Each Skyway curator made their own decision about how to group the works they chose.
At the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Katherine Pill, senior curator of contemporary art at the MFA, chose work that could be integrated interestingly within the museum’s permanent collection. You can pick up a map to find where they’ve been installed, but where’s the fun in that? Treat your visit like a treasure hunt.
“It’s more special when someone comes around a corner and sees something they weren’t expecting,” Pill told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. Anyway, there are plenty of hints in my picks below.
Be sure to go on a day when the museum’s Cafe Clementine is open. The breakfast and lunch goodies and house made pastries are scrumptious.
Skyway at the MFA St. Pete closes on Sunday, Nov. 3.
Don’t miss:
Emily Martinez, “27 DIC. 1974 (Mother’s Embrace)”
One of MFA Skyway’s “wow” moments, Martinez’s painting was inspired by the museum’s “The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine.” It shares the huge scale and elaborate framing characteristic of the Baroque, but the subject isn’t a virginal saint. It’s Martinez’s grandmother on her wedding day in the Dominican Republic, an image taken from a family photograph. Bold in color and patterning, the painting is both a celebration and a corrective, complete with angry cherubs. Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteKendra Frorup, “Dear Lexi, You Can Go This Far But You Can Go Even Further”
An exuberant portrait of Frorup’s daughter that responds to a work in the MFA’s 18th-century gallery, Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun’s portrait of her daughter. Each of the artists’ daughters is crowned with fruit and flowers, but the crown on Frorup’s Lexi literally bursts out of the frame, and the fruits, referencing the artist’s Bahamian background, are sugar bananas and coconuts. Lexi is also holding on to a beaded leash that leads from the painting across the gallery floor to a ceramic rooster and the empty frame of an antique armchair. She’s holding onto the past, but she can easily “go even further.” Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. Pete
Anat Pollack, “Hypnos’ Garden”
Pollack’s tiny bronze fertility figures mesh seamlessly with the museum’s ancient Greek and Roman collections. Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. Pete
Carola Miles, “UFO Alphabet”
A grid of drawings at the galleries’ entrance, these small, glowing, precisely delineated objects were inspired by Miles’s research into UFO sightings. You might see echoes of their rounded, knobbed shapes in Pollack’s “Garden.” Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteAlso look for
Just beyond the Pollacks (and the Greeks and the Romans), Cynthia Mason evokes a ruined civilization in her “Secret Garden.” It’s an eerie mixed-media installation incorporating earthenware, plastic bags and walls of raw canvas stuffed with shredded documents. Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. Pete
Look up before you enter to see the photo-based banners of Will Douglas.
Each depicts a sunset in Finland, reddened by the haze of the devastating 2023 Canadian wildfires. Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteVisit the gift shop.
You’ll not only find books and jewelry for sale but an Emiliano Settecasi installation challenging the whole notion of art as commodity, the sardonic “Department of Contemporary Art, FL Is Selling Out!” Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. PeteCredit: Photo c/o MFA St. Pete‘Skyway’ at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida closes on, Nov. 3, 2024. Credit: Photo c/o MFA St. Pete
