie a sense of wonderment and joy throughout her life.

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.