Jonathan Talit – Bay Art Files

Fee-Fi-Faux-Pfaff

Fee-Fi-Faux-Pfaff by Jonathan Talit

Any museum exhibition that even hints at celebrating debauchery is welcome in my book. At the time of this writing, American culture has sustained a “No-Fun Zone” mentality for at least a decade. I’m not naïve enough to expect outright fun in any museum, but there’s no reason exhibitions can’t be titillating, even sleazy. Museums themselves, however, seem dead set on convincing the public of how fun and carefree they are through a glut of programming like Teens’ Night, yoga classes, dance performances, and concerts. These programs are often hosted directly inside, and thus interrupt, the galleries. Designed to give the impression of “accessibility,” these programs can’t disguise the reality that museums are perpetually stern institutions. Museums are largely about propriety. I accept that – I’m an adult.

There is no horror quite like organized fun. Admittedly, my thirst for anything remotely stimulating has sometimes led me to initially qualify things as good in the negative: this TV show wasn’t as preachy as it could’ve been, that movie wasn’t as predictable as most movies lately, etc. When I heard that Judy Pfaff had an exhibition in Florida, about Florida, I had every reason to be primed to enjoy it.

It turns out Pfaff has a history with Florida; in particular: Sarasota. Known primarily for her engulfing multimedia installations, Judy Pfaff has worked as a prominent visual artist for over fifty years. In 1981, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art. Just over a decade ago, she was invited back to Sarasota by the educational program ARTmuse. This program was created by the Sarasota Art Museum’s founders as an embryonic platform for what would ultimately become the brick-and-mortar museum itself. Things have come full circle as Pfaff has an exhibition up at the Sarasota Art Museum titled Picking Up the Pieces.

The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains the most vibrant work and the least like installation. While they have oblong shapes, flex in multiple directions, and even reach out towards the viewer, each artwork is discernably contained. It isn’t that hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. “My mind is wired as a painter,” Pfaff admits, and that primary sensibility is on display here.

Multiple panels line the wall of various shapes and sizes. They all appear to be made of acrylic. Some are intrinsically pigmented, others superficially by staining the surface with resin. Most of these panels have “limbs” that extend outward, complicating their initial flatness. These extensions are mostly welded steel lines that blossom into other forms: more panels, crescent shapes for leaves, tubes of neon twisting jaggedly. The long arm of Alexander Calder can’t be ignored. Flashes of Frank Stella blink within these works, too. Specifically, Stella’s wall sculptures that seem equally inspired by fluorescent lighting, the Art Deco revival of the 1980s, and cocaine.

Regardless of how saturated and active these panels are, they all maintain a degree of translucency. Some light can pass through, some sections disguise themselves against the supporting wall, some areas let you see yourself looking at them. Moments like these are reminders that the materials here aren’t actually moving, aren’t really fluid, aren’t truly alive, but are entirely fake.

In fact, Pfaff’s work relishes in all things fake. This is a key point that isn’t directly addressed in the supporting text. There’s no question that, “Pfaff’s impressions of Florida’s sun-soaked, life-affirming landscape, fecund nature, and leisurely rhythm of life,” are presented. There are “…a plethora of readymade faux flowers, fruits, and vegetables…and three-dimensional elements that resemble flora and foliage,” all over these galleries. However, that’s only half right. There should be more emphasis on the word “faux,” as I see Pfaff’s work as a celebration of Florida’s evident natural life and obvious affinity for the artificial. That is Florida’s power: the cheap but seamless harmony of the natural and the synthetic worlds; a shotgun wedding between the Jurassic and the plastic.

This unorthodox synthesis is evident in this room’s only free-standing sculptures. In the center, a long table extends diagonally across the gallery next to a lawn chair. Or, it used to be a lawn chair. The tight network of warp and weft has become just the slightest bit molten, the littlest bit loose. Now, the plastic strings are frozen in limbo: a permanent refractory period. The table itself is smeared with detritus. Before the viewer lies an opulent spread of fake deserts, plastic bags, half-drunk cocktails, fabric flowers, and neon lights, all entombed in goo. Neon is a sharp analogy to Florida, as neon is a natural element but registers as otherworldly and disposable: hypnotic garbage.

As fun as these works are, they are often too literal. Fake fruits and fake flowers are used to represent…Florida’s real fruits and real flowers? That’s a bit too on the nose for me. Other works, like the two-panel pieces on the righthand wall, entertain more subtlety. The first, measuring at about 3’ x 3’, is an orange panel erupting into circular steel shapes. Lacing those shapes are small lights that blink in a gentle rhythm akin to Christmas lights. This all reads like flowers and bees without literally being those things. It’s also one of the pieces with the darkest color palettes: could those lights be little stars? The piece is backlit with surreal blue and green lights that recall a gas station at night. The panel piece to its right is a larger rug with a multicolored neon light zipping through it like a waterslide.

With all this activity, one almost misses the rug-turned-tablecloth that flows off the table at almost completely ninety- degrees. Itself covered in resin, it looks like roadkill in the final stages of rigor mortis, or a stray sock in a teenage boy’s room. One can hear the sound it would make if it fell on the floor. Across the gallery, another rug undulates like a tongue as it belches a small meal of plastic margarita glasses.

All these are richer strategies than “cocktail glasses to represent cocktail glasses.” Still, the work encapsulates Pfaff’s acute sense of the fun, futureless frivolity of Florida. This state is the perpetual butt of cheap jokes and single-minded analyses: heralded as a bastion of freedom and family values, derided from afar as “America’s dick,” or grimly presented as the canary in the coal mine of right-wing fascism and censorship that’s ready at a moment’s notice to leap onto the country writ large.

Florida is much richer and dumber than all that. It’s a place of off-season carnivals, dinosaurs past their prime, strip malls, strip clubs, loose morals, endless lawsuits, lush landscape, low taxes, low education, violent storms, finger foods, and the brisk exchange of fluids. The weather is nice, and the people are mean. It values transience and expedience: cheap thrills year-round. Obviously, this means no community, no history and no future, and absolutely no real obligations. That’s not exactly a role model. But what history matters in a place so relentlessly present? What future could ever happen in a state that is designed with no attention span? That has one season? Whose main business is tourism: strangers leaving just as quickly as they came? Pfaff astutely and lovingly distills Florida’s Multiple Personality Disorder into more digestible forms without reducing its amusement and frustration.

One gleans quite a different reading from the exhibition documents and the title itself, Picking Up the Pieces. Both the title of the exhibit and the title of a large-scale installation in the second room, refer to Hurricane Ian. According to the museum text, Picking Up the Pieces is inspired by, “Hurricane Ian’s devastating impact on southwestern Florida in September 2022.” The text continues to correctly describe Hurricane Ian’s “bewildering chaos and tumult” and the “indelible mark” it left in its “aftermath.” Some of this aftermath is presented in a video projection that accompanies the installation. Pfaff herself bore witness to Ian’s “destructive power” at Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island.

Words like these are apt descriptions of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian. What’s less apt is the implied equivalence between the somber memories of Hurricane Ian and the experience of Pfaff’s work here. Yes, twisted metal, pools of plastic, flying panels, and shorn fabric abound. Random objects from drinking glasses, neon lights, seashells, and honeycomb cardboard stock are married by the stirring forces of wind and flood. Natural disasters make their own mixed media installations out of our lives. Pfaff communicates that point well enough.

The issue is that Pfaff’s work just isn’t that sad. She may have felt sadness seeing what Hurricane Ian left behind – who wouldn’t? – but that’s her business. Sorrow is not evident in these galleries. But the supporting text and the dismal documentary-style of the video imply a mournful experience that just isn’t there, and a degree of chaos when the work is usually quite prim, for better or worse.

That said, the second room is notably more muted in color. Starburst candy colors are out, and the paler shades of taupe, beige, and grey are in. Largely, this is the result of a material swap: cardboard, polyurethane foam, concrete slabs, aged wood, and a monochromatic video dominate this room. There are still colored acrylic panels and neon lights, but they’re accents against a quieter backdrop. Speaking of backdrops, the room’s architecture lends to this new atmosphere. Instead of having the titanium white gallery walls of the first room, the second room exposes the weathered bricks of the original building, a former high school. These bricks, in their smeared glory, contribute heavily to the industrial, nautical feeling of the gallery. Dimmed lights allow viewers to see the video projection, obviously, but also induce a hush.

The centerpiece is a large installation of steel pipes, stone, colored panels, LED light strips, and sailboats suspended mid-air. They don’t move, but you can. Viewers can walk through this space, around these objects and their various harnessing apparatuses, to get the simulated, safer, lower-resolution experience that they’re in the eye of the hurricane. A single skylight window beams down soft, natural light roughly in the installation’s center. The power cords of the LED strips, the unnatural light in the room, are disguised, hilariously, by flooring tape with a “wood floor” image on their backside. Some large strips of that same tape are slapped against the gallery walls where their camouflage does them less good.

Again, where’s the doom and gloom? Viewers are impressed by this installation, not depressed. “How did they get these pieces in here?” “How do they all stay still?” “Who could think of this?” “Why is this so fun?” These are a few of the questions I overheard other visitors compelled to ask out loud. Some visitors preoccupied themselves with the logistics of how it was assembled, a common and distracting Achielle’s heel of most installation art. Many people, however, easily let go of those questions and drifted off into the museum VR-experience of matter swirling around them. My personal favorite of these Twister floating objects are the sunflowers and their towering stalks sealed in intergalactic platinum paint.

Well, if you don’t find sadness in this exhibit yourself, it’ll be handed to you. Opposite the installation is a large wall with a projected video. This video documents various sites of the destruction of Hurricane Ian from the vantage point of a car window. Collapsed buildings, enormous boats slammed into one another, long stretches of land filled with scrap: all presented in black and white, in case you didn’t register how solemn this is supposed to be. This is a flimsy juxtaposition to the vibrance and Fantasia-style animation of dead objects in the rest of the gallery. It’s a needless bummer. Presumably, the viewer is supposed to interpret this pairing as evidence of the exhibition’s sophisticated duality: holding the vividness and pleasure of the natural world with its hazardous potential for carnage. How mature.

This just belies Pfaff’s organic interests and the obvious effects of her work. It’s just as useless to insist on even a shred of this exhibit being mournful as it is to insist on Goya being happy-go-lucky. Quieter, yes. In fact, the artwork lining the walls surrounding the installation are some of the best works by Judy Pfaff that I’ve ever seen. On the left, two enormous wall pieces comingle cardboard, foam, and metal until they look like mutated hornet’s nests. When you get closer, the layering of colors, adjustments from gloss to matte, and degrees of opacity are so rich that they deserve the same reverent vocabulary used to describe oil painting. The porous cardboard stock rhymes nicely with the aforementioned sunflowers.

On the back wall, a horizontal steel frame acts as the skeleton for a billowing mass of plastic. It reads almost like a color spectrum, beginning on the left with some green and deep blues, transforming into violet and red, and then evaporating into translucency. A select amount of LED and neon lights breathe the most tender amount of life into this rubble. Beneath the circulating web of plastic neurons is the cortex: a multicolored disco ball. Despite the mass of material blocking out much of its already faint light, it spins faithfully: beaming out whatever signal it can.

The wall closest to the video projection holds a similar sculpture. This time, there’s no color: just steel, a white LED light, and translucent plastic. No disco ball, either. Unlike its sister sculpture, this one appears devoid of life. Backlit by the sterile white LED light, it suspends like a ghost waiting to cross over. Or maybe that’s pessimistic: what if its blankness isn’t the end of life, but the beginning, like a stem cell?

Underneath that is a large display of objects not dissimilar from the sordid table in the first room. This piece is more securely (i.e. more conservatively) positioned near a wall against which a large LED light projects. It appears to be a slab of concrete coated with foam tinted in various shades of blue, resin, seashells, plants, and dilapidated pottery. Both the seashells and the plastic twinkle as one walks by. Small orifices gape while masses of urethane foam crest and rock, all giving the appearance of a seafloor caught in the moment where the current stops just before shifting directions.

In my mind, these artworks display the most technical acumen and emotional resonance of the work on view. That said, their resonance is not that potent. If there’s any sadness in this exhibition, it’s the realization that the work isn’t as loose or audacious as their initial jolt suggests. After the sugar rush comes the crash. Granted, it’s not a major crash, there’s interesting and fun artwork here, but there is a noticeable dip in enthusiasm once one takes a second lap through the galleries.

While Pfaff’s piquant visual interests are obvious, so is her ultimate conventionalism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the brashness of the work ques the viewer up for an experience that is, frankly, rather innocuous. Just as exotic sea life and reptiles flaunt vibrant colors and dizzying patterns to signal danger, I wish these works had more of the venom I felt they promised me. Alas, I left the gallery not sucking out the symbolic poison or asking a loved one to urinate on my metaphorical jellyfish sting.

Picking Up the Pieces has the distinct feeling of butterflies in one’s stomach as they get ready for a party – the imagined possibilities of laughter, music, dancing, getting buzzed, getting laid, blowing off steam. Then, they get to the party and it’s just a little smaller, just a little quieter, the lights a little too bright, the decor a little too neat, the conversations a little stiff, the people a little more sober than one had hoped, the specter of etiquette hiding just behind the door.

The exhibition Judy Pfaff: Picking Up the Pieces is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, through Sunday, March 24, 2024.

Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in Orlando. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.

Location, Location, Location

Location, Location, Location
Anthony Record and the Museum of Florida Art and Culture

by Jonathan Talit

Driving to Avon Park is just that: driving to Avon Park. The 50-mile stretch of US-27, between the southbound exit on I-4 and the northwest border of Highlands County, begins packed with strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food chains: the trademark scenery of any highway exit. The deeper one drives, the less frequently these landmarks appear until there is nothing to look at but grass, sky, and asphalt. Yet, I couldn’t help but look out even more; to open my eyes wider as the flat land pulled itself closer to the horizon and the sky bent around my windows so dramatically that it appeared to dig at the edges of the earth. It was difficult to imagine people living anywhere near here. Not out of snobbery: it just, quite literally, looked so empty of people.

Of course, that’s not true. People do live in Highlands County and many have for generations. Even more visit to celebrate acute passions: the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring car race, sold-out concerts by Rumours, a renowned Fleetwood Mac tribute band, the charming trompe l’oeil murals of Lake Placid, and Toby’s Clown School and Museum. The latter has graduated more than 1,500 clowns since its founding in 1993. Despite appearing sparse, or perhaps because of it, Highlands County is sprinkled with various sites of assembly.

The Museum of Florida Art and Culture, or MOFAC, is one such site. Part of South Florida State College, MOFAC hired Anthony Record as its new curator in March of 2022. Since then, Record has been busy organizing contemporary art exhibitions and managing MOFAC’s permanent collection of historic art and artifacts pertaining to the region. I met with Anthony on a Saturday afternoon, at the pristine campus of SFSC, just two weeks shy of Hurricane Ian pummeling the state, to discuss his new role.

Anthony Record, Curator of the Museum of Florida Art and Culture. Photo: J. Talit

“I’ll show you the concourse, first,” he said as he ushered me inside. The main exhibition space is divided into quadrants (quintets if you include the lobby of the Board Room). The main gallery has two sections: one for contemporary art exhibitions and one for the permanent collection. The third section is the lobby of the music hall.

The fourth is the concourse, which is within the building but outside of the main gallery. It consists of a large, curved wall that follows a hallway between the main gallery and classrooms. Several long canvases line the wall. Technically, they’re canvas prints: reproductions of oil paintings by the artist Christopher Still. The originals are on display at the Florida House of Representatives. Each print depicts some aspect of Florida in a style akin to history painting. The commanding gaze of Seminole Indian Osceola aims at the viewer in Patriot and Warrior (2001). Each hand gestures with conviction: one towards the sunset and an approaching Spanish vessel, the other gripped around a knife that pierces into a written document. This document “hangs” over the edge of the painting in a trompe l’oeil effect like the aforementioned murals at Lake Placid. An enormous alligator’s claws dangle over the borders of The Okeehumkee on the Oklawaha (2000). Each painting is concerned with narrative, landscape, and perspective: visual and historical.

Christoper Still. *Patriot and Warrior*, 2001. Canvas print.
The original is on display at the Florida House of Representatives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Anthony Record’s curatorial interests are similar. “I don’t organize exhibits with a strict, pre-existing philosophy or ideology, like ‘I’m interested in shows about identity’ or ‘I only focus on work by abstract artists,” he explains. “However, many of the exhibitions I organize seem to involve place. Location matters a lot to me and to many of the artists I exhibit.”

Location has mattered to Record personally, too. Originally from Tampa, Record received his bachelor’s from the University of South Florida. After earning his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008, he returned to Tampa and has maintained proactive roles in the arts since. Most notably, Record is Co-founder and Director of the artist collective QUAID, which recently moved to Ybor City after almost a decade in Seminole Heights. Along with exhibition spaces like Tempus Projects and Parallelogram Gallery, QUAID was part of a community of enthusiastic, DIY artists and educators who promoted contemporary art in a city that was otherwise lacking.

Record complemented his executive role at QUAID with educational positions, adjuncting at the University of South Florida as well as various community colleges from 2010 to 2018. “I love teaching, but I definitely prefer teaching at community colleges,” he confesses. “The students tend to be more diverse in every way: age, socioeconomics, political affiliation, level of background. All the students are interested in art but tend to be less interested in credentials. They also tend to push back a little more, which often makes for a richer classroom experience.”

In 2018, Record stopped adjuncting to assume a full-time role at the Tampa Museum of Art. While no longer a professor in a college classroom, Record worked in the education department as the Studio Programs Coordinator, where he organized after-hours classes hosted by local artists. Children and adults alike would attend these classes to participate in a wide range of making. “The classes were only a few hours long, so they had to be engaging but concise. The topics depended on whichever artist hosted the event. They could range from self-portraits in acrylic to large-scale collage to simply paper sculpture.”

Record left his position at the TMA earlier this year to become the curator at MOFAC. “The job at MOFAC has several moving parts, which I enjoy,” he says. “The most obvious are the contemporary artist exhibitions. Artwork that involves Florida, whether the artist is a homegrown Floridian or not, doesn’t have much institutional presence. The same is true of general Florida history and archaeology. I know a lot of great artists whose work deals with this state and deserves the kind of authority and attention that an institutional solo show can offer. To pair those works side by side with objects of Floridian craft and archaeology, which have very different cultural and intellectual histories than art with a capital “A,” makes MOFAC an exciting exhibition space.”

Considering Record’s noted contributions to the Tampa Bay art scene, contributions about which several people have expressed their gratitude in casual conversations with me about Record, one wonders: why leave? Avon Park is not as far from Tampa as, say, Las Vegas, but it’s still a hike. Culturally, they’re almost polar opposites. Tampa, specifically the art scene of which Record is a notable architect, is “cool.” Under no circumstances is Avon Park. To my knowledge, Record previously knew no one in Highlands County. “The position at MOFAC popped up and seemed like a good opportunity,” he concludes.

Succinct, polite, evasive. I press, albeit gently, and like any schlocky interviewer, I make it about myself. I mention that I’ve moved around a lot for school and residencies. Within two months of meeting with Anthony, I had left a yearlong residency in Star, North Carolina to pursue a full-time job in Orlando, a city I hate in the lamest way possible. I have some family and acquaintances in Orlando, but not the community I had in Star, Tampa, or Boston. Being an artist grants you the flexibility to hop to new places and meet new groups of people, but it doesn’t make leaving them behind, if only by a few hours, any easier.

He agrees and elaborates on his decision. “I guess that the position at MOFAC seemed like a full-time version of my role at QUAID: providing young, hungry, interesting, local artists with exhibition space for their work. I’ve had mixed feelings about some of the places I’ve shown my work. As an exhibiting artist, I had a lot of disappointments with various galleries and museums; just the things that weren’t provided and the level of engagement with my work that I was hoping to get but didn’t. I hope that I can use those experiences to cultivate an exhibition space that is both more attentive to the needs of artists while also staying out of their way.”

Whatever cocktail of circumstances led to Record’s decision, MOFAC is clearly lucky to have him. In just six months, Record has served himself a full plate: reorganizing the collection, changing the floorplan of the contemporary art galleries, securing future solo shows, writing exhibition didactics, planning gallery events, and developing an online presence via video interviews with exhibiting artists. These videos, crispy produced, are separate interviews with artists Bruce Marsh and Sam Newton, whose respective solo exhibitions A Long Glance and Herd of Thunder opened in early October of 2022 (Both exhibitions have since closed.) Marsh was a longtime professor at the University of South Florida and Newton is a current member of QUAID.

The videos are not just methods by which the museum can advertise online, however. They’re also not just interpretation tools for the viewer to glean deeper insights into the work, though they do that well. Record conducted these interviews and edited the videos, and his signature appetite for “place” is all over them. While Marsh and Newton discuss their interests and aspirations outright, each video underscores the setting in which these artists make art and presents a synopsis of their daily working life.

Granted, Bruce Marsh explicitly discusses how his home of Ruskin, Florida defines his work. What the video presents that isn’t immediately visible upon looking at Marsh’s work or listening to him speak is the kind of life that would produce such work: a contemplative life of teaching, commuting, and now retirement. Marsh moved to Ruskin as a compromise between he and his wife, Dolores Coe. She was teaching at the Ringling College of Art and Design and he was teaching at USF. Thus, the rural town of Ruskin was the middle point of their commutes.

Installation view of the exhibition *Bruce March: A Long Glance* which was on display from October 5 – November 18, 2022.

Marsh’s paintings indicate someone who spends a lot of time looking around at the same things: the outlet malls off I-75, a brewing afternoon storm on the horizon, an intersection at sunset on the way home from work. What most of us would tune out, Marsh isolates and lovingly renders but without hyperbole. Instead, he purposely portrays them as what they are: ordinary, without exaggeration. One’s attention is drawn to these paintings because of their elegant execution of space, not because they depict recognizable people or distort the everyday into a spectacle. But when Record’s camera cuts from Marsh and lingers on an empty bridge or the charmingly dilapidated Ruskin Drive-In, neither of which are the subjects of Marsh’s paintings, the audience is handed more insight than anything Marsh could say out loud.

Installation view of the exhibition *Bruce Marsh: A Long Glance* which was on display from October 5 – November 18, 2022.

Since Sam Newton’s paintings aren’t really about location at all, Record’s focus on place is even more exposed in her video interview. Newton’s paintings have backgrounds, but they’re simplified to emphasize attention on the real subjects: horses, presented in all their buxom glory. Unlike Marsh, Newton isn’t interested in playing with perspectival space and ordinary locations. Newton’s interests, instead, lie in anthropomorphism and a comic sensibility akin to the infamous Foot of Cupid from Monty Python or the flat irony of stick-and-poke tattoos. Newton compresses her horses barely within the edges of the canvas to articulate just how robust, knobby, temperamental, vigorous, and fragile they really are.

Complicated creatures. And that’s just the artwork itself. Like Marsh’s interview, the main subject of Newton’s video is the particular configuration of her working life (I won’t say “work-life balance”). Unlike Marsh, Newton lives in trendy Seminole Heights but has no dedicated studio in her home, at least not one that we see. The generational contrast between the videos is sharp. Within the first minute, the viewer is presented with a domestic environment that is unmistakably Millennial. The living room, which doubles as Newton’s studio, is engulfed in potted plants, mostly palms. A slate gray housecat lounges on a cat scratcher that appears surprisingly manicured. A child’s cozy coupe outside is plastered with a bumper sticker that reads, in block print, “HONK IF YOU LOVE KING STATE.”

Another big difference: Newton has two young children. Julian, the oldest, doesn’t appear. The youngest, Valentine, unabashedly makes his presence known. Newton explains that she began these horse paintings during the COVID lockdowns and her subsequent pregnancy with Valentine. She admits that it’s easy for her to project onto horses because, “…they all have bangs.”

If only a little sarcasm covered our tracks like we hoped it would. Clearly, there are other reasons why vibrant horses in claustrophobic spaces might resonate with Newton: the pent-up isolation of COVID lockdowns? An analogy for pregnancy, where you share limited space with someone else? A representation of the compressed hours in a day of a working artist and mother? “[Acrylic paint] is a plastic so it’s drying faster, and it has a different texture [than oil paint],” she says, explaining her transition from using oils to acrylic. Newton loves how acrylic more readily accepts other media, from colored pencils to crayons to ink. Ostensibly, she’s come to prefer acrylic’s flexibility and expansiveness to oil’s stiffness. “The sky’s the limit,” she claims of acrylic. I object. More likely, it’s precisely the limits of acrylic that attracts Newton. Its swift drying time and uncomplicated working conditions provide a conclusiveness that she’s found compatible in her life. “I’m able to make work that I wouldn’t be able to make, in the speed that I make it, in the situation that I’m in right now,” she says, before glancing warmly over her shoulder at Valentine.

What provides me all this information, and what grants me a sense of access that, in turn, elicits some hubris within me to freely speculate about these artists’ lives, is Anthony Record’s quiet but guiding eye. Editing, directing, curating, producing: all these jobs require clear decision-making with as little trace of the author as possible. At least, that’s been Record’s hope for himself as curator at MOFAC. So far, it appears he’s succeeded. In six months, a set of interests and a graceful sensibility for articulating them has already emerged. The towns we decide to live in, our hours spent on the road or in offices, the slivers we carve out of our days to do the things we really want to do, the people with whom we choose to spend our “off” time: all the pragmatic compromises we make and their effects on creative work are under Record’s nonjudgmental microscope.

The Museum of Florida Art and Culture (MoFAC) is located on the campus of South Florida State College in Avon Park, Florida.

I’m sure Record’s recent move, like mine, feeds these interests even more. Like it or not, tradeoffs between work and life must be made. Like the artists he exhibits, Record has made a tradeoff that works well for him. Avon Park supplies the tranquility for focus and Record supplies the faithful attention to detail. With QUAID, Record is happily one of several making executive decisions. At MOFAC, he’s largely driving solo.

Visit mofac.org for more information about the Museum of Florida Art and Culture and its upcoming exhibitions and programming.

Click here to watch the YouTube archived videos on artists Bruce Marsh and Sam Newton.

Visit anthonyrecord.com for more information about Anthony Record.

Visit quaidgallery.com for more information about the Tampa-based artist collective QUAID.

Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott

By Jonathan Talit

Establishing the Sarasota Art Museum was a lengthy process that began back in 2003. After two years of speaking with community leaders in the arts and education sectors, the Sarasota Art Museum joined forces with Ringling College of Art + Design. Their decision? To transform the historic 1926 Sarasota High School into an art museum and education space. The school was originally designed by M. Leo Elliott but features a mid-century addendum created in 1959 by Paul Rudolph, an architect whose influence is still seen today in Sarasota. In 1996, classes officially moved to the current Sarasota High School, leaving the previous building abandoned for nearly 20 years. There were talks of demolishing the building until thirteen Sarasota volunteers, partnered with the Ringling College of Art + Design, petitioned for it to be transformed into an art museum.

The Sarasota School Board unanimously awarded them the building in 2004. From there, years of rigorous fundraising were required to begin renovations on the building. Over $22 million was raised by 2014. In 2015, they brought on Anne-Marie Russell to serve as founding executive director and chief curator, a position she held for six years. Russell oversaw the final renovations, the museum opening in December of 2019, as well as exhibitions and other programming through 2022. This includes Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott.

The first painting in the Robert Colescott exhibition is the first thing on most of our minds lately: America. Regardless of one’s political position, it is difficult not to see events in our country over the past few years as anything other than grim, claustrophobic, and without clear resolution. 1919 (1980), Colescott’s painting of the continental United States of America, presents our massive and varied slab of land, still curiously bound together somehow, at least on a map. The rendering of this map is not bleak and dreary, however, but throbbing with vivid technicolor. Each state is granted its own color that is different from the surrounding states, emphasizing contrast. Some states are stamped with images symbolic of their culture: an alligator in Florida, a bottle of wine in California, an ox skeleton in Nevada, charmingly rendered. The map is flanked by two figures in profile who are only visible from the chest up. The rest of their bodies are submerged in a billowy mass of cotton-candy clouds, sprinkled with “studio sweepings” like cigarette butts and opened cans. The figure on the left is a white woman, hilariously buxom, and the figure on the right is a Black man in uniform. Evidently, these are the artist’s parents, who are also symbolized in the bird’s nest image in the center of the painting.

There are a lot of tropes here: 19th-century silhouettes in the figures in profile, state symbols on children’s maps, the “melting pot” of America formed by distinct cultures, and the latent but potent tension between Black men and white women in our country. 1919 certainly taps into the unsightly race relations that helped form and maintain the U.S. but it’s with a light touch. As the exhibition progresses, Colescott becomes increasingly direct about his positions regarding race, the history of painting, and American popular culture. This cocktail of uncomfortable social commentary, crude figuration, and a lush color palette is Colescott’s modus operandi. Like Paul Mooney and Robert Crumb, Colescott aims for the status of great comedy by presenting these blunt and jagged truths with a sense of levity and even glee. Essentially, he’s his own straight man and funny man; Laurel and Hardy in one painterly package.

Installation shot of the artist’s early work.

It took a while to get there, however, and the exhibition traces Colescott’s history succinctly. Born in 1925, Colescott doesn’t develop his signature style until the 1970’s when he was well into his forties. This is peculiarly late for an artist to “find their voice,” particularly when individual styles were so prized in the mid-20^th century. A room in the exhibition dedicated to Colescott’s early work presents a serious student of art history, from Manet to Matisse to Léger (a teacher of Colescott’s). These paintings are mostly executions of the styles of other artists, if not copying specific artworks altogether. One exception is a small painting, Untitled (1949), made while Colescott was a graduate student at UC, Berkeley. It’s a small work of geometric abstraction that is an early cue of Colescott’s later strategies for organizing compositions and his affinity for pink. The rest of the work documents Colescott’s attempt to find his point of view through other artists. Fake it ‘til you make it. All artists go through this, but Colescott’s lengthy growing pains risked him becoming a permanent student of art history: a practitioner of the values of others instead of synthesizing his own.

That all changes after an extended stay in Egypt beginning in 1964 where Colescott became the first artist-in-residence at the American Research Center in Cairo. It’s always a little slippery to deduce clear cause-and-effect from an artist’s life to their work, but with Colescott, it’s pretty case-closed. There is a dramatic shift in formal concerns and sensibility that result from Colescott’s five-year stint in Egypt. The paintings become larger, the colors more saturated and delicious, and the figures less realistic yet full of life somehow. Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1968) is an early example. This is the beginning of the “cartoonish” style for which Colescott is remembered. Something about Egypt awakened his childhood love of color and comic strips (I suspect Egyptian hieroglyphics and ornate linen are to credit). It’s apt that Pop Art and psychedelia were occurring simultaneously in the States and the UK while Colescott was in Egypt. The social revolution of the 1960s was also brewing, exploding into the Civil Rights Movement in America and Second Wave Feminism in the west writ large.

***Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet***, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas.

This leads to another clear awakening for Colescott in Egypt: race. It seems that moving from the Pacific Northwest to Cairo forced Colescott to confront, accept, and celebrate his own bi-racialism. This, paired with his beatnik influence after moving to Oakland in 1969, focused Colescott to present these issues with a crass, cheeky sense of humor and almost hallucinogenic imagery. Sprinkle in some appropriation from art history and American popular culture, along with the occasional flashes of self-reflection and autobiography (see Bad Habits from 1983), and voila: you’ve got an artwork by Robert Colescott.

Colescott is extraordinarily productive once he finds his groove. The exhibition is replete with examples of Colescott keeping his basic ingredients but playing with the proportions. Cactus Jack in El Dorado (1977) amps up the transparent use of stereotypes, in images and text, but dials back the viscous painting style for which Colescott is best known. The painting’s crisp colors and flat rendering narrow the attention to Colescott’s matter-of-fact delivery of stereotypes, inducing an appropriate discomfort. Even the scenery is a stereotype of the American landscape and desire to head west.

Detail of ***Cactus Jack in El Dorado***, 1977, Acrylic on Canvas.

Hard Hats (1987), by contrast, relishes in cloddish, lumpy figures but doesn’t reduce them to signs or stereotypes. Instead, Colescott presents a rather intimate scene of solidarity between a wife and her husband, a construction worker and his coworkers, Americans and their fellow citizens. “We’re all building this together.” While the comradery is definitely visible, so is the looming fear of collapse. Hence, the hardhats. When is this whole thing going to tumble?

Some paintings eschew any immediate story altogether. Sleeping Beauty (2002), a large diptych centrally mounted in the exhibition, appears more interested in marks rather than images. Reduced and swift, the marks made on the canvas tempt the viewer to decipher any specific reference but are ultimately illegible. The painting has a sweeping sense of time that is enhanced by its large scale. It invokes the history of recording touch, from cave paintings to Abstract Expressionism, but isn’t particularly located in the specific project of America that concerns the rest of his work.

These paintings, however, are examples of Colescott’s deep cuts. They meander slightly from his primary “one-two punch” strategy: presenting the audience with cherished imagery and symbolism that connects them to their childhoods and rosy-eyed views of America, then immediately injecting the garish, foul costs of that imagery without any clear path towards reconciliation. They get the sweet and the bitter.

***Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White***, 1980, Acrylic on Canvas.

Or at least, that’s the goal. This “one-two punch” often consists of injecting Black figures into scenes in which they weren’t originally visible, like Rubens or Lichtenstein paintings. Sometimes Colescott is even more upfront by portraying white figures as Black and vice-versa. Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White (1980) is an example. Here, the famed actor/tap dancer ambles through a garden with the iconic child star of the 1930s. It could easily be a scene from one of the several movies they made together except that 1) the scene is in color and 2) their races are switched. Colecott’s intense color palette, drenched in saturation, amplifies the feeling of disorientation. The figures, however, are some of Colescott’s most realistically rendered. The result is a painting that is acutely abnormal. Besides the disarming switch of the figures’ races, the friction between the cartoonish colors (the background sunset looks like something straight out of The Simpsons) and the more focused realism of the figures confuses fantasy and reality. Don’t movies do this, too? There’s got to be a Wizard of Oz joke deep in this painting; the double entendre of switching from black and white to color when Dorothy arrives in Oz. The painting contains a remarkable stillness, as if frozen in suspended animation. A tonal remix occurs, too. Robinson’s laughter reads more like horror and Temple’s luminous enthusiasm comes off more withholding and cautious.

Left: ***Bad Habits***, 1983, Acrylic on Canvas. Right: ***The Judgement of Paris***, 1984, Acrylic on Canvas

They aren’t all hits, however. The Judgement of Paris (1984) uses the same “one-two punch” but just comes off rushed. Colescott had a fine line to walk: how to employ clear strategies of appropriation but not become utterly formulaic. The Judgement of Paris wears its formula on its sleeve: steal a title and composition from a canonized painter, usually a white male, and make one or all the figures Black! That’s a fine place to start, but The Judgement of Paris doesn’t really go anywhere with it. It doesn’t transcend this formula. The paintings have to offer more than the sum of their parts, and with Colescott they usually do. If not, the humor flattens, the point is cheapened, Colescott’s hard-earned voice is lost, and the painting quickly sums itself up. Yawn.

However, the final room that contains The Judgement of Paris does present other work that successfully complicates Colescott’s practice. Colescott’s signature oeuvre relies on this “one-two punch” that the viewer, ironically, is continuously hit over the head with throughout the exhibition. The idea being that Colescott shows us what these symbols from history books, Disney movies, and magazine advertisements really mean. He, the insightful artist and enfant terrible, reveals the truth of our complicity to us. Without him, perhaps we’d be lost in our personal fantasies and delusions of grandeur; fantasies in which we’re the heroes, of course. That’s fine, but it’s just fine. The show becomes richer when Colescott points that outward perception a little closer to home, making tidy, moral judgments tougher to deliver. After all, it is his work that relies quite heavily on stereotypes, on appropriating charged imagery that already exists only to alter it slightly, if at all.

***Lone Wolf Trilogy (Strutting his Stuff, Checking It Out, Yes Virginia)***, 1976, Graphite on Paper.

Perhaps Colescott never completely developed his own unique strategy for creating images outright. Whether it’s through Rubens or Shirley Temple, Colescott almost always needs a pre-existing vehicle through which to express his ideas and attitude. A series of drawings called Lone Wolf Trilogy (1974) makes this compromise well. Colescott steals the stereotype of a dapper, randy wolf, originally made popular by famed animator Tex Avery. With a lengthy and lascivious grin, the wolf is always standing confidently, puffing on a cigar (shout out to Freud), and dressed to the nines. In case it wasn’t already clear what the wolf is hungry for, Colescott draws an obvious dick print in the wolf’s pants. His legs spread wide exacerbate his intentions: he’s ready to deliver.

***Lone Wolf in Paris***, 1977, Acrylic on Canvas.

Colescott uses one of these drawings as a template for the painting Lone Wolf in Paris (1977). Here, the wolf is dancing with a blonde woman at a restaurant. Orbs of light (spotlights?) focus on the couple as the wolf dips the woman, an iconic and erotic position in salsa dancing. His once obvious erection is obscured the bent body of the woman, but sexual symbols linger. What else could those stiff candles, slowly dripping milky wax, be there for? The shadow underneath the dancers, an amalgam of intertwined forms, predicts more shapes and contortions that the dancers will take on later when they find someplace a little more private.

Of course, the wolf is Robert Colescott. Whether it’s how he saw himself, or how he wished he did, or both, who knows. Regardless, what’s successful about these drawings and the resulting painting is their sharp humor and lack of judgment. Colescott understands the pleasure of being a horndog and the resulting complications of it. It’s possible that the work in this room reveals Colescott to be even more reflective. What if stereotypes are often unfair representations with real consequences and pleasurable to slap onto others? If one needs a clear takeaway or lesson from an art exhibition (I don’t), this one offers a useful quandary: how do we attempt to make a better world for each other, whatever that means, while accepting our innate appetites to segregate and flatten each other into caricatures? What if America isn’t as pretty and fluffy as we’re sometimes told it is, but that’s because we aren’t either and never will be? Not in some high-minded, academic way, but in our tedious, daily negotiations with our egos and various thirsts?

In a culture where image management is high currency and many people, perhaps artists most egregiously, are constantly manicuring their morality on “the public stage” like a bird preens its plumage, Robert Colescott reminds us that manicures only go so far. In fact, they could even be detrimental in their disguising of the malformed and grisly impulses that run through all of us. Like all good art, Colescott’s work provides an opportunity for integration: to work on a better, more equitable world for all while acknowledging the quiet rumble in our bellies at the cheap pain of others; our animal eyes glowing in the dark.

Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, Raphaela Platow, and Matthew Weseley, was organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The traveling exhibition is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum through October 31, 2021. For additional information and related programming, visit the museum’s website.

Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in central Florida. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.