Category: Past Exhibitions

On view September 28, 2018 through February 14, 2019

The Tampa Museum of Art is pleased to present Yayoi Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING, one of the artist’s iconic Infinity Rooms, on loan from the Vinik Family Foundation Collection. An immersive, experiential work of art, LOVE IS CALLING invites visitors to enter a mirrored room with tentacle-like soft sculptures hanging from the ceiling and positioned on the floor. These forms glow with changing colors and feature Kusama’s signature polka dots. Mirrored walls create a kaleidoscopic effect, with the reflected imagery of the tentacles seemingly extending into infinite space. Visitors hear audio of the artist reciting a love poem in Japanese as they walk throughout the installation. 

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) is one of today’s most recognized and celebrated artists. In addition to her widely popular Infinity Rooms, such as LOVE IS CALLING, Kusama creates vibrant paintings, works on paper, and sculpture with abstract imagery. Her artwork has been shown and collected by leading institutions across the globe and she is considered “the world’s most popular artist.” A comprehensive retrospective, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is currently traveling around the US and Canada. In October 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo. The artist lives and works in Tokyo. 

On view August 16, 2018 through January 6, 2019 

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection is the inaugural exhibition in a biennial series exploring synergy between collections that may initially strike visitors as wholly separate from one another – namely, classical antiquities and modern and contemporary art. Patricia Cronin (American, b. 1963) is an internationally recognized Brooklyn-based artist uniquely positioned for such a visual conversation. Winner of a Rome Prize in Visual Art in 2006-2007, and past Trustee of the American Academy in Rome, Cronin is deeply interested in the ancient world, which she frequently references in her work. For the first commission in our biennial series, Cronin has created a large outdoor sculpture of Aphrodite inspired by a fragmentary 1st-century AD marble torso of Aphrodite in the Museum’s collection. Entitled Aphrodite Reimagined, Cronin’s sculpture re-envisions the Museum’s Aphrodite fragment as a monumental “complete” sculpture with a stone torso and translucent head, arms, and legs. The sculpture invites viewers to reconsider the narrative of an ancient work heavily restored after its rediscovery, and acts as a metaphor for shifting certainties about human history. Cronin and Museum curators will also pair an Etruscan cinerary urn from the Museum’s collection with multiple iterations of Cronin’s 2002 sculpture Memorial to a Marriage, a powerful artwork that references ancient and neoclassical funerary monuments as well as contemporary issues of social justice. The final gallery of the exhibition will comprise a visual dialogue between figural works by Cronin and several antiquities from the Museum’s permanent collection. 

On view July 14, 2018 through November 4, 2019 

Contests, combat, and commemoration played important and often interrelated roles in ancient art, life, and culture. This small exhibition, drawn primarily from the Museum’s permanent collection, explores a number of these connections within both mythological and historical contexts. Altogether, some eighty works of Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Egyptian art are included, ranging from the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD, and from painted pottery to sculpture in terracotta, bronze, and stone. 

On view July 14, 2018 through September 14, 2022

Supplemented with notable loans from local private collectors, this permanent collection exhibition explores The Classical World across its many centuries and vast geographical spread. Ranging from prehistoric pottery and sculpture from Cyprus, Greece, and Italy (as early as 3000 BCE) to marble sculpture and terracotta from the Roman Empire (as late as the 5th century CE), the exhibition includes a particularly fine assortment of painted pottery. Produced mainly in Greece and South Italy during the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE, these black-figure and red-figure vases comprise the most noteworthy segment of the Museum’s permanent collection of classical antiquities. Collection objects selected for the exhibition The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works are incorporated into the presentation of The Classical World.  

About the Permanent Collection 

The first artwork purchased by the Tampa Museum of Art was an ancient Greek vase in 1981, and this has remained an important area of collecting for the Museum ever since. The Museum’s most notable acquisition of antiquities came five years later, in the form of the Joseph Veach Noble Collection, a significant private collection of more than 150 objects amassed primarily in the 1950s and ‘60s. A collector and scholar interested in the techniques of potters and vase-painters in ancient Greece and South Italy, Mr. Noble had assembled a collection especially strong in painted pottery from those areas. While vases undoubtedly constitute the core of the Noble Collection, Mr. Noble also collected in other media, including two notable large-scale marble statues that have inspired recent exhibitions— the nearly complete Poseidon/Neptune with dolphin on view nearby (and in Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life, 2014), and the torso of Aphrodite/Venus discovered in 1771 (and featured in Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity, 2018). The Museum continues to add to its antiquities collection, primarily by gift, and always in accordance with the highest ethical standards. 

On view May 26, 2018 through August 19, 2018 

From Muse and Myth to Figure and Gesture presents a selection of figurative prints in the Tampa Museum of Art’s collection made from the 1960s to today. This exhibition is a follow-up to From Dada and Op to Color Field and Pop: 50 Years of Prints from the Permanent Collection, the 2016 exhibition that featured primarily abstract prints in the Museum’s collection. From Muse and Myth to Figure and Gesture includes works by a range of artists interested in the body and figuration, and demonstrates the breadth of the Museum’s contemporary print collection, including new acquisitions by Max Neumann and Alex Katz. The show explores the artist’s muse, from Katz’s picture of his wife Ada Katz to Kenny Scharf’s portrayal of Jackie Kennedy. Norse mythology inspired Jim Dine’s suite The Mead of Poetry (1988), large-scale woodcuts printed in Tampa at USF’s Graphicstudio. Other artworks on view include Philip Pearlstein’s signature studies of the nude; Niki de Saint Phalle’s triumphant portraits of women in her Nana Power series; and Keith Haring’s iconic linear drawings exploring man’s devastating effect on the environment. From Muse and Myth to Figure and Gesture presents approximately 25 prints by the artists noted above, as well as Vito Acconci, CRASH, Jim Dine, Marisol, Lisa Yuskavage, and others. 

On view May 3, 2018 through September 30, 2018

Tampa Museum of Art will present Vapor and Vibration: The Art of Larry Bell and Jesús Rafael Soto. This exhibition places in dialogue, for the first time, the work of two of the 20th century’s most innovative artists exploring light and space. Since the 1960s, Soto and Bell have pushed the boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture with new materials and forms. While there have been several exhibitions devoted to each artist, Bell and Soto aims to present their works in a fresh context not yet explored by curators and art historians. Bell and Soto is not a survey or historical overview of the artists’ prolific careers. Rather, the show will juxtapose key bodies of work by both artists in three sections: Cubes and Structures; Vapor and Vibration; and Light and Transparency. 

Cubes and Structures section will explore the reductive significance of the cube and the grid as both artists pushed beyond traditional painting formats and pedestal sculpture. Vapor and Vibration looks at how Soto and Bell have used color, as well as contrasting properties of light and dark, to render spatial illusion and optical effects in 2D planes. The final section, Light and Transparency, demonstrates the artists’ investigations of light, color, and surface in experiential-based sculpture and installation. Approximately 30-40 objects will be on view in Bell and Soto and will feature influential works from the 1960s through the present. 

On view March 9, 2018 through July 22, 2018

On view March 1, 2018 through July 22, 2018

On view December 1, 2017 through April 1, 2018

On view November 2, 2017 through April 1, 2018