Even with the Tampa Museum of Art closed (pending its reopening in February on the downtown waterfront), Tampa Bay managed to keep art lovers busy in 2009 with a diverse slate of exhibits and events. Here are my top ten visual art offerings of the year.

1. Picturing Eden (John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art)

The Ringling’s sleek Searing Wing hosted this exhibition of contemporary photography featuring more than 150 images by 37 artists from around the world exploring the idea of paradise. From prints in surreal, super-saturated color to ones in painstakingly balanced black-and-white, the showcased works reminded viewers that there’s no single recipe for a compelling image—or ironclad expectation for what constitutes photographic art—in contemporary practice. Highlights included Binh Dahn’s camera-less prints, pale but indelible memories of the Vietnam War, on dried leaves encased in resin. Smart, sensuous and substantive, this show was a little slice of heaven. (Pictured: "Structure of Thought #15, by Doug and Mike Starn.)

2. I Heard a Voice: the Art of Lesley Dill (Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg)

Voices and visions played a prominent role in an exhibition of work by New York-based artist Lesley Dill. A profusion of words, letters and images combined to form concrete bodies, freestanding garments and psychic extensions (e.g., an expanse of icons literally flowing out of one seated figure’s mind, or a verbal "soul" hovering behind another figure) in her sculptural installations. Drawn from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and others (Salvador Espriu, Rainer Maria Rilke) as well as the artist’s own musings, this visionary language constitutes human beings, for Dill, paradoxically "speaking us" even as it passes through our lips and our minds.

This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2009.