Current Exhibitions

The exhibition Purvis Young: 91 presents for the first time the depth of the Purvis Young (American, 1943-2010) holdings in the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection. In 2004, the Rubell Family Foundation gifted 91 works by Young to the Museum, one of the largest donations of the artist’s work in the Southeast. Young, a self-taught artist, created thousands of assemblages with imagery of protesters, pregnant women, and warriors on wood remnants, cabinets, and doors. The artworks reflect Young’s experiences and observations living in Overtown, Miami.

Purvis Young: 91 is part of the exhibition series Ordinary/Extraordinary: Assemblage in Three Acts. The series simultaneously presents three discrete shows focused on works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Purvis Young, and a selection of 20th- and 21st-century Haitian Vodou flags. The use of found objects, such as discarded wood and textiles, formally links the exhibitions together. More importantly, historical and socio-economic narratives informed by the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora, the Black experience in America, as well as European artistic influences, unite the artists featured in the series. Although each is a stand-alone show, viewed together, the series explores provocative portrayals of race, identity, spirituality, survival, and hope in a range of assemblage objects and compositions.

Additional support for the Ordinary/Extraordinary
exhibition season is provided by:

Deborah Brittain | Muriel Brathwaite
Dr. Willie Logan and Lyra Blizzard Logan | Bales Security

Sacred Diagrams: Haitian Vodou Flags from the Gessen Collection examines the tradition and artistry of Haitian Vodou flags. Often made of discarded burlap bags, repurposed fabric, beads, and sequins, Vodou flags represent Haiti’s spiritually rich yet often misunderstood Vodou religion. Guest curator and artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (Haitian, b. 1954) examines the role of Vodou flags and flagmakers within Haiti’s dynamic visual culture. Sacred Diagrams highlights vintage ceremonial flags from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as explores recent interpretations of Vodou flags by artists Clotaire Bazile, Myrlande Constant, Mireille Delice Delisme, Silva Joseph, Dubreus Lherisson, Edgar Jean Louis, Antoine Oleyant, Yves Telemaque, and George Valris.

This exhibition is part the exhibition series Ordinary/Extraordinary: Assemblage in Three Acts. The series simultaneously presents three discrete shows focused on works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Purvis Young, and a selection of 20th- and 21st-century Haitian Vodou flags. The use of found objects, such as discarded wood and textiles, formally links the exhibitions together. More importantly, historical and socio-economic narratives informed by the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora, the Black experience in America, as well as European artistic influences, unite the artists featured in the series. Although each is a stand-alone show, viewed together, the series explores provocative portrayals of race, identity, spirituality, survival, and hope in a range of assemblage objects and compositions.

Sacred Diagrams: Haitian Vodou Flags from
the Gessen Collection is presented by: 

Kay & Roderick Heller, The Harpeth, Franklin, TN

Additional support for the Ordinary/Extraordinary
exhibition season is provided by:

Deborah Brittain | Muriel Brathwaite
Dr. Willie Logan and Lyra Blizzard Logan | Bales Security

One of the 20th century’s most influential artists, Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008) defined his oeuvre by using ordinary, non-traditional materials to create distinct works of art. His “combines” hovered between painting and sculpture, and incorporated a range of media and techniques. Rauschenberg often used photography in his work and layered images to render provocative narratives or observations about the world around him. Suite 1 from (America Mix-16), 1983, a portfolio of 16 photogravures, features photographs of found vignettes or objects Rauschenberg encountered during his travels around the US. He found beauty in the mundane, such as a dilapidated rag hanging from the gas cap of an abandoned truck or the inadvertent still life of trashed objects resting on the curb. Rarely exhibited from the Tampa Museum of Art’s collection, the entirety of this portfolio will be on view.

The Classical World showcases Greek, Etruscan, and Roman artworks and artifacts from the Museum’s notable antiquities collection, supplemented with important loans from local private collectors. Ranging from prehistoric pottery and sculpture (dating from as early as 3000 BC) to marble sculpture and terracotta from the Roman Empire (dating to as late as the 5th century AD), the exhibition includes a particularly fine assortment of Greek and South Italian black-figure and red-figure vases. Important works in the antiquities collection are highlighted as part of the exhibition, The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works.

As the Tampa Museum of Art nears its 100th anniversary, exhibitions in 2019 and 2020 will focus on the breadth of the institution’s permanent collection, as well as examine its collecting history. The Tampa Museum of Art’s holdings are unique, with distinct collections of Greek and Roman antiquities, as well as modern and contemporary art.

Shards and Illusions: Contemporary Glass from the Permanent Collection in the Wallace Family Promenade.
Shards and Illusions features an intimate selection of contemporary glass by American and European artists Jon Kuhn, John Luebtow, Steven Maslach, Michael Pavlik, Louis Sclafani, Lino Tagliapietra, and Toots Zynsky. This presentation focuses on architectural, abstract forms and highlights the Tampa Museum of Art’s unique holdings in contemporary glass. Shards and Illusions offers an opportunity to view rarely exhibited works from the permanent collection.

With her commissioned outdoor sculpture Aphrodite Reimagined, 2018, Patricia Cronin (American, b. 1963) has re-envisioned a fragmentary Aphrodite torso in the Museum’s antiquities collection as a monumental “complete” statue of the goddess. With a stone torso and translucent head and limbs, the sculpture acts as a metaphor for shifting historical certainties.

Wolfgang Flad is a German artist living and working in Berlin. Born in 1974, he studied textile design at Fachhochschule Reutlingen and fine arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Germany and other European countries, and has placed his artwork in museum collections in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Primarily a sculptor, Flad is interested in “upcycling” previously used material, and in creating unexpected associations and connections between art and the natural world.

Kiss and Tell consists of some 30 individual wooden elements hanging from a grid in the Morsani Atrium. Each element has been coated with different types of paint and varnish, as well as with papier-mâché made from various papers dealing with art (critical texts, invitations, magazines, books, catalogs, etc). In this way Flad tries to bring the material back into organic shapes and structures reminiscent of the trees and other plants from which such materials first originate. According to Flad, this idea is close to that of the Italian artist, Giuseppe Penone, who has talked about “the hidden life within” in his peeled wood works that reveal delicate plants inside larger beams. Flad is also interested in the flora and fauna of Florida, where he spends time each year; some of his forms resemble mangroves and other plants from this region.

Generous funding for the framework used to hang this artwork provided by the Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts.

Jaume Plensa is an internationally acclaimed artist who has exhibited his sculptures in museums all over the world.  In locations as diverse as Seoul, Paris, Chicago, Bordeaux and London, Plensa’s monumental sculptures have reaffirmed the power of art to transform a public space into a community. This is aptly demonstrated in his first major commission in the United States, The Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park (2004). Two 11-story LED towers face each other across a thin pool of water, with images of a changing and diverse city reflected in the water, a continuously cycling metaphor for the life of a city.

The Crown Fountain was the beginning of Plensa’s investigation of the portrait via photography and form. This led to works like Laura with Bun. At more than 23 feet tall, this artwork expresses both individual and universal traits at great scale, inviting viewers to consider multiple aspects of beauty and human nature. Like all of his large-scale female portrait heads, Laura has her eyes closed, as if looking within. In speaking about these works, Plensa has said, “Look into yourself. My piece is a mirror to reflect your image, so you can think about your own interior—how much beauty we have inside of ourselves.”

Laura with Bun initially came to Tampa as part of the 2016 exhibition Jaume Plensa: Human Landscape. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous gift and the overwhelming popular support of nearly 100 donors, the Museum has committed to purchase the sculpture for our permanent collection.