Embodied

The figure is one of the oldest records of our existence as a species capable of storytelling; depictions of the human body constitute some of the oldest subjects in art. EMBODIED expands on the definition of the human figure by bringing together diverse representations in painting, sculpture, fiber, video, and mixed media by some of the most exciting artists working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.​​

Highlights include mixed media work Still Life with Quilt and Drinking Gourds (2021) by William Villalongo, who merges tropes from the European still life painting tradition with elements from Black histories, pop culture, and mass media to bring awareness to “the body as an abstraction, one of resiliency and flux that rewrites itself as it moves through the world.” Also on view are Tony Tiger’s Time and Place: Egmont Key – Indian Territory – LA – Oklahoma (2019), the first abstract painting by a contemporary Native American artist acquired by The Ringling; and Cauleen Smith’s film Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me (2017), which draws from the movement of Afrofuturism and borrows elements from an exquisitely layered Egungun (a costumed dancer who appears at celebrations for the dead in Yoruba societies) to acknowledge Florida’s fraught past.

Additional important works address the formal elements of figurative art while exploring the artists’ inner psyche through portraiture and representation, including those by Benny Andrews, Marisol, Jessica Osceola, and Jake Troyli. Other works embody the artist’s personal experiences and broader observations on socio-political issues through abstraction and non-objective art—a type of abstract art that does not represent specific objects, people or other subjects found in the natural world—including those by Natasha Mazurka, Linda Stein, William Pachner, and Yuriko Yamaguchi.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website