In identifying the year’s top 10 visual art exhibits, it was clear that 2008 was the year of the museum. Not the area’s grandest museums, per se — you won’t find St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts or the Salvador Dali Museum on this list. Though both institutions featured commendable exhibits throughout the year, neither took on a contemporary art project that made art lovers swoon like the exhibits below. Instead, two smaller institutions, the Polk Museum of Art and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM), proved themselves bastions of the Bay area’s contemporary art community. If you’re looking for an encounter with leading-edge artworks and artists and curators who ask insightful questions about what it means to live (and make art) now, turn to an exhibit at one of these two institutions.
While the Polk takes an unrepentantly populist stance, USFCAM offers more highbrow fun; it seemed to be a banner year for both. Next year, the competition may be stiffer, with The Arts Center offering Jasper Johns prints in January and the MFA jumping into the fray with a late-2009 Leslie Dill retrospective. For fans of contemporary art, that’s great news.
1. Audience and Avatar. The year’s best visual arts exhibit, USFCAM’s Audience and Avatar toyed with the boundaries between game world and real world, filling the museum galleries with avatar portraits, sculptures of iconic video game objects and even the pulsing sounds of in-game music. Through 3D renderings, performances (documented on video) and machinima (experimental “films” shot within virtual environments like Second Life or Grand Theft Auto), the exhibit asked viewers to question their assumptions about virtual gaming and its relationship to contemporary art.
2. MashUp. A rollicking good time of an exhibit devoted to art that investigates the culture of music and destruction, MashUp touched down at USFCAM in August. Students and a few other guests took the opportunity to smash one of Mexican artist Pedro Reyes’ plywood guitars in an interactive performance project. Relics from the Plasmatics’ decade-long run as a punk-band-cum-performance-art-project — e.g., an electric guitar chainsawed in half — and New York-based artist Ted Riederer’s destroyed instruments, painstakingly reassembled, charmed visitors. The verdict on this show? Rock on!
3. Radcliffe Bailey: Between Two Worlds. A one-man show dedicated to the work of Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey, the Polk Museum of Art’s Between Two Worlds explores universal themes like identity and migration through the lens of black Atlantic experience. Prints based on tintype portraits collaged with fabric and paint are lovely, but three larger paintings that explore the fragmented experience of diasporic heritage through color, shape and texture take the cake. (The exhibit continues through March 1; for more information, go to polkmuseumofart.org.)
4. Digital Art in the Post-Digital Age: Works from Florida Faculty. The world of fine arts has been slow at times to embrace digital media, but this exhibit at the Polk proved that computer-based technologies have permeated virtually every medium. Showcasing the work of artists who teach at universities and colleges throughout the state, Digital Art included pottery and metalwork embossed with digital patterns and elaborate interactive pieces triggered by motion sensors, as well as digitally manipulated photographs and prints — a fine introduction for the newbie that digital adepts could also enjoy.
5. Practical to Poetic: Women’s Handicraft Revisited. Knitting, crocheting and embroidery, oh my! The best among exhibits held during Convergence, a national conference for fiber artists that took place in Tampa earlier this year, the Arts Center’s showcase of contemporary art made with traditional fiber craft methods dazzled. From Jenny Hart’s embroidered portrait of Marianne Faithful to Olek’s immersive installation of floor-to-ceiling crochet, the selection of artists by independent curator Sangoyemi Ogunsanya was spot on.
6. Rediviva. Always adventurous, Tampa artist collective Experimental Skeleton were at their conceptual best this spring with Rediviva, a collaborative installation that included sculptures by more than a dozen of the loose-knit organization’s members. Each piece suggested a fragment of detritus from the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia in wildly different ways, from the literal to the obscurely symbolic. The fun was in piecing together a conversation about the collective fears and fantasies inspired by technology.
7. Site Matters. The Tampa Museum of Art invited a combination of local, national and international artists to submit proposals for Site Matters, a site-specific installation at the museum’s new downtown building (scheduled to open next fall). As it happens, locally based artists turned in three of the four strongest proposals. The resulting exhibit showcases those proposals in drawing and model form: Joe Griffith’s snail-like coil of Bayshore sidewalk; Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse’s wood-and-glass curtain; Leslie Fry’s Sphinx-like theater; and Maine artist Michael Shaughnessy’s collaborative hay sculptures. (The exhibit continues through Jan. 3; for more information, go to tampamuseum.org.)
8. Drawing Beyond the Plane. Already winner of a 2008 Best of the Bay award, TMA’s playful showcase of contemporary drawing weighs in at number eight. Besides out-of-area standouts, like Valerie Hird’s animated drawings of celebrities dressed as superheroes (think Bill Gates as Superman) and Janae Easton’s whimsical sculpture of artificial flowers and delicately folded drawings, the exhibit included several artists represented by Tampa-based gallery and printmaking atelier Bleu Acier. Drawing Beyond the Plane, like Site Matters, stands as an example of what TMA can accomplish with a smart-but-accessible curatorial premise and collaboration with local galleries and artists.
9. Architectural Details and Other Decorative Crafts. Much like the outstanding Necklust and the Chocolatier, which showcased neckwear from the classic to the outrageously experimental in March, the Florida Craftsmen exhibit Architectural Details and Other Decorative Crafts blew the top off its somewhat quotidian premise. I’m still thinking about some of the September show’s highlights: Alison Swann-Ingram and Carl Johnson’s eco-minimalist coffee table made of reclaimed wood topped with glass; Richard Chill Cott and Diego Duran’s Frank Lloyd Wright-esque walnut-and-zebrawood console table; and Catherine Wood’s fused glass panels for PSTA headquarters. I hope local interior designers are thinking about them, too.
10. Tie: Cameron Gainer: Impact Sight and Mark Messersmith: Natural Defenses. These two one-person shows — the former at USFCAM, the latter at the Polk — brought to attention the work of two exciting midcareer artists. Visitors thrilled to see Gainer’s sculptural simulations of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster on USF’s grounds and his faux-meteor sunk into the side of the CAM. Messersmith’s vibrant paintings of Florida wildlife under threat of human development depicted animals with uncanny intelligence and power — they’ll be here long after we’re gone, the images seemed to say.
Read all of the 2008 Top 10 lists:
News: Wayne Garcia & Alex Pickett
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2008.