With the holiday season in full swing, you may have company in town. If you're looking to entertain guests, museums across the greater Tampa Bay region are offering a variety of special exhibitions.
In Sarasota, get a glimpse of New York City culture and social history withHarlem Qulit at the Ringling Museum of Art.
The installation features 300 individual pieces of fabric, each with a black and white photo transferred onto its surface. The photos feature the people, street scenes and historic buildings of Harlem. Artist June Clark bought swatches of various fabrics at a Harlem Salvation Army. These colorful, multi-textured strips of textile are illuminated by a string of whimsical white lights.
In St. Petersburg, visitors to the Dali Museum can see their own dreams as part of the exhibition, The Shape of Dreams. The A-I experience asks viewers to describe a recent, or recurring dream, which is then transformed into an individualized art piece.
Hanging inside the Dali’s special exhibit gallery are dream-inspired paintings from the 16th to 20th century, which examine how Western artists have depicted dreams, a topic that has long fascinated artists, especially Dalí and his fellow Surrealists.
The Dali exhibition features a selection of art on loan from American institutions, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Several works from The Dalí’s permanent collection are placed in dialog with these works.
In Lakeland, the Polk Museum of Art is offering a chance to see the work of Edward Hopper, widely acknowledged as of one of America's most important painters.
Hopper is paired with artist Guy Pène du Bois in an exhibition called, ‘Painting the Real.’
The show comprises approximately sixty works and focuses on Hopper and Pène du Bois, two very thematically different but stylistically-overlapping artists who became lifelong friends from the time of their earliest studies at the New York School of Art. The two shared an interest in representing the evolving modern worlds around them, and each refracted those worlds through his own lens of Realism.
