Life in the ancient world was marked by many of the same events and experiences as our modern life: most obviously birth, marriage and death, as well as war and peace. People felt love and hate, just as us. Food and drinks stilled hunger and thirst. Music and dance provided amusement. Theater and sports provided leisure and entertainment. Trade and travel brought goods and ideas from farther away. Faith and worship offered hope when all else failed. For thousands of years, daily life will have changed very little for most common people and will have differed only depending on the land and climate of each region. Commoners toiled the land, they hunted game and gathered other foods. Men may have been called upon to serve in the army in times of war. People will have visited temples in times of public festivals or personal hardship.

This display of the Antiquities Collection of the Tampa Museum of Art aims to introduce some of those general aspects of life and death in the ancient world. The Lemonopoulos Gallery is broadly divided into five main themes: namely (1.) daily life – including human and animal figures, everyday ceramics, metal tools and glassware, portrayals of love and beauty ideals; (2.) amusement – including theater and sports, wine production and consumption; (3.) death and dying – including funerary vessels and (fragments of) sarcophagi; (4.) religion – including illustrations of myths and rituals; and (5.) power and trade – including warfare and seafaring, as well as two coin cabinets. The displays in the middle of the gallery generally showcase one or two artworks, while those along the walls and in the aisles regularly feature a larger selection of pieces so as to exhibit the variety of the Museum’s Antiquities Collection.

Watch an episode of Art Perspectives about “Life and Death in the Ancient World” on the Tampa Bay Arts & Education Network:

Born in Philadelphia, Joseph Veach Noble was not only a museum administrator and director, but also an avid collector and connoisseur of Greek and Roman antiquities, with a particular interest in ancient Greek ceramic vases. While he began his career in cinema, Noble was appointed Operating Administrator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1956. He held that position until 1967, when he became The Met’s Vice-Director of Administration. In 1970, Noble founded the Museum of the City of New York where he served as Director until his retirement in 1985. At the age of 87, he died in West Orange, New Jersey.

At the time of the acquisition in 1986, the Noble Collection was thought to comprise the largest private collection of Athenian vases in North America. Focusing on Mr. Noble as a connoisseur, this exhibition explores what motivated Noble’s interests and fascinations with the different materials and mediums, styles and techniques of ancient art. Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector is one of several new exhibitions dedicated to the Museum’s permanent collection that will be on view for long-term displays over the coming years.

Pseudo-Panathenaic Amphora
This double-handled vase was Noble’s most prized possession. It depicts Athena Promachus, fully dressed as champion of battle, in Archaic black-figure style.

The art of German-born, American sculptor C. Paul Jennewein (1890-1978) reveals the inspiration of the ancient world while also engaging with the new sculptural styles of his time, merging Art Deco with the Neo-Classical tradition. In 1978, the Tampa Bay Art Center, predecessor of the Tampa Museum of Art, received a bequest of nearly 2,600 objects including statues and paintings, as well as preparatory drawings, plaster models, and related ephemera of Jennewein’s work. The Jennewein bequest forms the largest collection of a single artist’s work in Museum’s holdings, and provides a bridge between the antiquities and modern art in the permanent collection.

The artist takes inspiration from cloud formations and the cosmos, with each navy blue kite featuring star-like markings. Depending on the time of day and the natural light filtering through the atrium skylights, the kites will shift in color intensity. This Particle of Dust explores the visual poetics of light and dark, color and form, as well as space and architecture.

Created from over 2,500 handmade kites, This Particle of Dust is a site-specific installation and unique to the Tampa Museum of Art’s architecture. The installation represents Jacob Hashimoto’s exploration of abstract landscape and his interest in blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. This Particle of Dust evokes the experience of observing the night sky through various cloud clusters. Thousands of transparent and opaque white discs hang suspended from a bespoke armature. Navy blue kites, imprinted with white and cerulean blue star patterns, hang amidst the cloud shapes and catch the light as the sun rises over the Museum and dips into the horizon over the Hillsborough River. Depending on one’s vantage point, either from the lobby, stairwell, or galleries, the experience of This Particle of Dust shifts—from below the cloudscape appears to drift into the sky while at eye-level the viewer looks directly into the stars.  

Hashimoto began making kite sculptures twenty-years ago while an art student in Chicago. Inspired by traditional Chinese kite making in the city of Weifang, where the artform of sculptural dragon kites originated, Hashimoto has made hundreds of thousands of kites from Japanese paper and resin. He appreciates kites as a universal object of joy that is recognized across the globe. Transformed into monumental artworks, Hashimoto’s kites convey happiness, wonder, and serenity.

- Jacob Hashimot You Tube

I’m interested in the look of things and the quality of being there. A moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass.
-Rod Penner

In the late 1960s, a new genre of realist painting emerged in New York City and San Francisco. While Pop art and abstraction remained the dominant forms of painting at the time, a group of artists explored the convergence of photography and painting. Dubbed “Photorealism” by the gallerist Lou Meisel, a cohort of artists used their own photographs to create landscapes, portraits, and still lifes in exact detail. To create such precise paintings, the Photorealists often employed projectors to enlarge their images onto canvas and utilized novel tools, such as spray guns, to render works with smooth surfaces. Brushwork, particularly bold gestural mark making, was abandoned in favor of a look that mirrored the quality of the photograph. The pictorial content varied but typically the West Coast artists favored everyday scenes of daily life. East Coast artists captured the shiny allure of chrome objects, such as diners, trucks, cars, and the typography of signs and advertisements. Artists on both coasts emphasized light and reflection in their paintings, which remains a signature element of Photorealism.

Rod Penner’s photo-based work inherits the legacy of Photorealism but also challenges the aesthetic of the genre. For nearly 40-years, Penner has painted America’s small towns. While much of his work portrays communities in Texas and New Mexico, Penner’s paintings explore the beauty in absence and decay that inhabit the once bustling corridors of Main Street, America. In this selection of eight paintings, Penner details deteriorating building facades, aging signs, and vacant streets devoid of people. Brooding clouds and expansive skylines loom above the one and two-story buildings, further highlighting the spectral quality of the town. Penner’s use of light and shadow, as well as reflections in puddles, create both a sense of drama in the composition and emphasize the passage of time.

To create his paintings, Penner uses his own reference photographs and videos to render precision of subject, light, and form. Unlike the Photorealists, he is not interested in recreating the photographic image, rather he uses the photo as a sketch. He photographs sites in the evening or Sunday mornings, finding inspiration in the solitude and quietness of the moment. In the studio, Penner uses a small paintbrush to laboriously render the details and visual textures of each scene. Although from a distance the works may appear as a photograph, close inspection of Penner’s paintings reveal his carefully placed brush marks. Each painting represents the artist’s poetic interpretation of Americana and the enduring presence of the past.

Throughout the exhibition visitors will encounter vividly painted canvases, detailed embroidery, as well as gold foil and mosaics. A feast for the eyes, the works included in the exhibition are unabashedly sumptuous. Beginning with pattern painting and moving into complex fiber works, the exhibition examines how artists embraced excess and rejected restrained formality. In their work and in their personal lives, several artists considered feminism to be a core component of their practices. Some aimed to elevate color palettes and techniques traditionally associated with women artists.

Embellish Me is presented in honor of Norma Canelas Roth (1943–2022). A tireless advocate for artists, Roth felt deeply passionate about collecting art that was often neglected by mainstream art dealers, critics, and curators. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and an alumni of the University of South Florida, she lived much of her life in Florida. She remained committed to collecting in depth. Embellish Me presents a selection of works collected by Roth, many of which made by artists affiliated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, which she collected extensively.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is organized by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at FIU and presented in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art

Inspired by the success of the exhibition Purvis Young: 91 in 2019, the Tampa Museum of Art will remount its Purvis Young collection as one of the first of several long-term displays of the permanent collection. Young’s paintings reflect his observations of daily life and the fight for social justice, hope for his community, immigration and otherness, as well as the fragile balance between life and death.

Purvis Young: Redux is one of several exhibitions on view between 2022-2024, highlighting the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection focused on ancient art and modern and contemporary art.

Purvis Young: Redux is presented in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

About Purvis Young
Born in 1943 in Miami, Florida, Purvis Young’s mother encouraged her son’s artistic talents. His grandparents immigrated to Miami by boat from the Bahamas and settled in Overtown. Although he did not complete high school, Young educated himself as an adult by watching documentaries and reading. He spent hours at the Miami-Dade Public Library, and books became an important part of his life and work.

As a child, Young enjoyed drawing, however, it wasn’t until adulthood that he embraced painting. He spent hours looking at books filled with imagery by El Greco, Rembrandt, Paul Gaugin, and Vincent van Gogh. In the early 1970s, Young began painting regularly, and he created a visual language reflective of life in Overtown. Although adversity was constant, Young’s neighborhood inspired him, and he strove to paint positive imagery. Angels with halos dominated his work and represented the good he admired in people. He revered pregnant women and holy men and painted this imagery in a range of configurations. While he supported his community, he also acknowledged its struggles.

Young created his magnum opus early in his career. For a short period of time in the 1970s, Young installed his paintings from the ground to the rooftops of abandoned storefronts in his neighborhood. The Wall of Respect in Chicago, a mural that featured heroic black men and women painted at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, influenced Young. He aimed to replicate the Wall of Respect in Overtown with his powerful, provocative paintings and often overlapped the paintings in an extreme salon-style hang. Titled Goodbread Alley Mural, the project was on view from approximately 1971-74 until the City of Miami started to dismantle the artwork. The installation on view at the Tampa Museum of Art takes inspiration from the Goodbread Alley Mural and features the entirety of the Museum’s Purvis Young collection.

In the late 1990s, Don and Mera Rubell, art collectors based in Miami, befriended the artist and acquired the contents of Young’s studio. In total, they transferred over 3,300 works from his studio to their art warehouse. Since then, they have donated nearly 500 works by Purvis Young to museums and universities across the country. Young died in 2010, and today his work resides in private and public collections across the globe.

Haiti emerged as a sovereign state after a massive slave rebellion overturned the established order in a dramatic and violent revolution. Since 1804, the island nation has embarked in continual attempts at self-rule but many of these efforts proved unsuccessful, never fulfilling the dreams of a better life cherished by the former enslaved. France, the former colonial power ousted by the rebellion and bitter at the loss of her crown jewel, made sure itself and its allies never gave the first Black republic a fair chance to compete fairly in the concert of nations. The successive governments of Haiti could not garner enough economic clout to make the transfer of impoverished and destitute slaves into a citizenry that could muster and foster a stable, progressive society. All in all, the former slaves were left mostly to their own devices when it came to nation building. Forming an identity needed and required with their new freedoms remained unresolved for centuries. Today, they remain in that constant quest for social cohesion but Haitians noteworthy accomplishments in the field of visual art helped define its national character.

Contrary to most of its neighbors in the Caribbean archipelago, one can say that Haiti’s visual culture emanates from its majority working class rather than from a well-tutored elite or directed from government led cultural initiatives.  Early travelers’ accounts to the island revealed cultural flourishes peculiar and distinct from Haiti’s neighbors. Their narratives perceived the Black republic as a place of wonder. One could sense it in the reports detailed in Eugène Aubin’s In Haiti: Planters of Yesteryears, Negroes of Today (1910) or William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island (1929). Published in the early 20th-century, both books featured extensive photographic coverage of the island nation but revealed unsympathetic and unabashedly racist opinions of Haiti. However, the publications’ images included ornate wall paintings unique to the rural habitats and sacred sites of Vodou temples, which were profusely decorated inside and outside. These photographs provided a glimpse of what would become decades later, a “discovery” of Haiti’s creative legacy.

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Edouard Duval-Carrié, guest curator and Miami-based artist shares the importance of the Centre d’Art, an art school and gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

In 1944, Haitian intellectuals collaborated with Dewitt Peters, an American conscientious objector, to found the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. The institution provided access to art to all strata of Haitian society. Artists gravitated to the Centre d’Art and what they brought with them was, though very far from any academia, a varied, fresh, and startling artistic expression. Each artist depicted a world they envisioned or observed in their own way. At the time the devotional practice of Vaudo was prohibited yet the artists creatively revealed the outlawed spirits and lwas (Vodou deities) to the world. The artists also depicted a way of life—simple and ordered—as probably more a wish than everyday circumstances. The bucolic aspect of these works likely triggered the term “naïve” as an explanation of Haiti’s art yet it was anything but simple. The art served as a form of protest in that artists pointed out at what Haitian’s expected, wanted, and deserved, and not what they had.  Learn more from guest curator, Edouard Duval-Carrié:

This exhibition aims to reframe the context of modern Haitian art. The paintings in this gallery, all masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection, attest to the unique and complex history of Haiti and its cultural legacy. Displayed at different heights yet in dialogue with each other, this installation metaphorically represents the artists’ ideas and ideals. Spiritual figures hover above mortals, as seen in works by André Pierre and Robert Saint Brice. Paintings by the Obin Family, Riguad Benoit, and Salnave Philippe-Auguste hang at a height that envelops the viewer rather than serve as a passive encounter with the artists’ world. The Albrecht Collection provides an overview of the production of art from an island nation, that despite adversity and strife, has and continues to strive in its creative practices.

Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection was curated by Edouard Duval Carrié, guest curator.

Funds for the conservation of the Arthur Albrecht Collection were generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project.

The art of German-born, American sculptor C. Paul Jennewein (1890-1978) reveals the inspiration of the ancient world while also engaging with the new sculptural styles of his time, merging Art Deco with the Neo-Classical tradition. In 1978, the Tampa Bay Art Center, predecessor of the Tampa Museum of Art, received a bequest of nearly 2,600 objects including statues and paintings, as well as preparatory drawings, plaster models, and related ephemera of Jennewein’s work. The Jennewein bequest forms the largest collection of a single artist’s work in Museum’s holdings, and provides a bridge between the antiquities and modern art in the permanent collection.