MOCA exhibit celebrates the odd beauty of summer
It's a rare summer show of art that resembles a clutch of pink ponies and purple dinosaurs masquerading as inner tubes and drifting unmanned toward the deep end of a swimming pool. It's a pool that has been temporarily hushed because its aquamarine waters were spiked with a surfeit of stinging chlorine and other antidotes to bodily pollutants.
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 08/03/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

Of land and sky
South Florida artists James Couper and Bill Burke bring the environment to life in works on display at FIU
There's a dizzying shift between the enormous acreage of earth and sky and the infinitesimal tiny web of bird and frog arteries that fills paintings and sculpture now at the Art Museum at Florida International University. But whether the subject is acres or arteries, the locale is mainly South Florida in these portraits of flora and fauna by FIU professors Jim Couper and Bill Burke.
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 07/27/2003 03:00 AM EDT)

Works by mentally ill intensely imaginative
Rodney Thornbland has drawn the Battle of Hastings with warriors crammed as tightly together as characters in Where's Waldo? But these warriors are riveted to an apocalyptic pack of crucifixes, darkening a bluish sky that leans over a lavender field packed with dozens of soldiers on horseback. More waves of fighters collide in Thornbland's drawing, which is spiked with as many swords as rhythmic patterns of line, and layered over a patchwork quilt of joyous paint box and playground hues.
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 07/27/2003 03:00 AM EDT)

In Warhol's world, wild life finds colorful urban setting
Andy Warhol came to collage with a chic sense of fashion and a drop-dead flair for color that Matisse would envy. No need for Warhol to dabble with the tattered scraps of newspaper that Picasso used to inaugurate 20th century collage or with the creased maps that American surrealist Joseph Cornell employed for his magically collaged boxes. Such dull stuff would be too tainted with the passage of time for Vanishing Animals, on view at the Dorothy Blau Gallery, a little-known series of unique paper...
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 07/24/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

Global crossing
The works of Edouard Duval-Carrié and Adolph Gottlieb, on display at the Lowe, blend non-Western elements in their unique styles
Unfolding this month at the Lowe Art Museum is a tale of two painters enthralled by African art. For one, Adolph Gottlieb, such a fascination impelled him to create his own language of stripped-down forms. Then he boxed these sleek little circles and spirals into that stylish grid beloved by Modernists everywhere, as well as by graphic designers in thrall to Martha Stewart.
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 07/20/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

These cheerleaders root for their own team
Not even a cheerleader squad worth triple its weight in gold charm bracelets could compete with the brassily buoyant squad Luis Gispert has assembled.
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 07/20/2003 03:01 AM EDT)

Drawn to paper
Michele Oka Doner's work takes on a new dimension at MIA.
( BY ELISA TURNER, elisaturn@aol.com, 06/15/2003 03:01 AM EDT)