Welcome to On the Radar, where we preview up-and-coming arts events to mark your calendar for. Last year, my boyfriend and I visited New York for New Year’s Eve. Among our myriad tourist-y photos of Times Square, The Met, Central Park, and me with a waxen Michael Jackson at Madame Tussaud’s, there’s a random photo of a big bubbly bronze cat sculpture. We happened upon him while strolling Park Avenue on our last night in the city, and he struck my fancy so I snapped a photo. Turns out that I might just have an eye for fine art: I found out later that “El Gato” was no amateur public art, but an installation by Columbian sculptor and painter Fernando Botero, whose new exhibit, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero visits the Museum of Fine Arts beginning this Saturday.
Botero is renowned for his use of colorful, voluptuous imagery, and this retrospective of 100 works (including three of my beloved, enormous bronze sculptures installed on Museum grounds) is the largest to ever visit Tampa Bay. (Pictured: "Our Lady of Colombia," oil on canvas from the private collection, 1992) On display Jan. 9-April 4, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat., 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Sun., Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, $16, $14 seniors, $10 students 7 and older, free for children under 7, fine-arts.org.
This article appears in Dec 30, 2009 – Jan 5, 2010.