Recent Acquisitions first opened in March, and this display is its second incarnation, which swapped out works, for example, by Matthew Barney, Tom Wesselmann, and Anna Gaskell for a series of floating watercolors by Richard Tuttle and Lewis Baltz’s photographic paean to urban geometries (both are minimalist in gaze, although the latter’s precision held my interest longer than the amorphous splotches found in the former).

Also of particular note: Carla Klein’s Untitled, an oil with a vista of the horizon and a highway angling into it. The Dutch painter uses space as deftly as she uses the brooding blues and grays that portion the picture into nomad lands -- no one lives there and yet their stillness beckons. Although significantly abstract, I saw a shipyard, smoke, and clouds dissolving into one another in this unframed canvas, and one can lose herself in the remote beauty of Klein’s shapes.


Ingrid Calame’s #226 Drawing was equally absorbing. Made with color pencil on Mylar, the sketch traces and conflates the pathways of the Los Angeles River and the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. The layered end-result is beautiful and gives the work the look of an embroidered cloth that, from a distance, is also a kind of intuitive aerial map. Up close, there is almost something floral about its arcs.

In this go-round there is still the presence of locally based artists, and their aesthetics are wide, not only in their choices of materials but in how they are filtering the environments in which they make their work. By environments I mean the hamlets and cities that comprise South Florida, which is almost always depicted as a glib hub of nightclubs and crime and skin, but is, in reality, so much more interesting than that.

And since these artists live here, and are not just swooping in with boom mics and cameras for the short haul, several are able to consider the nuances that give this place its sundry textures, not the least of which is the ubiquitous presence of organic forms.

They are in abundance in Adaptation: A Visual Diary of a Mutating Language. Assembled in a kind of exquisite-corpse fashion by Julie Davidow and Carol Prusa, the five vertically hanging panels unspool from ceiling to floor, and they are scrolled with silver point, graphite, and acrylic.

As a whole, these panels present a gender-flecked display of natural and human physiologies: eggs and neurons swirl around each other, tendrils gleam, and something like stars gather towards a science-meets-magic effect. There is little question as to from where the exotic sub-tropicalia of it all stems, even if only in part.


It will be interesting to see if the MAM continues collecting works that veer away from the directly representational, especially as it marches towards its new digs, slated to open to the public in 2012 at Miami’s Museum Park.

The specific dates of when this last crop of acquisitions was purchased is unknown, but “recent” to me implies that many were selected under the stewardship of Terence Riley, the museum’s latest director and one whose tastes are clearly injecting a welcome vigor into the MAM’s predilections.

Emma Trelles is an arts writer in South Florida.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS runs through Oct. 11 at the Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; noon-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; and until 8:30 p.m. on the third Thursdays of each month. Admission: Adults $8; seniors $4; free for children under 12 and students with valid ID. Free every second Saturday. 305-375-3000 or www.miamiartmuseum.org.

Like artists through the ages, Lovell is a visual storyteller. While his work is representational, his concept is original and runs deep through the veins of the African-American community. In large formats, he reveals the tales not told, the people that history forgot, except for remnants of their lives left in aging black- and-white photographs.

Influenced by watching his father developing and printing photographs in the family darkroom, Lovell uses his dad’s images and old photographs that he collects as reference for life-size conté, oil-stick and charcoal drawings created on tall, worn-wood planks that he finds. He then creates installations that concentrate on the period of time from the Civil War to mid-20th century by combining the images with found objects such as old radios, books, architectural elements, household goods and tools.

“The really orgasmic part of a project,” Lovell said, “is choosing the objects and seeing how they enliven the image and how the image enlivens the objects. I learned about flea markets with my grandma when I was a kid. She would buy and paint flowers on the objects.

"I choose objects that look like something my great aunt or grandma might have in their cabin. Someone used it on a daily basis, in some mundane but meaningful ritual," he said.

In the beautifully shaded and rendered drawings, one can almost feel the spirit of each subject, as dignified faces peer out from wooden surfaces and the hands imply a gesture or feeling. Lovell’s aim is “to evoke a sense of place, to be able to feel the spirit of the past for a moment, to feel the presence of these people.”

In 28M, a disc is perched atop an old radio, while a portrait of a fashionable young woman seems ready to tap out a jazz beat. An antique spinning wheel stands in front of a drawing on red clapboards in All Things in Time. The pensive woman taking a break perhaps from her labors reminds us of the importance of patience, and that things happen in the universe’s time and not ours.


From an immense piece of wood, five women in uniforms and aprons look directly at the viewer in Servilis, a word derived from the Latin servus, which means slave or servant. Their straight posture and confident body language seem to rebel against the five stuffed black crows perched on pedestals before them. The Jim Crow laws in the South institutionalized prejudice toward the black community, but these women, who are perhaps household servants, project the strength and dignity to patiently overcome those injustices.

Whitfield Lovell’s work is not only technically excellent but gives a voice to subjects who can no longer speak for themselves.

“My work is more abstract than realistic,” Lovell said. “The concept of spirituality — that which is left behind when someone is no longer here — I am acknowledging and honoring the lives of ordinary people. I seldom make images of famous people.”

In Ryan Toth's Teen Drawing I class, students did sketches of common objects, still lifes and figures, and the quality of the drawings was impressive, in particular a picture of a clarinet by Katy Short-Hamiwka and one of a corkscrew by Gabrielle Wilde.

Children are often limited in the size of their artwork, but the camp gave kids the opportunity to work in large formats. The Space Project was a group effort of students Joshua Barron, Benjamin Barron, Ellie Bender, Lucas Cabot, Dylan Cabot, Lindsay Ehrlich, Olivia Klein, Lindsay Kuperman, Jack Shepherd, Isaiah Suriel and Miles Wang.

“Instructor Rebecca Mock put paper on the floor,” Rushforth said, “and the students painted it just as Jackson Pollock did. Then each student made his or her own spaceship that they colored, cut out and suspended out from the painting with wire.”

“I really think poetry is a living thing now for all of us,” said Coon, whose organization accounted for the smattering of senior citizens among the bohemian twentysomethings. “Poets writing for the ear and poets writing for the page -- both are opening modern literature for human beings.”

Inside, a rapt audience listened as Seaton, a poet with 13 books, and Blair, a past slam champion, took turns at the microphone. Seaton read from a page in her hand; Blair performed from memory, like a singer.

“A little-known fact is that we originally called this ‘Page vs. Stage,’ but we never meant it as a completion,” said Taylor Mali, a published poet and past slam champion who oversees a series of Page Meets Stage events at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York.

Had it been a competition, though, Blair would have won easily. Seaton’s poems were wan little things, subtle and faintly musical, and she didn’t put much oomph into the reading. By contrast, Blair was not only a master showman, but his verses were also complex and skillful – page-ready, in other words.

“I don’t think about performance as I write,” said Seaton, a former director of the creative writing program at the University of Miami. “But I do think about sound. I read the poems aloud as I write. I am so intimidated by the stage, but today I’m having so much fun with Blair, I’m reading better than usual.”


A struggling Chicago poet named Marc Smith invented slam poetry in 1984. Determined to rescue poetry from effetery, Smith showed how to attract an audience by injecting passion, politics and – most of all – competition into the live performance of poetry.

And Smith, though no longer associated with the National Poetry Slam, has succeeded. Considering the passion displayed in West Palm Beach, both on stage and in the audience, it’s not easy to remember that only 20 years ago critics were seriously posing the question: Is poetry dead?

The grim joke among the poets gathered at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1992, for example, was that only 400 people in America read poetry – and they were all poets. That year’s seminar on the work of Elizabeth Bishop, by the way, was by far the most poorly attended in Key West history.


Compare that sad memory to Saturday night’s National Poetry Slam finals at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. As the four finalist teams performed, the audience of 800 expressed its enthusiasm with all the decorum of a crowd at a Miami Dolphins game, though with less public drunkenness and fewer fistfights.

As Henry Sampson, NPSI vice president said, spoken word should get most of the credit for the revival of poetry, including traditional poetry. “Hip-hop, spoken word and slam poetry all evolved separately,” Sampson said. “But they do enhance one other, and page poetry benefits, too. It’s all a great breeding ground of words and rhythm.”

The National Poetry Slam is the largest group competition in the world. It consists of teams performing three-minute poems for judges randomly selected from the audience. The judges rate each performance on a scale of one to 10 – a one is “Britney Spears,” while a 10 is “Shakespeares,” organizers helpfully explained. The crowd frequently boos any judge awarding less than a “9.”