The Year In Art

Thinking outside the box

[Times photo: James Borchuck] PHOTO PLAY: The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg now devotes a small gallery to rotating photography shows such as this year’s “Mystic Chords: Illuminated Photographs by Connie Sullivan.” Sullivan’s light boxes proved to be no ordinary photography show.

You could consider the cup half empty or half full.

West-central Florida art museums brought in few "oh-wow" exhibitions in 2002; Tampa Bay area venues had none.

But I am reminded of a comment made by Maxwell Anderson during a recent conference at Columbia University. Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, said that looking for shows of great masters is well and good. But he also believes in museums' responsibility to "turn over stones" to find art that is perhaps less well-known, glamorous or popular.

That is how our local museums are making a virtue out of necessity, because the cold-cash truth is that our institutions have neither the space nor the financial resources for most blockbuster shows. That could change with planned expansions at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota and the Tampa Museum of Art, as well as hoped-for growth at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, although the cost of such shows always will be an issue.

Still, we had our share of fine shows during 2002, and so this is a good time to review the overall efforts of museums and some of their brightest moments.

Photography and prints, both suspect art forms for decades, emerged with new validation and fresh perspectives. The Museum of Fine Arts now devotes a small gallery to rotating photography shows and another to works on paper from the permanent collection. The Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts is a small but feisty enterprise that has shown work by nationally known photographers along with locals.

"Photography's Multiple Roles" at the Tampa Museum of Art, which leaves Jan. 5, was the most ambitious. The collection of 200 images from the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago had a harder edge than most such exhibitions, forgoing studied, studio-type examples for those with a more naturalistic, candid approach.

Exhibitions of contemporary art are the bravest efforts of our museums, whose supporters tend to be conservative in their aesthetic tastes. That some of the most noteworthy shows here were of contemporary artists is a sign of the institutions' vitality.

Leading the pack was the Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida in Tampa. It had two remarkable exhibitions, "Outside the Box" in February and "The Field's Edge," which recently ended. We're fortunate to have such an institution that is buffered, as a university museum, from many pressures of museums that rely on corporate patronage. That freedom has generated the most sophisticated contemporary art shows in Florida, bringing in artists with national and international reputations. The art, heavy on conceptual and video forms, is not easy for those trained in traditional media, but these shows have provided rich experiences for visitors.

The Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, with its mission to promote and collect Florida artists, also presented challenging exhibitions. Standing out was "Florida Focus 2002: Fresh Squeezed" in the fall; it included some daring work that was not about Florida but what's happening in the Florida arts community.

The Tampa Museum of Art also showcased contemporary artists, all local in its sixth "UnderCURRENT/overVIEW," a show that took fewer chances than in past years but still gave us a good review of some of the leading practitioners in our area.

Even the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, a bastion of traditional art, loosened up with the illuminated photography boxes of Connie Sullivan, a huge collection of prints by Red Grooms and a summer exhibition of modern and contemporary art from its collection. The last show included works frequently seen by museumgoers, but it was ordered in a new thematic way that made revisiting the art fun.

"Forms of Cubism" at the Salvador Dali Museum last summer was a small show with a big impact, sculptures by the leading European lights who experimented with cubism in three dimensions shortly before World War I. The movement was brief, and the works by Picasso, Brancusi, Lipchitz and others showed the liberating glory of cubism as well as its limitations.

The Ringling Museum had two outstanding shows, a collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, which is on view through Jan. 5, and "American Anthem," paintings by American masters spanning 300 years from the Butler Institute of American Art. All the great names were represented in the latter show, though many by their lesser works, but the star was Winslow Homer's Crack the Whip.

The Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, under former director Jeffrey Spaulding, had a series of beautiful shows of modern masters and one featuring drawings by Baroque masters that made us take notice of the formerly sleepy little place in horse country. Spaulding recently returned to Canada at his family's behest; his new job is director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. But his brief presence in Ocala added luster.

The biggest deal at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art was its opening in January. With an interesting permanent collection of modern art, primarily by Abraham Rattner, and a series of small but worthwhile traveling exhibitions, this facility is one more link in our chain of good regional museums and a needed presence in north Pinellas County.

Also worth noting in this "best of" discussion were two singular events. James Rosenquist raised the bar on local public art with the colorful giant bandage he created for the All Children's Hospital-University of South Florida Children's Research Institute building in St. Petersburg. And the three-month visit of Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory to the Dali Museum, a rare loan from the Museum of Modern Art, was a high point in the arts calendar.

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