Category: Past Exhibitions

On View November 19, 2020 through March 28, 2021

The Highwaymen are a group of African American artists celebrated for their distinctive paintings of Florida’s natural environment. Working in and around the Fort Pierce area beginning in the 1950s, these self-taught artists depicted the state’s scenic coastline and wild backcountry, often in dazzling combinations of color and tone. Brilliant tropical sunsets, windblown palms, towering sunlit clouds, and blooming royal poinciana trees are among the many subjects that have become iconic images of Florida, in part because of the paintings that the Highwaymen created.

Living Color: The Art of the Highwaymen focuses on work produced from the 1950s to the 1980s by a core group of the Highwaymen including Al Black, Mary Ann Carroll, Willie Daniels, Johnny Daniels, James Gibson, Alfred Hair, Roy McLendon, Harold Newton, Sam Newton, Willie Reagan, and Livingston Roberts. The exhibition brings special attention on two key artists, Harold Newton and Alfred Hair, and presents extensive examples of their work. Drawn from five private collections, Living Color also considers the role of collectors in preserving the legacy of these artists and their extraordinary life stories.

On view November 8, 2019 through March 15, 2020

On the eve of the Tampa Museum of Art’s 100^th anniversary in 2020, the exhibition The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works from the Permanent Collection, features works representative of the institution’s collecting history and mission. The collection is unique—with significant holdings of ancient Greek and Roman art, as well as increased acquisitions of modern and contemporary art. With eight main categories, the collection features a breadth of objects: Classical Antiquities, Prints and Photographs Related to Classical Antiquity, the C. Paul Jennewein Archive, Painting, Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Photography, Works on Paper, and New Media, Video, and Installation Art.

The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works will present unique insight into how the collection and identity of the Museum have evolved as it has grown from a small local arts organization to the City’s preeminent museum of art.

Sponsored in part by:  Celia and Jim Ferman

With additional support provided by: The Blanchard Family

On view through October 25, 2020

Since photography’s inception in the mid-nineteenth century, women have stood among its artistic and technological pioneers. Modern Women: Modern Vision features 100 works from the Bank of America Collection by leading artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The exhibition is organized in six thematic sections: Modernist Innovators, Documentary Photography and the New Deal, Photo League, Modern Masters, Exploring the Environment, and The Global Contemporary Lens. Each section examines the photographers’ role in forging new directions and methods in photography, as well as how the medium has evolved with the advent of new digital and studio practices.  Artists featured in this exhibition include Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Tina Barney, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Margaret Bourke-White, Esther Bubley, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Candida Höfer, Barbara Kruger, Dorothea Lange, Nikki S. Lee, Helen Levitt, Sonia Handelman Meyer, DoDo Jin Ming, Ruth Orkin, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and others.

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On view October 22, 2020 through May 9, 2021

Representations of the body vary from person to person, artist to artist. The works featured in Figure Forward: Selections from the Permanent Collection demonstrate different approaches to figuration from the 18^th-century to the present through the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Portraiture and figuration anchor the modern and contemporary collection, with works in a range of media by artists such as Jose Clemente Orozco, Francisco Goya, Louise Nevelson, Fairfield Porter, Lorna Simpson, and Rafael Soyer. The exhibition also highlights recent acquisitions by Alex Katz, Yigal Ozeri, and Pepe Mar. Figure Forward expands on the figurative work included in the show The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works.

Figure Forward: Selections from the Permanent Collection is part of the Tampa Museum of Art’s centennial exhibition series Celebrating 100 Years.

On view through September 27, 2020

In conjunction with Frank Stella: Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya, the Tampa Museum of Art has organized Frank Stella: What You See, a pendant exhibition featuring works by Frank Stella in regional collections, including the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection. The exhibition is inspired by Stella’s quote “What you see is what you see,” the artist’s famed description of his art as noted in a 1964 interview. The intimate selection of works provides an overview of Stella’s oeuvre from his exploration of minimal forms in the 1960s and 1970s, to the creation of lyrical multi-media compositions in the late 1990s. Frank Stella: What You See presents a snapshot view of one of today’s most influential living artists.

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On view through September 27, 2020

Frank Stella (American, b. 1936) created the series Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya (1984) after seeing artist El Lissitzky’s artwork at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Between 1917 and 1919, Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941) completed imagery for a children’s book of “Had Gadya”, an allegorical song sung at the close of the Passover Seder. Lissitzky’s modernist interpretation of the traditional song highlighted the influence of the Russian avant-garde in his work, as he depicted characters and scenes in “Had Gadya” with abstract forms and interlocking geometric shapes. Inspired by Lissitzky’s “Had Gadya”, Stella produced a suite of prints corresponding to the artist’s imagery. Rather than re-interpret the song, Stella responded to Lissitzky’s abstractions with his own signature vibrant palette and curvilinear gestures. The exhibition features Stella’s complete portfolio of twelve prints, each unique in technique and color.

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June 5, 2020 – May 15, 2024

Dominique Labauvie (French, b. 1948)Maison Dépliée, 1994. Forged and waxed steel. Courtesy of the artist and Bleu Acier, Inc. Photographer: Philip LaDeau.

Artist Dominique Labauvie (French, b. 1948) unites language,
both his native French and English, with image in his architectonic steel sculptures. Air Fer Mer, the title of the outdoor installation on the Sullivan Terrace, as well as the title of one the sculptures on view, reflects the artist’s play on language—“air fer mer” spoken aloud sounds like “éphémère,” the French word for “ephemeral.” Ephemerality embodies the essence of Labauvie’s art. 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, four of Labauvie’s sculptures exist in harmony with the Hillsborough River and Tampa skyline.