Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College
March 2019
Degas: The Private Impressionist
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is one of the most revered artists of all time, a French Impressionist renowned for his paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings that take the viewer deep into the world of late 19th century Paris. Interested in the psychology and everyday lives of his subjects, Degas is famous for a number of recurring themes in his work, foremost among them the subject of dance and ballet, in particular. Indeed, more than half of his works depict dancers. Degas…
Find out more »SUN + LIGHT
SUN + LIGHT is a collection of works from the series Everyone Loves the Sunshine by contemporary visual artist Charles Williams. Captured through emotionally charged and compelling imagery, works featured in this exhibition juxtapose Williams' own personal encounters, past and present, with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. In doing so, he attempts to strike a balance between both the peaceful and violent protests of the movement and of varied expressions of power. Williams work has been exhibited nationally and has…
Find out more »Celebrate La Francophonie Day at the Polk Museum of Art
Vive la France! Inspired by its Edgar Degas exhibition, the Polk Museum of Art will celebrate French language and Francophone culture with its La Francophonie Day Celebration from noon to 4 p.m. on March 23. The celebration pays tribute to the 300 million French speakers living on five continents, and offers a variety of themed activities, including an opportunity to create impressionist art. Children and adults will get to create landscapes of Paris, Montreal and Port-au-Prince using chalk pastels. An…
Find out more »Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts
Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts explores the golden age of handmade books, some of which employed elaborate gold leaf decoration and intricate ornament. The show includes examples from medieval European Bibles, prayer books, psalters, books of hours, choir books, missals, breviaries, and lectionaries. Examples of the materials—gold leaf, parchment, vellum, and minerals which were ground into pigments—used by artists to create these extraordinary pages are also featured in the exhibit. Most of the works date from the thirteenth through the eighteenth…
Find out more »April 2019
Inside the Masters’ Studios: Richard Haas Dioramas
Although best known as a master of trompe l’oeil, illusionistic painting, Richard Haas, a Wisconsin-born painter who now resides in New York City, also began creating diorama boxes in the 1960s as a means of exploring in intimate, three-dimensional scale the inner worlds of the great masters of art history. An unusually personal show, Inside the Masters’ Studios: Richard Haas Dioramas presents each Museum visitor with his or her own individualized viewing experience. Haas’ meticulously rendered and deeply-researched dioramas re-imagine the famed…
Find out more »August 2019
Across the Atlantic: American Impressionism through the French Lens
This extraordinary exhibition, drawn entirely from the collection of the Reading Public Museum, explores the path to Impressionism through the nineteenth century, and the complex relationship between French Impressionism of the 1870s and 80s, and the American interpretation of the style in the decades that followed. Paintings and works on paper help tell the story of the new style of painting which developed at the end of the nineteenth century—one that emphasized light and atmospheric conditions, rapid or loose brushstrokes,…
Find out more »
