Contemporary Art

1. John Sonsini "Fernando,Ismael,Gabriel,and Israel" 2004 Oil on canvas

While Art Basel Miami, the largest and most important contemporary art fair in the country has been raking in the press as well as the big bucks, the adjacent city of Fort Lauderdale, with much less fanfare, has been silently growing by leaps and bounds. Up until the mideighties Lauderdale was the country's go to destination for college kids on spring break. Today, real estate, both commercial and residential, is the face the city wears. Plush hotels, from W to the Atlantic to the il Lugano and the Ritz Carlton, followed by a plethora of condos, restaurants, night clubs, boutiques, and cultural institutions - you got to feed and entertain the people - are springing up like pimples on a teenager's face. And why not! Fort Lauderdale, long the yacht capital of the country, and the country's second largest gay vacation mecca, shares the same coastal beaches as Miami, has as many, if not more inland waterways, a lot less people, and at least for now, is considerably more reasonable than Miami on your pocket book.

The city's most popular and populated cultural institution is the Museum of Art/ Fort Lauderdale, a division of Nova Southeastern University.

Relatively unknown since its beginnings in 1958, the museum located at the end (or is it the beginning?) of Las Olas Boulevard the city's main street was all but moribund until its current director Irvin Lippman, imported from the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio in 2004, was tapped to head the institution. Having previously cut his teeth as Assistant Director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth - he also did a stint at the National Gallery in Washington, DC - with nothing to lose and everything to gain, jumped started his tenure at the museum by cleverly bringing in several blockbusters exhibitions.

[Fernando, Ismael, Gabriel and Israel (2004), by John Sonsini]

Lippman's choices turned both town and museum upside down. Crowds from all over the state of Florida, and then some, came to see Diana: A Celebration and Tutankhamun and The Golden Age of the Pharaohs. With more than one million people having visited the museum since 2003, the museum now holds the record as the most visited art museum in Florida.

Like art museums the world over who have been digging into their permanent collections, as well as exhibiting the artworks of local collectors to counteract recessionary times - shipping alone can break the bank - the museum has mounted the art collections of prominent Lauderdale locals, Francie Bishop Good and her husband David Horvitz, Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea, from Palm Beach, California. Presented under the title With You I Want To Live - a title taken from a 2006 Tracey Emin neon wall sculpture - the exhibition's 118 eclectic works (mostly paintings) by some 100 artists, virtually fill the museum's two floors. Locksley and Shea are on 2nd floor. Good and Horvitz inhabit the first. Each collection obviously assembled by a ...