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Florida State University’s School of Dance and the Museum of Fine Arts are delighted to announce “The Quilts of Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill.” Conceived and developed by School of Dance Professor Anjali Austin, the exhibition highlights quilts designed and crafted by her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Gussie Beatrice Arnold Hill, a Tallahassee native.

Talamh agus Teanga engages the Irish language in contemporary creative practice to reflect on our interconnected worlds. Through visual art, dance, film and performance, these Irish artists ground their work in the ethos of fite fuaite, the Irish phrase meaning, “interwoven or inextricably connected.” Their artistic practices reflect on the deeply interconnected and dynamic relationships between people, language, land, and sea. This exhibition gathers artists engaged with land-based practices who are both native speakers as well as learners of Irish in a celebration of the rich history and vitality of Irish language, culture, and art. January 25th to May 18th, 2024.

This project is sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture, the FSU Council on Research + Creativity, Culture Ireland, FSU’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Center, FSU’s Department of Art History, and an Emigrant Support Programme Heritage Grant through the Government of Ireland’s Global Irish Program.  

Additional funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the Florida Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Curated by Dr. Kristin Dowell

Featuring:
Kari Cahill
Ceara Conway
Liadin Cooke
Dorothy Cross
Miriam de Búrca
Katie Holten
Siobhán Ní Dhuinnín
Méadhbh O’Connor
Éimear O’Keane
and Kathy Scott, The Trailblazery

SCAP is led by Professor Denise Bookwalter. Denise works in a range of print media including traditional and digital processes, artist’s books, installations and dimensional prints. Her work has been exhibited in a variety of venues nationally as well as internationally. She received her BA from Northwestern University and her MFA from Indiana University in Printmaking. Sarah Scarr joined SCAP in 2021 as the press manager. She is a writer, book artist, and translator. She produces artist books as Two Trick Pony Press & Bindery, which has released collaborations with Sophie Strohmeier, Sarah Panlibuton Barnes, Dee Dee Behind, and others. She has an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama, and degrees in Creative Writing from Columbia University and the University of Alabama.

November 30th – May 18th, 2024

One of the primary missions of MoFA is to collect and preserve artworks for the study and enjoyment of current and future patrons. This exhibition, which includes a very small selection of the over 7000 works in the care of the museum, celebrates five decades of collecting and illustrates the deep connections members of our community have to these objects. Like so many vital resources on our campus, the collections at MoFA are enriched through donors, alumni, faculty, and students. As you engage with this eclectic selection, we invite you to consider the things you choose to collect, your connections to these artworks, and what work you would preserve for the future. January 11 to March 30, 2024.

The history of textile and fiber arts is defined by transmission – the exchange of knowledge, custom, and practice from person to person, culture to culture, and generation to generation. Today, technology has fundamentally shaped the nature of these exchanges, impacting the creation, presentation, and interpretation of artistic traditions in unprecedented ways. Opening August 31, 2023, at the Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts (MoFA), Intertwined: Labor and Technology in Contemporary Textile Art calls attention to the dynamism of textile-related practice through the work of contemporary artists. Working across various interdisciplinary lenses and media, these innovative artists explore themes of labor and agency that simultaneously highlight and subvert our expectations. By blurring the perceived boundaries of tradition in both tangible and intangible ways, this exhibition challenges viewers to consider new, inclusive possibilities for artmaking at a critical time.

Curated by Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Annie Booth, Intertwined features the work of Tawny Chatmon, Jeffrey Gibson, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Ahree Lee, Kate Nartker, Yvonne Osei, Aaron Rothman, Carrie Sieh, and Shaheer Zazai, with a critical focus on process and materiality. August 31 to December 16, 2023.

Exhibit Support is provided by the Ann M. Stevens Excellence Fund for Textile & Costume Arts, managed by the FSU Foundation.

Women at War. Partial installation view, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, 2023. Photo Credit: Ivan Peñafiel.

The Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts was honored to present Women at War, curated by Monika Fabijanska and on loan from the Fridman Gallery (NYC), on view from July 13 to October 28, 2023.

Women at War features works by a selection of the leading contemporary women artists working in Ukraine, and provides context for the current war, as represented in art across media. Several works in the exhibition were made immediately following February 24, 2022, when Russia began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; others date from the eight years of war following the annexation of Crimea and the creation of separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” in Donbas in 2014.

War is central to history. History has been written (and painted) by men. This exhibition provides a platform for women narrators of history and also examines gendered perspectives of war. Many artists in this exhibition struggle with the notion of victimhood and pose the question in what way women have agency during war.

Participating artists:

Yevgenia Belorusets

Oksana Chepelyk

Olia Fedorova

Alena Grom

Zhanna Kadyrova

Alevtina Kakhidze

Dana Kavelina

Lesia Khomenko

Vlada Ralko

Anna Scherbyna

Kateryna Yermolaeva

The future of the South is on our minds. With the ample creative praxis in the South today, we called for the submission of artworks for this juried exhibition by artists who think of their work as a lens through which we can consider the future of our region. Anyone who self-identified as Southern was eligible to apply. After much consideration, and out of over two hundred submitted artworks, guest jurors Dana-Marie Lemmer and TK Smith selected the thirty-six pieces you see on display for the exhibition. June 1 – July 15, 2023.

Exhibiting Artists:  Donald Morris Bied, Christa Capua, Kate Chassner, Carmen DeCristo, Virginia Derryberry, Adam Farcus, Houston Fryer, Susan C. Gregory, Sal Guastella, Jodi Hays, Geneva Lark Hutchinson, Susan Jedrzejewski, Nancy Jane Lee Jones, Jeremiah Jossim, Kaius Kirby, Zdenko Krtić, Maya Krtić, Topher Lineberry, George Lorio, Cora Nimtz, Leah Patton, Solar Surf Club, Kimberly Riner, Jennifer Seo, Rylan Steele, Laura Tanner, Rachel Trusty

Dana-Marie Lemmer is the executive director and curator at Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, Alabama. Lemmer is a published writer and has curated independent projects focusing on various professional interests including: the (under)representation of emerging and female artists; regionalism and contemporary practice in the South; and creative placemaking as a catalyst in social and economic development.

TK Smith is a Philadelphia-based curator, writer, cultural historian, and the Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation. His writing has been published in Burnaway, ARTS ATL and Art Papers, where he is a contributing editor. Smith recently curated Looming Chaos at the Zuckerman Museum of Art as an inaugural Tina Dunkley Fellow at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.

Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts is pleased to announce Lilian Garcia-Roig: Plein-Aired Histories, on display from May 15 to June 3, 2023. 

Lilian Garcia-Roig is an internationally acclaimed artist known for her lush and vibrant landscape paintings. In this new series, painted on site in Georgia, she considers the legacies of the South and the ways history imprints on place. Garcia-Roig was recently named the 2023-2024 Lawton Distinguished Professor, the highest honor the university bestows on a faculty member.

Curated by Grace Aneiza Ali, Are We Free to Move About the World explores how contemporary artists engage with the passport – an archive, document, symbol, object of migration, and instrument of mobility with control – to reflect one’s freedom of movement, or lack thereof. This exhibition examines how works by key contemporary global artists trouble the passport as agents of privilege, inequity, and control. This exhibition aims to investigate how artists treat the passport as an object of inquiry, both precious and stripped of its meaning, unpacking it as an urgent response to the global migration crisis. February 2 – May 20, 2023.

Un sentimento di libertà | A Feeling of Freedom, curated by Tenley Bick, celebrates the diverse identities and experiences of “new Italians” in portraits and digital paintings by the contemporary Afro-Italian artist Luigi Christopher Veggetti Kanku (b. 1978–). Conceived in relation to the artist’s international exhibitions of the digital artworks shown, which he organized in response to the inattention to Afro-Italian artists in arts institutions in Italy, this exhibition also includes new expressionist portraits that invite viewers to contemplate a feeling of freedom that comes from rethinking constructs of nationhood, identity, and belonging. January 19 – May 6, 2023.

The be/longing was an exhibition of works by Florida State University’s 2023 MFA graduating class Jenae Christopher, AnnaBrooke Greene, Camille Modesto, nik rye, Chayse Sampy, and Chansong Woo. Hosted by the Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition focused on their shared considerations of being in the state of longing regarding the diaspora, community and home. April 14th – May 6th, 2023.

Found footage filmmaking is a practice involving reappropriating and remixing previously shot or created materials for new, innovative purposes. This new exhibition, curated by Dave Rodriguez, traces international trends and histories of found footage filmmaking over the past several decades. 

Filmmakers working in this tradition utilize many different methods of transforming moving images—from physically manipulating motion-picture film to juxtaposing disparate content through clever editing to glitching digital video and video game software—to critically examine its original meaning, context, and cultural significance. Artists featured in this exhibition incorporate materials from a wide spectrum of sources including Hollywood films, reality television and sitcoms, news broadcasts, home movies, archival footage, immersive online worlds, and computer desktop displays. At the heart of all these works are questions that encourage deep analytical readings and challenge our collective ways of consuming and finding meaning in visual culture.

This exhibition will be divided into three phases – “Cinematic Surfaces”, “Video and its Discontents”, and “Expanding Screens” –  which will unfold between January and March 2023. Each phase will feature a unique slate of artists whose work reflects different kinds of source materials and different styles of creative practice. January 12 – March 18, 2023.

Artists in the exhibition include:   

Colorful, geometric, and abstract artworks coalesce in an exploration of the formalist prints from MoFA’s Permanent Collection and features brand new acquisitions of work by Edival Ramosa, José Luis Rochet, Domingo López, and Elí Barreto. June 9th-December 10th, 2022.

Centering Naiad Press (1973 – 2003), a Tallahassee press dedicated to lesbian literature, as a community center, this exhibition will engage student-generated research, archival ephemera, and oral histories. June 9th-October 29th, 2022

The oral history collection can be accessed at diginole.lib.fsu.edu. The PEN & Inc project site can be viewed at lgbtoralhistory.create.fsu.edu/naiadpress.

MoFA’s 2022 exhibition, “Trust & Transformation at the Circus: 75 Years of Flying High,” asked viewers to “marvel at the feats of wonder and expand their understanding of the circus as a space in which athleticism and ambition, daring and dedication, and precarity and persistence unite . . . to inspire awe.”

In turn, Arts4All teaching artist Raymond Jimenez, and classroom teacher, Marsha Rockhill challenged students to respond to the multi-media exhibition after sharing the installation, artwork, and videos of circus performers with their students.

Jimenez asked the young artists to portray what “circus” meant to them and guided them as they created realistic posters and abstract paintings. Using colored pencil and watercolor, they drew artistic lines and shapes and developed the works with lively color.

The students were encouraged to work freely and be as “fantastical, realistic, or abstract” as they wanted. In the end, “the students became ringmasters of their own imaginations,” says Jimenez.

“I have had the privilege of being an outsider allowed on the inside,
searching for beauty, meaning, and myself.”

For eight decades, Bruce Davidson has documented people on the margins. A master of mood and nuance, his images show us the universalities of not just joy or grief, but also things more difficult to capture – contemplation and hope.

Bruce Davidson: Love and Longing features more than fifty original photographs from many of the artist’s most acclaimed series, including Brooklyn Gang, Subway, Chicago, Central Park, Florida – Daytona Biker Week, and the Birmingham Museum Project.  This exhibition was made possible through the support of an anonymous donor, the Council on Culture & Arts, and the Florida Department of State – Division of Art & Culture. January 13 – March 19, 2022.

Combining American pop culture and traditional Korean iconography, Jiha Moon’s ceramics explore issues of global identities and the construction of personal narratives. Utilizing humor and repeated icons and motifs, Moon builds her own rich visual language. Many of the symbols in her work speak to the complex identities Moon navigates as a Korean-born, Atlanta-based artist. In Korean culture, peaches are considered ghost-repelling symbols of vitality and immortality, while in the United States, they are emblematic of Moon’s home state of Georgia. The fortune cookie, which has become synonymous with Chinese American restaurants, can be traced to Japanese bakeries in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Moon also repeats the banana throughout her work – a reference to Andy Warhol’s iconic Velvet Underground album cover and a derogatory term experienced by some second-generation Asian Americans. Understood as “yellow on the outside, white on the inside,” Moon calls out this harmful trivialization of rich and complex identities in her work. Moon’s ceramics take on particular potency now, as an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes has given rise to a national conversation about the experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. January 13 – March 19, 2022.

This exhibition was first organized by the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Special thanks to Tina Ruggieri, Assistant Curator at AEIVA, for generously sharing research and insight into this work, and to Laney Contemporary. This exhibition is funded, in part, by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Division of Arts and Culture.

THIS PRESENTATION AND EXHIBITION IS FUNDED, IN PART, BY A GRANT FROM SOUTH ARTS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS AND THE FLORIDA DIVISION OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS.

Join us for a special exhibition celebrating the 75^th anniversary of FSU’s Flying High Circus. Marvel at the feats of wonder and expand your understanding of the circus as a space in which athleticism and ambition, daring and dedication, and precarity and persistence unite to empower performers and inspire awe in their audiences.

Since its founding in 1947, FSU’s Flying High Circus has enjoyed worldwide recognition for its brilliance and creativity. Through countless Home Shows and Halloween performances, summers at Callaway Gardens, over fifteen appearances on national television, and sell-out tours across Europe and the Caribbean, Flying High athletes have earned their reputations as being among the hardest working students at Florida State.  It takes a lot to be a circus performer, but students and alumni repeatedly reflect on the importance of trust – trusting oneself, trusting one’s partner, trusting one’s apparatus – to achieving the magic that animates each act: a transformation from the everyday and ordinary into the amazing and extraordinary.

“Trust & Transformation” features an array of photography and video installations, interactive displays, and historic and contemporary circus costumes together with original drawings by the celebrated costume designer Miles White, vintage circus posters, and works of art on loan from the Howard Tibbals Circus Collection and the Ringling Circus Museum.  This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the staff, students, and alumni of the FSU Flying High Circus, The Ringling, Howard and Janice Tibbals, the Council on Culture & Arts, the Florida Division of Art & Culture, and FSU’s Council on Research & Creativity. January 13th –  March 19, 2022.

During quarantine, Linda Hall and Becki Rutta documented the impact of the pandemic on Tallahassee through a series of performances and interventions in local malls, parks, and other shared spaces. This exhibition includes masks, photos, and videos from this ongoing project.

The past year has been a time of dis-ease. The deadly and unpredictable nature of the pandemic, contentious elections, environmental crises, and righteous protests over racist crimes have combined to bring social anxiety to a distressful extreme. This installation integrates sculptural work by Linda Hall with photography by Becki Rutta to document this moment.

“Anxiety Masks” is a series that Linda Hall began in April 2020. Unlike most face coverings, they conceal the entire head and sometimes the whole body. “Anxiety Masks” offer a form of protection analogous to the ubiquitous medical mask, providing shelter from the world for those who wear them. Virus safeguards are met, but they also protect against violence and discrimination. The sculptures theoretically disguise differences such as race and gender and make everyone equal. Idiosyncratic (a wasps nest formed out of pages from William Bartram’s Travels) and yet anonymizing (inverted hoods negating the KKK), masks replace the individual experience of expressive legibility.

Becki Rutta’s photographs explore this body of work in varied environments—some private, some public, some commercial, some recreational—to see how they are transformed by their contexts. Becki gave birth to a daughter in the midst of the pandemic, and she is now raising a child who has little opportunity for social interaction, let alone with people not wearing a mask. The visual cues on which we traditionally depend for communication are muted. Emerging self-identities cannot orient themselves around smiles or frowns. In their place, we meet from a distance inscrutable, half-covered faces (from the escalator at the mall, from the hiking trail in the woods, from across the freezer aisle). Exquisitely crafted, elaborate, and whimsical, “Anxiety Masks” are comforting for some and alienating for others.

The compulsive process of adornment manifests in beauty, humor, and mystery. These surface textures cover a well of worry. Social Distance simultaneously displays the anxiety of these times and the hope for a better future.

Monday, August 23rd – Saturday, December 11, 2021. 

A Shared Body, a shared responsibility, a shared experience, a shared need. As humans, we can impose ourselves onto our waterways through commodification, pollution, and control. The projects in A Shared Body push back against the violence and imposition of the historic and ongoing impacts of colonialism and racism as they reclaim, protect, defend, and dream of a future of equity and access.

The artists in this exhibition invite viewers to consider the spiritual, physical, and ever present connections we feel to water and what it means to the human condition when those connections become strained. Ways of Water / Wash Over, a poem by Heid E. Erdrich commissioned for A Shared Body, serves as a guiding text for the show. Erdrich is an Ojibwe poet registered at Turtle Mountain, and several of her poetry collections are available to read in the show’s reading nook.

A Shared Body was curated by Annie Booth and Meredith Lynn. Artists in this exhibition include Andrea Carlson, Jim Denomie, Heid E. Erdrich, Courtney M. Leonard, Cannupa Hanska Luger, William Pope.L, Calida Garcia Rawles, and Sarah Sense. The exhibition was installed by Kelly Hendrickson, whose creativity and ingenuity is indispensable. Jean Young coordinated loans, artwork shipments, insurance, and other essential arrangements. Preston McLane is the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts and contributed to many tasks, both great and small. Paradigm designed the graphics, and the font used for all text was designed by Andrés Felipe Ramíez.

 Monday, August 23 – Saturday, December 11, 2021. 

More films have been made about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other figure in history. What is it about this man that intrigued filmmakers, actors, and audiences throughout the 20th century?

Napoleon’s story arc is epic in scope and dramatic opportunity. It is a narrative that spans his idealistic youth as a Corsican nationalist and revolutionary in the French army to the height of his power as an ambitious emperor to his eventual ego-fueled downfall. These plot points are punctuated by shifting love interests and awe-inducing battlefield set pieces.

Napoleon at the Movies is a collection of posters that advertise these films to specific audiences around the world. Part of what has made Napoleon’s character so enduring in performance is its changeability – in the archetypal story of rise and fall, each filmmaker can find a point of view that makes the story newly relevant. This same flexibility is present in the posters: the image that compelled moviegoers in East Germany to see 1970’s Waterloo is quite different from the one that spoke to an audience in Cuba.

Through the lens of these films and the posters that typify them, much can be understood about the cultures, moments, and histories that contributed to their making. Throughout the world, the 20th century was marred by wars, economic depressions, and the brutalities of authoritarian governments, each of which was accompanied by prolonged periods of social unrest. Napoleon’s legacy is difficult to comprehend in 2021 as we revisit the limitations of his liberal ideals, the violence of colonialism, and his embrace of slavery. These posters tell us what twentieth-century audiences might have seen in Napoleon and how national identities were projected and performed through him.

Napoleon at the Movies features more than forty original posters created between 1908 and 1989 from sixteen countries, including Argentina, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Egypt, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania, and Spain. The exhibition also includes displays of rare books and materials from FSU Libraries’ French Revolution & Napoleon Collections to aid in exploring the history of self-fashioning and myth-making that surrounds Napoleon. August 23rd – October 30, 2021.

In the Spring of 2021, Arts4All resident instructor Amy Richard partnered with Annie Booth, Program Coordinator at the Florida State Museum of Fine Arts (MoFA), to participate in the My Art My Way program. Through the program, Sharon Karim’s class at Godby High School had the opportunity to create work inspired by a virtual visit to the Museum. Amy and Annie first took the students on a virtual tour of artworks exhibited in MoFA exhibitions Memento Vitae and What It Takes; Amy then lead guided discussions about specific artworks in an effort to “stretch” observation and analytical skills followed by hands-on projects. Students experimented with making imagery using four main processes: drawing, painting, printmaking, and cyanotypes—an early photographic “blueprint” process. The overarching goal of this residency was to work with students to strengthen fine motor (hand) skills as well as observation skills through intentional looking and “focusing” activities while also providing enjoyable experiences with a variety of expressive processes and mediums.

The FSU Department of Art is pleased to announce the 2021 BFA Exhibition “Discursive Anthology” hosted at the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts. April 22nd. April 16th – April 22nd, 2021. 

“Discursive Anthology” highlights recent work by graduating BFA students:

Zachary Dobbins, Grehan Edmunds, Isabella Falbo, Myah Freeman, Melissa Gonzalez-Lopez, Cole Hancock, Keilana Hoffstetter, Caroline Kuhlmeier, Olivia Sanderford, Gabrielle Simpson, Carolyn True, and Morgan Wegner.

The College of Fine Arts at Florida State University is home to seven units: the Departments of Art, Art History, Art Education, and Interior Architecture and Design, the Schools of Dance and Theatre, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Over one-hundred faculty members across these areas produce vital creative and scholarly research that can range from original works of choreography to a book on the colonial architecture of Puerto Rico.

There is no simple way to characterize the incredible work done in the College, but we all share an understanding that creativity fundamentally expresses our humanity. The work of generating and studying our cultural heritage is essential, and it demands rigor, resources, and care. It takes discipline. It takes patience. It takes humility. It takes collaboration. It takes tools and technology. It takes libraries and archives. It takes knowledge of skills and languages. It takes a willingness to rise to the challenges of finding and making and sharing.

“What It Takes” brought together all of the units of the College in a celebration and exploration of the power of research in the arts. The exhibition was originally intended to take place in the museum. The global pandemic moved it online, which has generated an opportunity for MoFA to do what we do best: creative problem-solving. In addition to this digital exhibition, throughout the spring semester we will host a range of online activities, convenings, and programs.

This exhibition was conceived with the help of a committee of faculty members from across the College. We thank Tenley Bick (Department of Art History), Jessica Ingram (Department of Art), Yelena McLane (Department of Interior Architecture and Design), Caleb Mitchell (School of Dance), Aaron Thomas (School of Theatre), and Pat Villeneuve (Department of Art Education) for their time and creativity in imaging this exhibition. January – May, 2021.

In partnership with the Innocence Project of Florida, MoFA is proud to present a suite of prints from Voices from Outside: Artists Against the Prison Industrial Complex, a portfolio project in honor of the 10th anniversary of Critical Resistance, organized by the Justseeds Radical Arts Cooperative (2008). January – March, 2021. 

The United States has the largest prison population in the world—over two million inmates. In Florida, 50 prisons house over 175,000 men and women at an annual cost of more than $5 billion. Florida has an incarceration rate of 833 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), which is among the highest rates in the United States and more than twice the average of other wealthy democratic countries.

Since the 1970s, the rate of most serious crimes has dropped or remained stagnant, yet prisons have been filled at double capacity. People of color, the poor, the illiterate, the mentally ill, youth, and women are the primary occupants. One in three Black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine will spend time in prison or jail. The majority of those entering prison are convicted on non-violent drug charges.

Between 1980 and 2019, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700%, rising from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 222,455 in 2019. The Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, Florida holds over 2700 women—nearly twice its rated capacity—and is the largest women’s prison in the world. This phenomenal growth is due to mandatory drug sentencing laws, conspiracy provisions, a dysfunctional parole system, inadequate legal representation, and huge profits made by the multinational corporations servicing the prisons.

During the summer of 2008, the Pittsburgh-based Justseeds Radical Arts Cooperative completed the collective portfolio Voices From Outside in association with Critical Resistance‘s ten-year anniversary conference in Oakland, California. “Critical Resistance Ten” was a gathering of activists, educators, and allies of prisoners who came together to organize and promote efforts to abolish the United States prison system.

Artists featured in this project included the Amor y Resistencia Collective,  Jesus Barraza, Brandon Bauer, Kevin Caplicki, Melanie Cervantes, Etta Cetera, Lydia Crumbley, Alec Dunn, Andalushia Knoll, Nicolas Lampert, Josh MacPhee, Colin Matthes, Mazatl, Claude Moller, Jesse Purcell, Favianna Rodriguez, Erik Ruin, Meredith Stern, Pete Railand, Mary Tremonte, and Bec Young.

We use flowers to mark both beginnings and endings. We give bouquets at graduations and send them to provide comfort during illness or recovery; we decorate with flowers on our wedding day, and heartfelt arrangements fill the room at funerals and memorials. In art, the cut rose can serve as a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death, while a pink carnation can symbolize eternal love. In the proposition of these dualities, the reality of life is laid bare: there is no celebration without pain.

It is difficult to put the year 2020 into context at such a short distance. Once the hurt, stress, and fear subside, the remarkable triumphs of individuals to develop a vaccine, vote in record numbers, and protest systemic racism will undoubtedly influence how we consider the overwhelming loss, grief, and frustration that marked the year. Will we remember 2020 for what was begun or what was ended? While we wait to see, we offer Memento Vitae, a small selection of works that hold space for our grief and our joy as we continue on together.

This show was inspired by an exhibition concept proposed by Kailea Myrick, a graduate student in the Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies program. January – March, 2021. 

Students graduating from the Department of Art showcase their thesis projects in the Museum of Fine Arts. These students have worked for years to develop the technical skills that enable them to explore ideas and concepts as part of their own artistic practice. Working closely with faculty mentors from the Department of Art, these students have developed these projects over the past year, and they illustrate the range of processes and concepts that engage emerging artists. November – December, 2020. 

Natalie Cevallos’s paintings investigate unrealistic beauty standards, unattainable body image, and elite lifestyle choices. In a social media heavy society, Cevallos explores self-concept and identity while alluding to the subcurrent of toxic culture.  By exploring themes of beauty, gender norms, sensuality; she employs bright, appetizing colors sourced from advertising and their desire to sell and consume body image. In this series, she explores the qualities that accompany the “successful” Instagram feed, for and by women. These paintings reflect her relationship with her own body image and the effects resulting from nearly a lifetime of online influence and indulgence. These compositions serve as a metaphor for the destruction of the female psyche as they are simultaneously being enticed into their own consumption.

Eli Goldstone’s work examines objecthood and gesture to determine what differentiates humans from tools through a series of contradictions. The work is theatrical, and engages the viewer through humor and hyperbolic situations. The theories of art in the everyday and object autonomy connect his body of work as a whole. His performances overcomplicate each task, emphasizing the gestural uses and autonomous behaviors of everyday objects being used. Through performative gestures, the re-contextualization of these objects he disassembles, repairs, rearranges, crawls and interrupts the object and space. The process is usually documented as a video, and is later installed within the object. The object is an artifact, while the video is a record of human influence. Each piece guides the viewer to perceive these objects as extensions of the body and human gesture. As a result, the ways in which viewers are taught to do things are examined. The process of re-contextualizing is ultimately used to question education and the act of teaching.

Yadriel Hernandez Allende (b. San Juan, PR) is a multi-media artist and researcher currently residing in the United States. Their childhood in the commonwealth of Puerto Rico– and subsequent displacement to the States­– sparked an interest in Caribbean identity theory. Motifs first established by Spanish-colonial agricultural, architectural, and military efforts, artists in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-centuries transformed the Caribbean picturesque to profit from lack of interest in the island’s populace outside of capital gain. As a continuation of these traditions, their image alterations and collages transform archival imagery and family photographs. Noting differences in the display and contents of works in art institutions depending on their location lead them to apply methodology seen in visual sociology when presenting works.

Through the performed embodiment of lola clay, showgirl, sublime subject/object, star of their own one-woman show Hannah Kae explores the severed qualities of allure and abjection as they pertain to the societally constructed ideals of gender and sexuality. With colorful, camped up installations and performances the artist focuses on the particular feminist curiosity aroused by spectacular images of the female body, generating curiosity as a figure for feminist desire to think about the fetishized female body, gender, and performance. They explore the slippages and discrepancies that occur from the relationship between the expectations placed on the female body and their non-binary identity, highlighting recurring patterns and shared experiences of trauma enacted on female bodies.

Through the use of text-based practices, Ariel Raskin makes work representative of memories that make her feel vulnerable. She discloses her most secretive hopes, fears, struggles and desires to form an intimate connection with the audience. An emotional bond is created with her text “as viewers discover something they should not know about a stranger, and feel as if they were trusted with sensitive information.” Her work confesses realizations to an audience going about their daily routine by letting them act as voyeurs. By exposing her innermost thoughts, Ariel asks her audience to consider their own vulnerabilities. Confessing these emotions is a form of catharsis for Ariel as she desires to cultivate vulnerability between strangers.

Through the combining of creature puppets, film, makeup, and designed environments, Diana Robertson creates stylistically distinct atmospheres that elevate the suspension of disbelief that comes with the use of puppets. Robertson uses these creature puppets to discuss themes of mental health. While the creature puppets are infused with modern materials (i.e. servo motors and 3D printed elements), they are constructed as hybridizations with traditional forms of puppets. Robertson’s works reference early 20th century European films with German Expressionism and Soviet Montage being her primary influences.

Curated by Elton Burgest, Kicks Off explores the fast and fabulous world of sneaker collaborations.  Selected silhouettes feature the creativity and vision of established artists and emerging talents paired with major brands to enliven familiar forms and break new ground in fashion, function, and fun. October – December, 2020.

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. October – December, 2020. 

do it began in Paris in 1993 as a conversation between curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. They were curious to see what would happen if they started an exhibition that could constantly generate new versions of itself. To test the idea, they invited 12 artists to propose artworks based on written “scores” or instructions that can be openly interpreted every time they are presented. The instructions were then translated into 9 different languages and circulated internationally as a book.

Since then, hundreds of artists have been invited to submit instructions, and do it has taken place all over the world from Austria to Australia, from Thailand to Uruguay, from Canada to Iceland giving new meaning to the concept of an exhibition in progress. Each do it exhibition is uniquely site-specific because it engages the local community in a dialogue that responds to a set of instructions. As a result do it is less concerned with copies, images, or reproductions of artworks, than with human interpretation. No two iterations of the same instructions are ever identical.

do it is an exhibition conceived and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. do it and the accompanying publication, do it: the compendium, were made possible, in part, by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and with the generous support from Project Perpetual and ICI’s International Forum and Board of Trustees.

Embracing the current moment around the world, MoFA is using a hybrid presentation model with do it instructions in person and online. The museum executed new instructions every week, featuring the work of Ai Weiwei, Uri Aran, Mel Bochner, Elmgreen & Dragset, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Joseph Grigely, Mona Hatoum, Jonathan Horowitz, Koo Jeong-A, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Suzanne Lacy, Sol LeWitt, Erik van Lieshout, Lucy Lippard, David Lynch, Jorge Macchi, Annette Messager, Ernesto Neto, Yoko Ono, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Nicolas Paris, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Raqs Media Collective, David Reed, Tobias Rehberger, David Robbins, Peter Saville, Hassan Sharif, Shimabuku, Anton Vidokle, and Hannah Weinberger. 

In partnership with FSU’s Winthrop King Institute, MoFA was delighted to be host an installation of original comic book drawings by the celebrated Congolese artist Pat Masioni. The exhibition presented illustrations from three projects: Vertigo Comic’s Unknown Soldier; Living Level 3, a graphic novel series sponsored by the World Food Programme; and UFFO Somali, a publication of the London-based nonprofit PositiveNegatives. On display are a suite of original black and white storyboard drawings together with examples of the published comics. August -December, 2020. 

Pat Masioni was born in Mikuzi, in the region Bas-Congo in 1961. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. He began his career as a professional illustrator in Democratic Republic of Congo, where his books sold more than 250,000 copies. Since moving to France in 2002, in addition to illustrating for popular titles by Dark Horse and DC Comics, he has published graphic novels on the war in Rwanda, contributed art work to humanitarian educational initiatives by the International Red Cross and UNICEF, and drawn for “Samba Diallo,” a comic published in the magazine Planète jeunes.

This autobiographical statement appeared in Unknown Soldier #13, dated October 28, 2009.

My name is Patrice Masioni Makamba. I am Congolese, born in Mikuzi, Bandundu province in the early 1960s, to the Mbala tribe. I do not exactly know when I first started drawing – from the moment I could hold a pen, I imagine. I published my first drawing at 14, supported and recognized by two Spanish priests who helped my family financially support my studies. Through their grace I learned painting, ceramics, and sculpture in Kinshasa and eventually created a ceramic bas-relief for the cathedral in anticipation of the first visit by Pope Jean Paul II there. These priests, they gave me the tools I needed to live, and I am deeply in their debt for this. It was not long before I was a professional illustrator and doing quite well for myself. My books were big sellers, and my name was not unknown. Mostly I worked on religious books, but I also published political cartoons in newspapers. Art had set me free from poverty and obscurity, but it was not long before it also brought me trouble. Over the course of my life as an artist in Kinshasa, DRC I was arrested on multiple occasions, sometimes by child soldiers. I have been beaten for my drawings. And yet, still, others suffered worse. People disappeared. People died. I have seen things no one should see, things I will never forget. In 2002, after receiving death threats from people with the will and power to back them, I – literally overnight – fled for France and began the hard path of the political refugee. There was no time to consider this decision. It was extremely difficult to start over in another country. My past, my family, my friends, my home and money, they were all gone. Over time I rebuilt a reputation as an illustrator in France, found an apartment and had my family join me, but it wasn’t easy. The culture here is very different from my own (the French sense of humor is a mystery to me), the struggle to assimilate is constant and it reminds me of how much I miss my home. I very much look forward to becoming a French Citizen so that I may return to DRC to visit, safe and free. I have been very happy to be working on Unknown Soldier. I can feel from inside the story. Sometimes, it reminds me of my past, and true situations I have seen with my own eyes. Joshua Dysart’s script depicts a notable reality, and I feel free and expressive in drawing them, all while adding a touch of African style to the endeavor. I can only hope that American audiences come to care for the truths these stories speak to.

For more information about Pat Masioni, African comics, and political cartooning in Africa:

Pat Masioni’s Blog (Le Blog de Pat Masioni): http://patmasioni.canalblog.com/

Africa Comics: http://www.africacomics.net/

Afropolitan Comics: https://www.afropolitancomics.com/en

Planetary Republic of Comics: https://professorlatinx.osu.edu/planetary-republic-of-comics/

Michelle Bumatay, FSU Assistant Professor of French specializing in sub-Saharan African and diasporic literature and cultural production, including bandes dessinées (French-language graphic novels known in French as BD) by cartoonists from Africa and Europe: https://mbumatay.com/

For more information about the Winthrop-King Institute’s Fall 2020 Global Africas Conference: Global Africas: Congolese Literature, Music, and Art in the 21st Century.

Pat Masioni Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_8BI2OhuJA

Video Interview with Pat Masioni: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64QeWoQAAg

Every spring, MoFA showcases the work of graduating students, but the pandemic forced a rescheduling this year. This exhibition featured the work of these recent graduates who have now transitioned to new alumni. August – September, 2024. 

The show features work by Spring 2020 Masters of Fine Arts graduates Skip Brea, Caroline Ennis, Camden Goddard, Channing Gray, and Patrick Shevlin. The included works are selections from their respective MFA thesis projects and reflect three years of intense study in the classroom and studio.

Spring graduates of the Bachelors of Fine Arts program are also included. Urielle Blanchard, Sam Bigelow, Emilie Chavarie, Kenny Nguyen, and William Leech all have pieces on display.

These students weathered a highly unusual final semester and found ways to remain creatively engaged through a difficult time. Join us in celebrating their great accomplishments.

It is a New Landscape out there. It is a natural landscape, which we now share with a new life-threatening virus. It is a cultural landscape activated through righteous protests against racism, violence, and injustice. It is a digital landscape in which we gather and communicate. We perceive through the lenses of innumerable cameras that it is a new landscape, but we do not yet understand it. Museums, art galleries, and cultural organizations must confront the challenge of seeing, engaging with, and translating the experience of the new landscape. Technology will play an outsized role in how we come to terms with it, how we close the distances.

We are not the first to face such a daunting task. At the risk of being too literal, MoFA is offering this virtual exhibition of landscape photography as an opening salvo in its campaign to address the new landscapes and test our ability to thrive within them. We have brought together historical and contemporary works by a range of artists, each of whom transforms a familiar landscape into something unexpected and revealing. These transformations were often by means of novel photographic techniques or interventions, but always with the intent to reorient viewers to a change, an interposition, a mark that denotes humankind’s struggle to apprehend this world in which we live together.

New Landscapes features more than thirty photographic works on loan from selected artists and from MoFA’s Permanent Collection, including newly acquired works by Dionne Lee, Shoog McDaniel, Keisha Scarville, and the Wheelchair Highwaymen. The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of public programs including virtual tours, live-streaming artist interviews, and “Make It at MoFA” events in which guests can create their own landscapes to be featured in a custom web gallery.

 “Virtual curating presents a range of new and different challenges. Rather than building, painting, lighting, and labeling in the museum’s physical spaces, we have worked alongside graphic designers and programmers to fashion a gallery out of code in which we have installed digital images of dozens of wonderful works,” said Preston McLane, MoFA’s Director. “We have Zoomed. We have recorded voiceovers.  We have grappled with ornery fonts, links, and image resolutions.  And this week, we roll it all out.”

New Landscapes was made possible through the support of the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Council on Culture & Arts, Visit Tallahassee, and the FSU College of Fine Arts.

July 23 through October 31, 2020.