Purvis Young: Redux
June 23, 2022 – June 30, 2024
Inspired by the success of the exhibition Purvis Young: 91 in 2019, the Tampa Museum of Art will remount its Purvis Young collection as one of the first of several long-term displays of the permanent collection. In 2004, the Rubell Family Foundation gifted 91 artworks to the Tampa Museum of Art by Young (American, 1943-2010). Based in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida, Young’s paintings reflect his observations of daily life and the fight for social justice, hope for his community, immigration and otherness, as well as the fragile balance between life and death. He rendered his work from found objects—items he discovered in his neighborhood. Discarded wood, windows, furniture fragments, cabinets, doors, carpet, fabric, string, and cables. Although his means were limited, Young was recognized throughout Miami, and now across the globe, for his remarkable painting practice and his contributions to the cultural landscape of South Florida.
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue
Organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum
July 21, 2022 – October 23, 2022
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue brings together a focused selection of work from a period of over forty years by two of today’s most important and influential photo-based artists. Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems, both born in 1953, came of age during a period of dramatic change in the American social landscape. Since meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977, the two artists have been intellectual colleagues and companions. Over the following five decades, Bey and Weems have explored and addressed similar themes: race, class, representation, and systems of power, creating work that is grounded in specific African American events and realities while simultaneously speaking to universal human conditions. This exhibition, for the first time, brings their work together to shed light on their unique trajectories and modes of presentation, and their shared consciousness and principles.
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue is organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
Presenting Sponsor: Bank of America
Poetry in Paint: The Artists of Old Tampa Bay
Selections from Alfred Frankel’s Artists of Old Florida, 1840-1960
August 18, 2022 – January 23, 2023
Collector Dr. Alfred Frankel has studied and collected the paintings of early Florida artists for the past 40 years. After meeting Michael Turbeville in the 1980s, an antiques dealer based in Tampa, he started to collect relatively unknown artists capturing Florida’s untamed landscape. To date, Dr. Frankel as acquired nearly 500 works of art. His holdings not only depict Florida’s raw beauty but the collection reveals how local artists from Miami to Tampa, and Orlando and Gainesville, were influential in developing art communities across the state in the early 20th century. Poetry in Paint: The Artists of Old Tampa Bay explores artists essential to the founding of the Tampa Bay area’s creative circles and features painters such as Harry Bierce, Theodore Coe, and Belle Weeden McNeer. Dr. Frankel has extensively researched the artists in his vast collection, which has resulted in the self-publication of the books Artists of Old Florida, 1840-1960 and The Dictionary of Florida Artists.
Platinum Orange Life, 2019. Mixed media on board with artist’s plexi box
60 x 48 inches, Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery
Pepe Mar: Myth and Magic
September 4, 2022 – January 29, 2023
The Tampa Museum of Art will present the exhibition Pepe Mar, a 15-year survey of the artist’s work. It will include fifty objects from Pepe Mar’s (born 1977, Reynosa, Mexico) diverse practice in collage, sculpture, ceramics, and painting. Mar has developed a highly unique personal style in which he equally mixes and innovates craft, Op art, painting, and identity politics. The artist often explores themes related to cultural isolation and identity, rituals and mythologies, and consumer consumption and excess. Recent projects illuminate queer history and icons—the places, events, and people often overlooked or marginalized in historical narratives. His work has been exhibited throughout the US and abroad and is included in private and public collections. Mar received his BFA from California College of Art, San Francisco and his MFA from Florida International University. Mar lives and works in Miami.
Wooden boat, cloth bundles, glass bottles, and plastic containers
Jorge M. Pérez Collection
Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge Perez Collection
November 17, 2022 – March 12, 2023
Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection uses contemporary art to explore conflicts and contradictions of contemporary society, as well as analyze historical events and reframe them within the present. An interest in the marginalized, the marginal and the margins (of society, of history) is what brings together the works in the exhibition. Time for Change was first presented as the inaugural exhibition in December 2020 at El Espacio 23, a contemporary art space founded by collector and philanthropist Jorge M. Pérez. Featuring artists from across the globe, the exhibition highlights works that address unrest through allegory, metaphor or veiled allusion.
A Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection is organized by El Espacio 23.
attended by four figures on grave; upper register: Dionysus and Ariadne with winged Eros figures
Monumental funerary vessel (red-figure volute krater with added white and yellow; attributed to the Arpi Painter); Apulia, South Italy; early Hellenistic period, ca. 325-300 BCE. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles W. Sahlman, 1987.036
Life & Death in Antiquity
Introduction to the Ancient Collection
Opening Fall 2022
The Tampa Museum of Art purchased its first ancient artwork in 1981, a black-figure column krater, perhaps depicting the wedding procession of Peleus and Thetis. Five years later the Museum’s antiquities collection quadrupled in size with the single acquisition of the prominent collection of Joseph Veach Noble. The permanent collection currently holds about 575 ancient artefacts, in addition to over 100 long-term loans from private collections. More than three-quarters of the Museum’s antiquities are representative of ancient Greece and Italy, particularly Athens and Rome. The ancient world encompassed a much wider diversity of traditions, however, of which some can be encountered in this introduction to the Museum’s Antiquities Collection. The gallery display will highlight aspects of daily life and death, as well as human and animal figures, beauty ideals and eroticism, athletics and theater, wine consumption and vase production, religion and mythology, trade and politics
In his Ninth Labor, Heracles was ordered to retrieve the girdle of the Amazonian princess Hippolyta
Ceramic wine vessel (black-figure neck amphora with added white; attributed to the Leagros Group); Attica, Greece; late Archaic period, ca. 520-500 BCE. Museum Purchase, 1982.011
Identity in Antiquity
Ethnicity, Gender & Sexuality
Opening Late 2022
This two-year presentation centers around the theme of identity in the ancient world, especially aspects of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Across the ancient Mediterranean, people will have felt some sense of group identity as belonging to a tribe, race, culture or civilization. They will have recognized differences between men and women, and will have experienced sexual desires and moral constraints. Feelings of identity could also be expressed in opposition to other groups, such as Greeks vs. Persians or Scythians, Romans vs. Gauls or Germans, men vs. women. In our modern society many more expressions of identity are recognized that may invoke a sense of belonging or form exclusive alliances. In Antiquity expressions of identity could not always be articulated explicitly because the terminology for voicing thoughts about personal, sexual, cultural and national frames of identity did not exist. Identity in Antiquity: Ethnicity, Gender & Sexuality will illustrate these aspects based predominantly on the Museum’s own Antiquities Collection, supplemented with some prominent long-term loans from private and museum collections.