Category: Exhibition Review

More is More

EMBELLISH ME: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

One of the most significant imperatives of the exhibition philosophy of the Tampa Museum of Art is to present visually stimulating works of art which are not only possessed of superior aesthetic qualities in their own right but whose subject matter is relevant. That relevance is formulated by asking its visitors to view those works of art within the context of current international discourse about pressing social issues. The permanent exhibition, Identity in the Ancient World, explores such issues as ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as lived experiences resonating with similar issues impacting upon our contemporary society.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is its parallel, temporary loan exhibition, showcasing a panorama of stimulating eye candy reveling in glorious patterns and captivating decorative motifs. But like the themes articulated in the Identity exhibition, Embellish Me engages its visitors in an equally compelling art historical discourse, what is art and who decides what is art.

For about a decade from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s a group of artists on the East and West Coast participated in a movement now known as P&D, the Pattern and Decoration Movement. The participating members, mostly women, understood that artistic discourse was dominated by men who, it seemed, arbitrarily and somewhat disparagingly dumped textiles, basketry, and the like into the pejorative “craft” category, effectively divorcing those creations from the supposedly superior category of “fine art.” That hierarchical categorization had an unfortunate misogynist side effect, because, traditionally, from the dawn of civilization women were the dominant weavers of textiles and baskets. The P&D movement’s imperative, therefore, was to set aside such rigid hierarchies and in so doing, intercalate the contributions of women into the ages-old continuum of visual creations. The movers and shakers of P&D also correctly observed that textiles and baskets were themselves often imbued, as a result of the materials used and the patterns employed, with an intrinsic sensuality effected by their retinal-commanding ornament.

The combined oeuvre of the participants of the P&D Movement offered a viable alternative to what some have termed the general manliness of modernism. It demolished the artificial boundaries traditionally separating fine art from craft. Significantly P&D succeeded in elevating the status of women as artists in their own right. 

Joanna Robotham, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tampa since 2016, collaborated with Dr. Amy Galpin, former Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum (now Executive Director and Chief Curator at MOAD in Miami) on Embellish Me. Robotham reinforces the added significance of this exhibition for our Tampa Bay community because, as she rightly stresses, the works of view are from the collection of Norma Canelas Roth (1943-2022), and her husband, William. Mrs. Roth was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, is an alumna of the University of South Florida, and lived most of her life right here in the Sunshine State. Early on she recognized the marginalization of women artists because they were often ignored, and hence neglected, by mainstream gallerists and collectors. 

Figure 1. Installation view of the exhibition Embellish Me at the Tampa Museum of Art.
Photograph by Paige Boscia. Courtesy of the Museum.

The exhibition space is sumptuously designed (Figure 1) with its aubergine-colored accent walls and strategically-placed benches affording visitors various vantage points from which to contemplate the works of art, each one of which occupies its own environment. Every work stands alone and proud, there is no clutter, there is no crowding.

Figure 2. Betty Woodman (1930-2018). Untitled, 1981.

Among the works of art on view are an exuberant vase (Figure 2) potted by ceramist Betty Woodman, one of the mainstays of P&D. The vase is noteworthy for both its size and consummate polychromatic effects. 

Figure 3. Joyce Scott (born 1948). Necklace (Skeletons), 1994.

The necklace (Figure 3) by Joyce Scott, created from glass beads and semi-precious stones, is a deceptive masterpiece in miniature because it deserves more than a passing glance. This work, informed by Scott’s Afro-American heritage, alludes to current social issues by virtue of the initially inconspicuous skeletons which are subtly intercalated into its overall, seeming ornamental design. 

Figure 4. Jane Kaufman (1938-2021). Screen, 1979.

Equally deceptive and likewise worthy of contemplation is the screen (Figure 4) by Jane Kaufman, a leader of P&D. She transformed the skills of embroidery and sewing, taught to her by her Russian-born grandmother, by introducing bugle beads and metallic threads, often glued together, into her compositions. She also foregrounded feathers into her oeuvre, as seen in this exacting, meticulously designed screen in which each pheasant feather appears to be so identical that one’s first impression is that they had been mechanically reproduced rather than being selectively plucked from nature.

Figure 5. Tony Robbin (born 1943). 1978-21, 1978.

Toby Robbin was a member of an improvisational theater group and a member of a men’s consciousness-raising group before joining the P&D. There his oeuvre concentrated on illusion effective by compositions of polyvalent geometric patterns. The repeated patterns of shape and color in 1978-21 (Figure 5) are a tour de force, oscillating as they do between the linear and the painterly, the static and the kinetic. 

Figure 6. Lucas Samaras (1936-2024). Reconstruction #39, 1978.

Lucas Samaras participated in P&D, particularly in the 1970’s when he began his Reconstruction series, of which Reconstruction #39 (Figure 6) is representative. He composes his geometric motifs from swatches of fabric which he combines into compositions with a sewing machine. The resulting works of art purposefully resonate with the aesthetic concerns of the Russian Suprematist Art Movement in which the traditional distinction between foreground and background are blurred.

Embellish Me, therefore, engages not only the visitor’s eye with its dazzling array of decorative, polychromatic ornamentation but challenges the visitor to reassess the place of ornament within one’s own environment. That mental engagement may force one to rethink the attraction that we have either for patterned bed sheets or for wallpaper. And that rethinking should awaken everyone to the role that pattern and ornament have played in the visual culture of virtually every civilization since the beginning of time.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is organized by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, and presented in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view through July 28, 2024.

Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya in Tokyo. During his career, he has curated exhibitions of contemporary art in New York City, Antibes, and Tokyo. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files. 

In Good Company

In Good Company: Strength of Character at Creative Pinellas
by Jessica Todd

In her latest exhibition, Strength of Character at Creative Pinellas, curator Katherine Gibson welcomes the viewer into the gallery with warm familiarity. Oak seats and fruit chandeliers allude to home. Rich colors, natural materials, and hints of domesticity soften the formality of the impressively grand galleries of Creative Pinellas. There’s even a scent of cedar in the air.

The Art world is still shedding the restrictive boundaries between “Fine Art” and Crafts and Design. The Western Art canon has long excluded work due to medium, process, functionality, and proximity to the domestic. While oil painting and marble sculpture dominate the collections of major institutions and the pages of Art History books, a wealth of works in traditional Crafts media such as ceramics, wood, glass, fine metal, fibers, and paper have been largely ignored.

This exclusion is not due to a lack of artistic merit. Rather, it is deeply rooted in classism, racism, and sexism. Availability of materials, differing cultural applications of art objects, and restricted access to education and patronage led to different kinds of artmaking throughout history. To assert the dominance of the upper-class Western European male, the materials and functionality associated with the art of socially repressed groups were deemed inferior. And the tradition lives on.

Today, we see artists and curators challenging this bias. Audiences’ enthusiasm for Crafts media, Design, and functional work continues to push it into the mainstream. We see materials, processes, and forms we’re accustomed to living with in our homes now in gallery and museum spaces. This familiarity offers an entry point to the viewer. It democratizes Western art in a revolutionary way.

Gibson’s curatorial work is, in this sense, revolutionary. She integrates Crafts media with painting and sculpture, functional with conceptual work, and self-trained with academically trained artists. She integrates these works into the gallery seamlessly. Most importantly, her exhibitions are not “about” Art hierarchies. They’re about placing thoughtfully made artworks in a space and allowing them to converse with each other and with the viewer.

Strength of Character beautifully iterates this concept. We see the abstract paintings of Edgar Sanchez Cumbas next to the carved wooden furniture of David and Kathleen Bly alongside the sculptural installations of Kendra Frorup, which integrate printmaking, casting, and metalwork. Chandeliers converse with stretched canvas. Stools talk to framed paintings.

The harmony of the work in the gallery is a reflection of the collaborative installation process. The curator, artists, and Creative Pinellas staff came together to design an exhibition that is both cohesive and unexpected. Gibson isn’t afraid to ask the viewer to look upward or downward – “gallery height” is merely a suggestion. She’s a master of balancing scale in improbable ways: the Blys’ four petit Live Oak sculptures hold their own resting on the ground catty-cornered to Frorup’s wall-sized installation and substantial Sugar Apple Chandelier.

Each artist also contributed their unique perspective to the installation process: Frorup’s talent for collaging objects, Sanchez Cumbas’s eye for color and form, and the Blys’ engagement with architecture. Freddie Hughes (Gallery and Facilities Engagement Manager for Creative Pinellas) was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to life with his extensive installation knowledge and technical support. Serendipitous moments, like finding an old fence post outside to anchor Sanchez Cumbas’s Brush, or Frorup upending a utility cart from her studio to hold Banana Chandelier, reflect an openness to experimentation and play.

Though diverse in their media, the works in Strength of Character are united visually. Warm, rich earthy tones dominate the palette with intermittent pops of teal and quiet moments of textured white. Voluminous abstract shapes uncovered in the natural wood patterns of the Blys’ Live Oak series mirror Sanchez Cumbas’s explorations of human form in his Skinless series. Frenetic feather-like shapes in Sanchez Cumbas’s Compression Series and Reduction in Volumes are reflected in the crisscrossing screen- printed palm fronds of Frorup’s untitled installation. After seeing the symmetrical wood-turned bumps of the Blys’ work, Frorup responded with similarly shaped spun metal hardware to hang her Sugar Apple Chandelier.

Conceptually, all of the artists in the exhibition start with process. Frorup’s practice begins with collecting objects. She then problem solves through active making. Frorup engages in a range of art-making processes – from casting to papermaking to screenprinting – to arrive at her installations and sculptures. Her high regard for process is evident in her untitled installation featuring used screen-printing screens. The fruits that appear in Frorup’s work are an homage to her Bahamian roots and her mother’s farm that she grew up working on. Much like the artwork, the fruits are the sweet end result of a long cultivation process.

The Blys’ work is similarly driven by collected materials – reclaimed trees from Tampa’s urban neighborhoods. Their sculptures are a collaboration with the tree that bore the wood, which evolves throughout the making process. The tree tells them where to carve and when to stop. They work the wood while it’s still green, rather than fully dried, so that after their intervention the wood continues to bend, move, and crack. The resulting sculptures, many of which function as furniture, act as monuments to the downed tree from which they were sourced.

Sanchez Cumbas responds to the world around him through the cathartic process of painting. His kinetic brushstrokes in Compression Series and Reduction in Volumes reflect the turbulent war in Afghanistan and politics of 2010, when they were made (he notes, still relevant today). These works mark a turn from his figurative paintings, the last of which is Brush, also in the exhibition, a nod to the Buddha and his own Buddhist practice, a piece that is notably calmer and more grounded. The much more restrained works in the Skinless series sensitively explore bodies and skin, and issues around skin tone in the Latinx community. Each piece is a visual reflection of the emotion with which it was created.

It’s evident when speaking with Gibson and the artists of Strength of Character that they all share an immense respect for each other’s practices. The joyful spirit with which they engaged in this collaborative project is palpable in the gallery, and reflected in the enthusiasm of Creative Pinellas’s passionate staff. Head to Largo and make yourself at home in this beautiful exhibition, up through April 28, 2024.

A special thanks to the Gobioff Foundation for supporting this exhibition through their Microgrant program.

Creative Pinellas is Pinellas County’s non-profit local arts agency providing funding and support to artists while connecting businesses, tourism and the public with the arts community.

Jessica Todd is a curator, writer, and artist based in Tampa, Florida. She is passionate about building the creative infrastructures that support artists, and studying and addressing issues of equity, access, and inclusion in the arts. In October 2022, Jessica opened Parachute Gallery in Ybor City, first serving as an exhibition space for national artists and later a retail gallery representing local artists. Parachute Gallery currently operates remotely through online resources and off-site programming. Jessica has worked with a number of arts organizations since moving to Tampa in 2020, including Tempus Projects, Artspace Tampa Initiative, Crab Devil, and the Morean Arts Center. For six years, prior to moving to Tampa, she was the Residency Manager for the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. Jessica holds an MFA in Jewelry/Metals/Enameling from Kent State University, a BA in Art from Penn State University, and a Diploma of Hispanic Studies from the University of Barcelona.

Photography credit: Jessica Todd

Marisol in Miami

Marisol Escobar. Dinner Date, 1963.

Marisol in Miami

By Katherine Gibson

Two figures sharing a meal together, Dinner Date from 1963, was my introduction to Marisol’s work. I gravitated to it right away when scrolling sculpture images several years ago. I was not familiar with the artist Marisol (Maria Escobar, Venezuelan-American, 1930-2016) but kept bookmarking images of these captivating, odd, intriguing carved figures with various details highlighted, an actual shoe here, a sculpted hand there. I was immediately fascinated by Marisol’s work and vowed to see it in person.

That opportunity came this summer when my good friend Jose Gelats and I learned that the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) was showing Marisol’s work in a traveling exhibition, Marisol and Warhol Take New York, organized by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, PA.

Driving to Miami took much less time than I remembered, and winding through the streets of South Beach was pure delight. Nothing compares to the authentic, historical, elegant Art Deco buildings, an architectural Disneyland in magical pastels. We stayed at The Whitelaw Hotel on Collins Avenue, one block up from Ocean Drive, and immediately found a delicious coffee shop nearby. Across the street, we stumbled into a tucked-away hotel bar complete with a kind (patient) bartender, Darrell, who put up with two chatty Kathys. He made delicious cocktails and even talked me into trying peanut butter bourbon which insulted me at first (bourbon doesn’t need a flavor) — however, it wasn’t terrible, and now I have a bottle of my own.

Our zigzagging drive to The Pérez the following morning took us through various neighborhoods, reminding me how tropical and lush Miami is — you can round the corner and feel like you are in a dense, colorful rainforest. Vivid beauty in every direction.

Once at the Museum, I made a beeline to Marisol’s work. I breezed past the entrance layout and introductory wall text in search of the larger free standing installations — Dinner Date being a favorite (top image) and The Party, one of her most well-known (below).

It was easy to become distracted by the wooden structures and how elements were presented. When I actually locked eye-to-eye with the figures, their features were superbly drawn and many were immediately recognizable as well-known newsmakers of the time.

Who is this person who can come up with such original configurations of mediums while simultaneously rendering identities and known personalities so well, yet in an unusual, unorthodox way? Marisol also incorporated objects and fabric, yet you weren’t initially aware of the materials — at least I wasn’t at first. I was so mesmerized by the whole chunky, blocky, wood figure, or figures, that the skill, meticulous craftsmanship, and sheer artistry of a face, body, or detail was discovered moments later — and then, I would marvel at her work all over again. I’m just so darn knocked out by her work.

Standing amidst The Party guests — fifteen life-sized, carved figures in wood, each having its own dramatic flair and all sharing similar facial features — I was enchanted by the flourishes of each costume, the clever use of drama, and exposure. I also noted the aloneness of each figure — all were arranged together but hardly a connection between them.

The placement of Warhol’s loud pink and yellow cow wallpaper, running floor to ceiling behind The Party, was annoying. Obnoxious party crasher. I was incensed and confused. Why would you do that?

Marisol’s The Party, 1965-66, as installed in the exhibition Marisol and Warhol Take New York
at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Listen to curator Jessica Beck from the Andy Warhol Museum discuss this particular work in a video walkthrough of Marisol and Warhol Take New York.
Detail of The Party as installed at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Photo: Camp Jen

In one review I read, the author felt very much like I did but expressed the impact more clearly. “The only mistake in this display of “The Party” is the use of Warhol’s cow wallpaper as a backdrop, which grotesquely draws oxygen away from Marisol’s genius,” wrote Emily Cardenas of The Biscayne Times.

Below is an image of The Party without wallpaper distraction, as shown in The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), where is it part of the Museum’s permanent collection. TMA’s published description of the installation reads, “As someone who always felt uncomfortable in the 1960s social scene, Marisol chose to display the figures in a setting where none of them interact with each other, many appearing entirely self-absorbed. By seeing these figures up close, you will also notice that each one shares similar facial features; Marisol often used herself as a model.”

Marisol Escobar, The Party, 1965-66. As installed at the Toledo Museum of Art.
For a fascinating discussion on this work, listen to Fashion & Alienation in 1960s New York with Dr. Halona Norton-Westbrook of the Toldeo Museum of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker of Smarthistory. Photo: Dr. Steven Zucker

Perhaps TMA could add an installation addendum requesting that the piece be shown without a background, ideally a plain white wall providing a clear and undistracted view.

Installation details of The Party, 1965-66. Photos: Dr. Steven Zucker.

Meandering through the full exhibition at PAMM, I noticed that a few other installations suffered from the wallpaper cacophony. Marisol’s wonderful sculpture of John Wayne on a horse — when you look straight at it — is almost erased due to the louder, bolder cow images behind the figure (see image). Warhol continues to mark his territory in ways that hinder views of Marisol’s work. Ironically, one of the few unencumbered views of Marisol’s work is her figure of Andy Warhol himself. Andy sits — as if on a throne — in a pristine, white corner.

Marisol Escobar, John Wayne, 1963, and Andy, 1962-63.

Tricky to do, to show two very different bodies of work, together, created during the same timespan by two very different artists — both influenced by, and motivated by, the other. I find it interesting — fascinating really — to see how each chose to convey similar ideas. Marisol’s work, to me, just blows Warhol’s work away and I wince to see her unique authentic work watered down by an attempt to blend the less impressive work of another artist — or perhaps, in the opposite way, Marisol’s work shines even brighter because, when seen side-by-side, her work far surpasses Warhol’s.

“A lot of people will assume that Warhol was the famous one first, but really it was [Marisol],” says PAMM’s curator Maritza Lacayo in an art article that appeared in the Miami New Times. “There was so much about her that Warhol admired. She, in a way, inspired him.”

On our way out of town, we stumbled on the Laundromat Art Space, in the neighborhood known as Little Haiti, a clever re-use of an actual laundromat converted into a gallery and artist studios. Even though the building wasn’t open, we knocked anyway. And to our delight, an artist appeared and let us in and showed us around.

Laundromat Art Space is an artist-run studio and exhibition space located in the neighborhood of Little Haiti in Miami, Florida.

Jose and I are curious Nancy Drews at heart, and delight in aimless moseying. All we need is an inspiring anchor to organize around, and we are off and running. This last stop was a nice way to wrap up our indulgent, highly enjoyable road trip, spurred on by seeing Marisol’s work in person. Completely worth it — and really not that far from Tampa — a repeat round trip for sure.

As you drive here and there for the holidays, visiting — or escaping — family and friends, try taking the backroads instead of boring interstates; drop in a diner instead of a drive-through; visit a fruit stand instead of a jiffy store. Go in the direction of what gets your attention and tune out the obnoxious cow heads along the way.

About the exhibition

Marisol and Warhol Take New York debuted at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg in October 2021 and was curated by Jessica Beck, The Warhol’s Milton Fine Curator of Art. On view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami from April 15, 2022, through September 5, 2022, it was organized by Franklin Sirmans, Director, and Martiza Lacayo, Assistant Curator.

About the author

Katherine Gibson, creator of ArtHouse3, is a regional art consultant and independent curator living in St. Petersburg, Florida. Gibson is the former Director of the Hillsborough Community College (HCC) Dale Mabry Gallery, which was rebranded Gallery221@HCC. Gibson received a 2018 Individual Artist Award from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance for her Drive-by Window Project and was selected for an ArtsUp Grant by Creative Pinellas as creator and curator of the 2019 summer exhibition Tonge & Groove. Creating temporary exhibits in alternative spaces is a focus, and so far, has included storefront windows, empty lofts, rustic lake houses, and her home. Current projects include selecting artwork for various client environments, hosting exhibitions in ArtHouse Upstairs and writing the occasional piece for Bay Art Files.

The Woman who Broke Boundaries: Photographer Lee Miller

by Sabrina Hughes

Lee Miller is a fascinating figure in the history of photography, and it is refreshing to experience a retrospective of her work of this size and scope, more than 130 images spanning her decades-long career.  The Woman who Broke Boundaries was curated by Dr. William Jeffett, chief curator of exhibitions at The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, FL, with all photographs on loan from the Lee Miller Archives in Sussex, England, managed by her son Antony Penrose.  

Miller’s career, and her photographic archive, represents her ceaseless drive to see, express, and experience. Her place in the industry and its history seems almost fated. Yet Miller’s insatiable ambition to become an important photographer and writer is sometimes downplayed in favor of telling the stories of her relationships to several key figures who Miller encountered along the way. 

The exhibition’s organization is informed by The Lives of Lee Miller a biography that her son Antony Penrose wrote. However, since the first introduction visitors get to the exhibit’s thesis is “This exhibition tells the story of Lee Miller’s extraordinary and unconventional life as seen through her photographic portraits of others” it is within this framework that viewers are meant to situate what they learn of Miller—through her portraits of and relationships with others. The exhibition, however, does not address many of the tragedies of Miller’s early life and simplifies key relationships that were more complex than they seem.

Self portrait [with headband], Lee Miller Studios Inc., New York, USA,
circa 1932 by Lee Miller
(NYS 12-6-C) © Lee Miller Archives England 2020.
All Rights Reserved

The exhibition begins with a large didactic panel situating Miller as Artist, War Correspondent, Model & Muse. Miller modeled for Vanity Fair and Vogue in her late teens and early 20s and was vaunted as the pinnacle of beauty standards of the 1920s. This was how she met Edward Steichen, an absolute giant in the field of both artistic and commercial photography who would later become a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Miller was in front of, rather than behind, the camera during this period of her career, therefore this part of her life is not detailed much in the exhibition. Nevertheless, it represents the sum of numerous formative moments since Steichen wrote her a letter of introduction and recommendation to work with Man Ray, the American surrealist artist living in Paris. 

Surrealist aims of accessing unconscious creativity, desires, and expression have a natural affinity with the medium of photography. Photography captures fractions of a moment that the eye and the brain experience very differently than what the camera captures. A photo represents a different plane of reality. Additionally, photography’s formal characteristics allow for techniques like cameraless image creation (photograms), double exposures, combination printing, and any other number of manipulations that distort the “reality” that photography represented for many.

Since surrealism as an art movement (including writers, poets, painters, and photographers, and other creators in all sorts of media) was preoccupied with Freudian psychology, women in the group may have had a challenge being taken seriously as creators and were more often treated as Muses—passive inspiration for the creators. Or at least that is how it’s been reported in the photo history books. 

Miller’s relationship with Man Ray is well documented and marks the introduction to her photographic work proper in The Woman Who Broke Boundaries. This critical part of her photographic career also has scant representation in the exhibition. Though she was a model for Man Ray, Miller was far more than muse. They were technical and artistic collaborators. One of the surrealist photographic techniques that is synonymous with Man Ray’s legacy is that of solarization. 

Solarised Portrait (thought to be Meret Oppenhiem), Paris, France, 1932 by Lee Miller
(NC00585) (c) Lee Miller Archives England 2020. All Rights Reserved.

A negative, while in the process of being developed (so while it is still sensitive to light exposure) is exposed to a brief bright light. The result is a sort of otherworldly reversal of some tones in the final photograph—the highlights and shadows create an illusion of lighting that would be impossible to achieve without the manipulation. Sometimes the relationship between figure and background is lost and the model appears to be a relief carved from stone. 

History books say Ray invented the technique, but Miller reports that it was something that happened while she was working alone in the darkroom. In The Lives of Lee Miller, she is quoted: “It was all very well my making that one accidental discovery, but then Man had to set about how to control it and make it come out exactly the way he wanted to each time.” 

In the biography, Penrose suggests “Few examples of her early photographs survived her subsequent traveling and the strange contempt in which she held her own work.” However, just a few pages later Penrose writes, “A measure of Lee’s and Man Ray’s mutual respect was that neither of them was seriously concerned when their credits were wrongly ascribed” indicating that some of Miller’s work may have been attributed to Ray at the time, and in legacy.  

Miller’s photographs in this portion of the exhibition are representative of her avant-garde approach to portraiture—for sitters who were up for it. Solarized portraits of socialites such as Dorothy Hill denote a desire for Miller’s unique combination of techniques developed while working with Ray and her own sense of what makes remarkable portraits. 

This segment of the exhibition also showcases photographs of Miller’s friends, surrealist artists, and work she made in Egypt. The former grouping, Miller and friends, is a name-dropper’s paradise. With the pictures as proof of Miller’s intimate association with major artists, her own renown as an artist grew. 

Her photographs from the period she lived in Egypt are among the most fascinating of the exhibition. It seems to have taken Miller a while to resuscitate her creativity after marrying and moving to Egypt, but the images she eventually produced defined her mature photographic style. When creatively unfettered and free to pursue her own vision, Miller’s style of surrealist photography creates a playful tension by highlighting odd juxtapositions of subject matter. Portrait of Space (1937), an image made in Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt, demonstrates the way an everyday scene can become a record of a dream in Miller’s hands. A simple torn window screen becomes an aperture to an otherwise shrouded ambiguous landscape—is it desert or beach? An oddly hung mirror seems to reflect the blank wall behind the photographer, but it also looks like it is a portal into the sky. It is hard to look away from the image because it invites and rewards close looking.

Miller’s wartime photographs also demonstrate her style of surrealism-via-juxtaposition. The realities of life in London during the Blitz must have eclipsed the surrealist visions she experienced in the desert. 

Fire masks, Downshire Hill, London, England 1941 by Lee Miller
(3840-8) © Lee Miller Archives England 2020. All Rights Reserved

She remained on staff as a photographer for Vogue and in 1942 Miller became accredited as a war photographer giving her the right to travel with the US Army. When Miller left London for the mainland, she found that she thrived in the bedlam of war. She was present for the Liberation of Paris, for the horrific discoveries at Buchenwald and Dachau, and for the first entry to the Berghof with its secret mountain passages. Her dispatches to Vogue began to slow as the world tried to move on after the war. Eventually, Miller also moved on from photography, leaving it almost completely in her past by 1954.

Miller’s life was indeed extraordinary and unconventional, and she is a photographer who should be celebrated for the boundaries she broke. The pictures in the exhibition don’t always stand on their own to demonstrate how exceptional she was, which is why the didactic text in the galleries (essays and label text) is so important for interpretive context. This is where the exhibition’s theme either becomes clear or not. 

In my subjective experience, the exhibition doesn’t achieve its goal which I’ll repeat here: “This exhibition tells the story of Lee Miller’s extraordinary and unconventional life as seen through her photographic portraits of others.”  As a woman and an artist, I would not like my life simplified to the degree that Miller’s has been to suit this simultaneously too-wide and too-narrow theme.  

The unspoken subtext of the exhibition, as I experienced it, seems to focus on Miller almost as connective tissue among the notable men she met along the way. Viewers may be spurred, as I was, to find out more about Miller’s life that’s hinted at between the lines of The Woman Who Broke Boundaries. In the exhibition writing there is a lot about Miller’s extraordinary life and trailblazing career that is glossed over, euphemized, or just plain omitted. 

What is evident from the work in this exhibition is that Miller was a master photographer, technician, and storyteller who created meaningful portraits and documents of her age with equal prowess. The opportunity to see such a range of photographs from an artist of Miller’s stature is not to be missed. 

The Woman who Broke Boundaries: Photographer Lee Miller is on view exclusively at The Dalí Museum in St. Peterburg, Florida, through Jan. 2, 2022.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.