Founded in 1958, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm has one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art, and one of the strongest collections of American art in Europe. In 1973 the Swedish institution joined forces with the New York-based group, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), to raise money for its collection. As partners, they produced a limited-edition art portfolio of 30 works by 30 artists, of which the Frost Art Museum owns one copy thanks to the donation of Mr. & Mrs. Bernard W. Gimbel in honor of Helen & Jacob Goldfinger.

This exhibition features the entire portfolio, with works by: Lee Bontecou, Robert Breer, John Chamberlain, Walter de Maria, Jim Dine, Mark di Suvero, Öyvind Fahlström, Dan Flavin, Red Grooms, Hans Haacke, Alex Hay, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Richard Stankiewicz, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Robert Whitman. It is notable that only two women and one artist of color were selected for the project.

Printmaking gained significant acceptance as an art form in the mid-20th century. Artists working across several art movements, including Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop art often incorporated printmaking into their practice.

As an inexpensive, accessible, and reproducible mode of art, lithographs and silkscreens are conducive to fundraising art projects. Having artists create signed prints for auctions and private fundraisers is a practice that continues into our century. E.A.T. relied on a network of generous artist peers to donate art in support of a European museum that celebrated American artists. Today, many museums have a copy of the Stockholm Portfolio in their collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kemper Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin.

This exhibition is curated by Florida International University alumnus Angela Chaine

Entre los elementos/Between the elements marks the first solo museum exhibition of Cuban artist Juan Carlos Alom (b.1964). Recognized for his experimental approach to photography, Alom creates work that investigates the various communities and identities that comprise Cuba and its diaspora.

Vast lowlands and mountains, jungles, deserts, and the surrounding ocean contribute to the experiences of Cubans on the island and abroad. The works on view unravel this link, spanning Alom’s career from 1989 into the present day. This presentation includes black-and-white and color photography as well as the never-before-seen film, Natural Pools (2024).

The expression “exposed to the elements” carries with it the notion of vulnerability. However, for Alom it’s not about being exposed to the elements but about stubbornly—and perhaps, courageously—existing within them. With honesty, precision, and discernment, Alom shares photographs of the people that survive, endure, and nurture life between the elements. It is a story of adaptation. More so, it is a testament to the human spirit. This exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue available for purchase at our Front Desk.

We are grateful for the generous support of lenders, our Florida International University colleagues at the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, the Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture and the State of Florida, and Members of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum.

Juan Carlos Alom: Entre los Elementos/Between the Elements, curated by Amy Galpin and Yady Rivero, will be on view from June 15 to November 3, 2024.

Of what surrounds me presents three artists whose creative process is profoundly influenced by nature, serving as both a significant element in their work and a conduit for exploring self and others. Taking its title from the poem by Mary Oliver (1935–2019) of the same name, this exhibition positions each artist as instigators of close contemplation. Looking to their surroundings, Amanda Bradley, Cristina Lei Rodriguez and Mette Tommerup think of the natural world as both an immersive state and a vehicle for making meaning.

In Amanda Bradley’s work, themes of identity and belonging manifest through environmental imagery. While creating, Bradley considers what is invisible, ephemeral, and hard to quantify. Heavily influenced by writing, Bradley incorporates embossed lettering as a way to complicate the legibility of both the final image and the superimposed text. While not documentary, her photography documents lushness, abundance, and density, with her home country of Belize as a common subject.

Abundant flora and complex terrain inform Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s practice, which includes sculpture, painting, and mixed media work. Born and raised in Miami, Rodriguez has an intimate familiarity with the region’s vibrant vegetation as well as the light, humidity, and ferocity of this environment. While Rodriguez’s work is often maximalist, it is not rooted in living nature so much as the passage of time, the changing of the seasons, the process of decay, and the nature of resiliency. Rodriguez’s work for the exhibition will include a rarely seen, monumental installation titled Endless Autumn, from the collection of the Perez Art Museum as well as a new, large-scale painting.

Mette Tommerup’s practice, which includes public art projects, reflects the artist’s longstanding inquiry into nature. A native of Denmark, Tommerup grew up near the ocean. Her large-scale paintings, which often include a performative component, evoke underwater seascapes, grassy expanses, and complex topographies. Tommerup considers her physical self and the viewer’s physical response as integral to her work. Rooted in languages of abstraction and the intersection of painting and sculpture, Tommerup’s monumental installations encompass the viewer, evoking a sense of awe. Deeply inspired by the poetry of Mary Oliver, Tommerup will premiere a new installation created for Of what surrounds me.

Curated By:
Elizabeth Thompson Goizueta

Organized By:
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College

The Lost Generation: Women Ceramicists and the Cuban Avant-Garde examines the participants and artistic output from 1949 to 1959 of the Taller de Santiago de las Vegas, a ceramic workshop on the outskirts of Havana. A decade of artistic experimentation primarily by little-known women ceramicists had deep reverberations both for the acceptance of ceramics as a fine art form in Cuba and for the symbiotic relationship that flourished between the ceramicists and the painters, largely men, who visited the Taller to learn the craft. The painters in turn applied new techniques and methodologies to their two-dimensional production, now regarded as synonymous with the Cuban avant-garde (vanguardia).

At the helm of the Taller was a physician, Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz, who formed and fired the ceramics and hired mainly women, many of whom were trained at the prestigious Academia San Alejandro and other fine arts schools, to decorate the wares. These ceramicists created their own styles, establishing an artistic movement that garnered national and international recognition. Rebeca Robés Massés, Marta Arjona, María Elena Jubrías, Mirta García Buch, Amelia Peláez, and numerous others were key ceramicists at the Taller. They and Rodríguez de la Cruz welcomed the participation of renowned modernist painters, including René Portocarrero, Wifredo Lam, Raúl Milián, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Mariano Rodríguez. The trajectory of ceramics following the Cuban Revolution of 1959 is also explored in the exhibition; many of those who worked at the Taller went on to found their own independent workshops, furthering the commercialization, and acceptance, of fine art modernist ceramics on the island.

Featuring vases, mugs, water jugs, murals, and plates drawn from premier private and gallery collections, The Lost Generation displays for the first time many of the Taller’s finest ceramics in conversation with dozens of paintings by Peláez, Portocarrero, Lam, Martínez Pedro, Mariano, and others.

Organized by the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, The Lost Generation has been curated by Elizabeth Thompson Goizueta and underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons and the Hispanic Art Initiative of the McMullen Museum. At the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, The Lost Generation is funded by FIU CasaCuba and generously sponsored by Cernuda Arte.

This exhibition, which will be on view for two years, proposes a revised narrative of modern and contemporary U.S. art. Together/Apart draws on the rich collections of the Frost Art Museum and the Wolfsonian, two dynamic, but distinctive institutions affiliated with Florida International University.

With more than 200,000 objects, the Wolfsonian FIU offers various collections strengths, including art and ephemera produced before 1950 in the United States. The Wolfsonian collection encourages reflection on urban and rural environments as well as industrial shifts that include transportation, architecture, and design. Works from the 20th and 21st centuries by Latinx artists as well as contemporary works by Thornton Dial, Hung Liu, and Lalla Essaydi in the Frost Art Museum’s collection of 6,500 objects will establish a more nuanced picture of art of the U.S. than traditional art historical surveys have offered.

The exhibition will be organized in three sections: Identity: Expressed, Imagined and Constructed; Re-Design: Expressing Identity though Form; and Place and Space: Where Identity Lives. Re-Design: Expressing Identity Through Form focuses on the use of symbols and form as tools of identity formation. The New York World’s Fair of 1939 celebrated a “world of tomorrow” centered on production and consumption, but Augusta Savage’s Lift Every Voice and Sing (represented in the exhibition by period ephemera) defined Black American identity around spirituality, community, and creativity. Place and Space: Where Identity Lives explores how art and the built environment defined identity. WPA mural studies, intended for federal buildings across the country, promised a sense of belonging through collective labor and a shared sense of history, while architectural paintings by Cuban American artists such as Emilio Sanchez articulate a loss of place and community. Identity: Expressed, Imagined, and Constructed considers the portrait, from self-portraiture to posters that humanize the HIV/AIDS crisis.

The exhibition features 20th-century and contemporary artists and designers, including Berenice Abbott, Laura Aguilar, Milton Avery, Isabel Bishop, Mark Bradford, Squeak Carnwath, Jess T. Dugan, Agustín Fernandez, William Glackens, Hans Hofmann, Sargent Claude Johnson, Mike Kelley, Fritz Scholder, Ramon A. Shiva, Lorna Simpson, Rafael Soriano, Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, and Annie Tolliver.

Terra Foundation