Daily Loaf

If you have an art-loving family, this one’s for you: two family passes to St. Petersburg’s beloved Museum of Fine Arts. The first pass is good through Dec. 31, and provides free entry to the museum and to events like Lesley Dill Family Day on Nov 21. The second admits your family to one of the most talked-about shows of the season, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero (Jan. 9-Apr. 4, 2010). Botero’s paintings and sculptures, world-renowned for their voluptuous, often comic imagery, will delight adults and children alike.

Estimated value: $200. Suggested opening bid: $25

Bid on this item below: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to On the Radar, where we preview up-and-coming arts events to mark your calendar for. This weekend, a traveling exhibition organized by Chattanooga’s Hunter Museum of American Art, I Heard A Voice: The Art of Lesley Dill brings nearly 30 of the acclaimed contemporary artist’s works — with an emphasis on sculptural installations — to St. Petersburg.

Poetic and psychologically charged, Dill’s constructions often combine fabric and figures (or dress forms) with text to spellbinding effect; works featured in I Heard A Voice respond to poetry by Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu and Franz Kafka. Expect to be moved by the artist’s ideas and awed by her craft. (Pictured: “Breathing Leaves”  (2004)  Ink, thread, glue on tea-stained fabric, courtesy of the Artist and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, Canada) Oct. 10-Dec. 27, Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Dr. NE, St. Petersburg, 727-896-2667, fine-arts.org. – Megan Voeller

A traveling exhibition organized by Chattanooga’s Hunter Museum of American Art, I Heard A Voice: The Art of Lesley Dill brings nearly 30 of the acclaimed contemporary artist’s works — with an emphasis on sculptural installations — to St. Petersburg. Poetic and psychologically charged, Dill’s constructions often combine fabric and figures (or dress forms) with text to spellbinding effect; works featured in I Heard A Voice respond to poetry by Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu and Franz Kafka. Expect to be moved by the artist’s ideas and awed by her craft. Oct. 10-Dec. 27, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 727-896-2667, fine-arts.org.

Pictured right: Dill’s Breathing Leaves (2004). Ink, thread, glue on tea-stained fabric. Courtesy of the Artist and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

More of Lesley Dill’s artwork after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s fitting that one of the most high-profile events of the fall arts season is a musical adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, because lately it’s seemed we’ve all been headed down the rabbit hole. The No-Bama crowd calls for the truth about healthcare, but traffics in outright lies. The president says the so-called public option is a key aspect of his plan, then says it isn’t, then says it is. The St. Petersburg Times wins a Pulitzer for PolitiFact, then backs a mayoral candidate, Bill Foster, who believes in such “facts” as this statement: “None of Darwin’s theories can be replicated or proven in a laboratory…”
So what’s all this got to do with the fall arts season? Easy. If you’re starved for the truth, start listening to artists. Read the rest of this entry »