Guide to the Arts 2024: Best art exhibits of the season

As part of our Guide to the Arts, which published in PRIME Magazine on Oct. 6, entertainment writer Phillip Valys offered his Critic’s Picks for the best visual arts exhibits coming up in South Florida.

‘Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides’

Through Feb. 2, 2025, at Pérez Art Museum Miami; 305-375-3000 or PAMM.org.

In Calida Rawles’ acrylic painting “Release What I Will Not Give,” a woman floats face-up within swirls of the ocean while a hand reaches up into the frame from below. In “Impact,” we see a top-down view of a person attempting a handstand, the lower torso sticking out of the pool in a twisted, balletic pose. These hyperrealistic images, of course, convey deeper themes than just comfort. Water, for all its welcoming warmth, acts as a space for Black spiritual and physical healing in Calida Rawles’ new exhibit, “Away with the Tides,” mainly because of its Miami location. For her show at PAMM, Rawles tapped residents of the historically Black Overtown community to wade into a public pool and at Virginia Key Beach, a place once racially segregated, to explore themes of climate change, displacement and persistence. The act of swimming is meaningful in another way, according to the museum: For many of the coastal residents who participated in Rawles’ project, it was their “first time in the ocean.”

‘Joel Meyerowitz: Temporal Aspects’

Oct. 5, 2024-March 16, 2025, at NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; 954-525-5500 or NSUArtMuseum.org. 

In the 1950s, photo pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson described “decisive moments” that are gospel to photojournalists: Cameras, he wrote, capture events that are “ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.” There’s arguably no better disciple of the decisive moment than Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938), a street photographer whose new show, “Temporal Aspects,” is part of the NSU Art Museum’s newly acquired collection of 1,800 photographs. The poetic melancholy of his pictures is matched only by his patience to catch them: In “Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, 1967,” we see a snapshot of a conversation between two people through the window of what seems to be a fine-art gallery. In “Paris, France, 1967,” we see a warm dusk light set over a crowd of Parisians watching a street performer spitting a brilliant plume of fire. In “The Hammock, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1982,” we feel the windswept coast even before we see the hammock twirling in the breeze. There’s even a Florida nod or three, like his sepia-toned “Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1977,” in which Meyerowitz captures a tranquil day at a beachfront swimming pool.

‘Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing’

Oct. 26, 2024-March 9, 2025 at Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; 561-832-5196 or Norton.org. 

Mike Tyson emerging from retirement to fight YouTuber-influencer Jake Paul isn’t the only thrilling event in the boxing world this fall. The timely “Strike Fast, Dance Lightly” features 100 works spanning the 19th century to present day, from bare-knuckle fighting to today’s megabucks stadium bouts, and charts the spectacle, politics, violence and psychology that boxing had on international photographers, sculptors and painters. Jerry McMillan’s black-and-white photo, “Judy Chicago Boxing Ring,” for example, spotlights a female boxer mugging and looking tough in the ring, while Andres Serrano’s photo, “Floyd Joy Mayweather Jr.,” is a vivid close-up of the boxer’s fabric-taped hand.

‘Splendor and Passion: Baroque Spain and Its Empire’

Nov. 7, 2024-March 30, 2025 at Boca Raton Museum of Art; 561-392-2500 or BocaMuseum.org.

Spain’s Golden Age brought a flourishing of art and literature, conquest and culture, from Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” to Christopher Columbus to Baroque masterpieces. The latter is the subject of the Boca museum’s world-premiere exhibit “Splendor and Passion,” on loan from Manhattan’s Hispanic Society Museum & Library, which holds the biggest collection of Hispanic art and literature outside of Spain and Latin America. On display are 57 masterworks from El Greco, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Diego Velázquez and others, many of them inspired by Caravaggio in Italy, where Baroque art originated. These paintings, many commissioned by the Catholic Church at the time, brim with dark, intense emotion and powerful drama, and feature still lifes and portraits of figures like Saint Michael the Archangel and Philip IV of Spain.

‘Akira: Architecture of Neo-Tokyo’

Nov. 9, 2024-April 6, 2025 at Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, Delray Beach; 561-495-0233 or Morikami.org.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s gorgeous cyberpunk classic film “Akira” is an astonishing work of animation, bleak and mesmerizing in its chaos, that captures a gleaming city on the edge of despair. Released in 1988, “Akira” is set in 2019 “Neo-Tokyo,” a reconstructed version of the Japanese capital destroyed in a nuclear war. While the city’s night architecture looks like a neon-splashed utopia, social unrest is everywhere: Teen gangs rule the streets on motorbikes, bombing cars and smashing windows, while armed police battle rioters and college students railing against unemployment. “Akira” passes over this urban mayhem with casual detachment, its bird’s-eye view so high that giant skyscrapers appear like tiny white blood cells. To quote one character, Neo-Tokyo is “a garbage heap made of hedonistic fools.” But it’s also imbued with vibrant color and apocalyptic mood, its animation so influential to movies (“The Matrix,” “The Fifth Element”) that it sparked an international boom in anime in the 1990s. To celebrate the movie’s influence, the Morikami will display 59 background artworks, layout drawings, image boards and concept designs used to imagine Neo-Tokyo. These world-building works are on loan from co-curators Stefan Riekeles from Germany’s Riekeles Gallery and Hiroko Kimura-Myokam of Japan’s Eizo Workshop, and the museum is the lone U.S. venue presenting the show.

Originally Published: October 16, 2024 at 12:15 p.m.