Gordon Parks was already a renowned photojournalist when he first stepped behind a movie camera. He worked for Life magazine from 1948 to 1968, yet within a few years of switching to motion pictures in the late ’60s, Parks had established himself as one of the most influential American moviemakers…

When art is in trouble, realism comes to the rescue. — Stendhal Realism rushed to the rescue like the cavalry in an old western when, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a new development in American painting that came to be called photorealism offered alternatives to such extreme styles…

I was ambivalent about going to an exhibition with the prosaic title “The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life,” only to discover a delightfully whimsical, imaginatively assembled show. The exhibition, now midway through its four-month run at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, is essentially one sprawling installation of…

A little more than a year ago, artist William Bock and his wife, Christy, were settling into their new gallery in the Fountains Shoppes of Distinction in Plantation, as well as awaiting the birth of a child. After five years of struggling to survive in the fledgling arts district of…

Although nearly 100 pieces of art, some quite large, are on view in the fall exhibition at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the works have been placed so strategically throughout the museum’s 10,000 square feet that there’s no sense of clutter or overkill. The spacious, airy, light-flooded main gallery,…

After circulating several times through the art on display at Gallery 421 in downtown Fort Lauderdale, I began to feel a little like the matriarch in the lavish Martin Scorsese adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Taking to her bed in a swoon, she declares: “A stroke? Ridiculous…

Last year’s faculty exhibition at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale got mixed but generally promising grades. Although some of the instructors represented in the show seemed to be working at less than their full potentials, several were producing above-average work, the kind we might reasonably expect from people in…

A year ago there wasn’t a gallery at Steven F. Greenwald Design, just a suite of interlocking offices, work areas, and cavernous storerooms. Greenwald was primarily in the business of custom framing, not running an art gallery. All that changed in December. Now a gallery — divided into two sections:…

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Jasper Johns’ famous exhortation is one of the most succinct statements of aesthetics in 20th-century art, and the artists included in “Amalgam: Multi-Media Fusions by Four Florida Artists” seem to have taken his advice to heart and then…

Like the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, which is currently showcasing pieces from its permanent collections in an exhibition called “Scale Matters,” the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami is putting the summer lull to good use with a show called “Heads Up!: Highlights From the…

The big summer show at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, which began in late spring and runs through early fall, is called “Scale Matters: Mega Vs. Mini.” Highfalutin theme aside, the exhibition is really just an excuse to show off selections from the museum’s permanent collections…

“A View of the Contemporary: Latin American Artists” is on display through July 18 at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, 1650 Harrison St., Hollywood,9549213274.

The title of one of the exhibitions on view at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood is oddly grand, vague, and somewhat misleading, all at the same time. “A View of the Contemporary: Latin American Artists” features more than three dozen highly diverse works by 25 artists from eight…

I went to the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale expecting to sift through yet another juried group show. This time it was the “1999 South Florida Cultural Consortium Exhibition,” an annual competition in which more than 350 artists from Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Martin, and Monroe counties were whittled…

It’s best to approach the “48th Annual All Florida Juried Competition & Exhibition,” now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, from the show’s end. Resist the natural impulse to enter the main gallery to one’s left and instead make your way through the long, narrow central gallery, past the…

No development in the history of art changed the nature and function of portraiture as dramatically as the invention of photography. Before photography, portraits were more or less about documenting reality, preserving a person’s distinctive look and bearing for both the present and posterity. Photography changed all that. No painter…

Wandering into a neighborhood art gallery can be a demoralizing experience. What begins as a quest for a rising star or an unsung talent usually turns up wall after wall of the same dreary art readily available all over South Florida. Interior designers may like art that’s nondescript enough to…

You might think that an artist who spent most of his life around blackboards would be weary of them. Not John O’Connor. The Idaho-born painter has been a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville for the past 30 years. Before joining the faculty there, he studied and taught…

What’s most striking about “The Water’s Edge: A Painting Installation by Margaret Ross Tolbert” when you first view it is not so much the content of the exhibition as the way it’s displayed. The nearly 150 six-by-eight-inch panels that make up the show, now at the Art and Culture Center…

When he died a decade ago at the age of 85, Salvador Dali left behind an output vast enough to make him one of the most prolific artists of the 20th Century. The flamboyant Spaniard’s legacy also includes a reputation as one of the shrewdest — some would say most…