Some years ago the Dalí Museum board and staff did some soul searching and decided that having a collection as important as ours constituted an obligation to share it with other audiences and other institutions. It was at that time that the Museum first began to loan paintings, a decision that marked the maturation of the Dalí as a museum and a new stage in the appreciation of Dalí. And our community began to enjoy the reciprocal priviledge of lending – that of borrowing. Now we bring to our own audience treasured works of art from Velazquez to Picasso.
The presentation of Dalí and Film represents several highpoints in the Museum’s history and service. First, we received greater corporate support for this exhibition than ever before. Support from the St. Petersburg Environmental Research Center, Progress Energy, Ovation by JMC Communities, M&I Wealth Management, and the Renaissance Vinoy allowed us to present this exhibition as magnificently as it was presented at the Tate Modern, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art, museums with budgets many times the size of our own. Our audience has seen a wealth of Dalí as has never been gathered before.
At the Dalí we nurture understanding of Dalí on a critical and academic level. But we also intend our exhibitions to empower our visitors on an experiential and emotional level. The impact of Dalí & Film was strongly registered among the young people of our community who submitted films for our Dalíwood Film Contest and later watched the huge and public projection of these films onto the walls of buildings downtown. These young artists have learned from Dalí that an artist can go beyond a single medium and beyond the confines of the studio, gallery and museum.
In our current exhibition Women: Dalí’s View, curators Joan Kropf and Dirk Armstrong were challenged to organize Dalí’s diverse and contradictory views of women into a survey that will allow both an instant sense of his emotional response to his female subjects and a cumulative one.
In this first year in which an American woman presents a potent bid for the presidency, what topic could be of greater interest than the powers and unlimited potential of women? We hope our exhibition will provide a framework for considering questions about our society and about the engagement of women in culture, business, science and civic life. Here, Dalí steps into the background while we invite our community, person by person, group by group to use the Museum as a place for meeting and discussion.
Coming to the Dalí Museum in October is an exhibition loaned from the Haggerty Museum, Wilfredo Lam in North America, currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami . Lam, was a Surrealist of Afro-Cuban origin, a contemporary of Dalí and among the most accomplished artists of his generation. Born in Cuba in 1902, Lam and Dalí cross paths in Madrid, Paris and New York, keeping the same friends and illustrating the books of Surrealist poets. Both artists were strongly collected in America though Lam did not enjoy a patron as generous as Reynolds and Eleanor Morse. The exhibition, as interpreted by our curators, will place Lam’s iconic paintings opposite a separate but parallel exhibition of Dalí to be called, Myth in Dalí’s Art.
Art is like water. Not only is it essential to our lives, but our thirst for it is rarely slaked for more than a brief time. We mark Dalí & Film as a current high-water mark. But more is coming. Don’t miss it. We invite you as a member to return to the well as often as you like.
Sincerely,
Hank Hine
Director
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