James Rosenquist is hot.
The internationally renowned artist is the subject of a major retrospective currently on display at The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, before moving on to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (which organized the show) and then to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Rosenquist, who's acclaimed for his large-scale pop art paintings, also has two pieces in the Tampa Museum of Art's current show Modern Art in Florida: 1948-1970 — "Shadows" and "Cold Light."
As part of the museum's Art After Dark series, Rosenquist gives a talk at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 19, discussing the development of his work and his role in the local, national and international art scenes.
Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, N.D., Rosenquist studied art at the University of Minnesota and spent summers painting signs and bulk storage bins for contractors. In 1955 a scholarship took him to New York City, where he studied and worked as a commercial artist, eventually saving enough by 1960 to spend a year working in his Coenties Slip studio.
Through exploration of the commercial methods and materials he knew, he developed his own style of painting, juxtaposing fragmented images, variously autobiographical and popular.
Rosenquist was a contemporary of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and his stature as a mature artist was established early on when the architect Philip Johnson commissioned him to paint a mural for a building at the New York World's Fair in 1963.
Rosenquist's ties to the Bay area are immediate, and he's certainly had as much impact on regional contemporary art as any artist in the Tampa Museum's show.
In 1971 he worked on his Cold Light suite of prints at USF's Graphicstudio, and in 1973 he rented a studio in Ybor City (then a haven for artists). In 1976 he built a house and the first of two studios in Aripeka, where he's lived since 1977.
Among the area museums to show his work: The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota held a retrospective of Rosenquist's graphic work in 1979; USF hosted a show of his prints in 1988; and the Salvador Dali Museum exhibited James Rosenquist: Paintings/James Rosenquist: Selects Dali in 2000.
Prior to his talk, curator Jill Berk Jimenez guides a tour of Modern Art in Florida: 1948-1970, highlighting key works and significant artistic exchanges.
Refreshments are served throughout the evening, from 5 to 8 p.m.
Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N. Ashley Drive, Tampa. 813-274-8130.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2003.