NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale Announces New Exhibition Series: The Daily Act of Art Making

The inaugural “The Daily Act of Art Making” series at NSU Art Museum features solo exhibitions for South Florida artists Matthew Carone, Jaime Grant, and Elizabeth Thompson. Beginning February 25th through August 4th, 2024, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will launch a new series of exhibitions, The Daily Act of Art Making, consisting of three concurrent solo exhibitions of South Florida artists who have dedicated their long careers to the daily act of art making. The title is derived from the anthology of writings and statements by German painter Gerard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting (1995), in which he recounted his lifelong dedication to process, method, and private reflections. Each of the three artists selected to inaugurate this series follows a distinct practice honed by their daily practice. The exhibition is curated by Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater.

Matthew Carone (born 1930, lives and works in Fort Lauderdale), whose daily-executed gestural abstractions have made him a mainstay in the South Florida art scene. Carone’s works range from pure abstract expressionism to figurative expressionism and the latest patterned, almost calligraphic abstractions guided by an innate sense of movement and rhythm. He describes his process as akin to automatic writing, “except that it is the spontaneous image I seek as a consequence of a gesture…The dialogue with this discovered image is what I find most challenging; keeping the painting in a state dictated more by the subconscious than by rational, disciplined procedure.” Carone considers himself self-taught as he attended University of Miami as a music major and had no formal art education. However, he learned from his older brother Nicolas Carone, who was a well-known Abstract Expressionist painter and through his close friendship with Roberto Matta, an influential surrealist and abstract painter.

Panamanian artist Jaime Grant (born 1965, lives and works in Miami), a long-time South Florida resident, discovered in his 40s that he had a sudden impulse to draw, paint, and sculpt. He believes he was visited by a spirit who drove him to create more than 5,000 paintings and build machines reflecting the struggle between good and evil. Grant’s work covers broad themes related to the human experience and struggle including historical situations and national and international events, each depicted with magic realist tones grounded in surreal facades. For this solo exhibition Grant has created a vibrant room of fluorescent paintings and an installation of found-object sculptures of buildings and motorized trucks, as well as battery operated boats that will patrol a row of fish tanks. Grant is a member of Les Vagabonds Collective, a group aiming to bridge the gap between the artist and the art world.

Elizabeth Thompson (1954-2023) commanding canvases of mysterious narratives are on view in two galleries in this posthumous exhibition. Thompson’s plan for the installation of this exhibition was inspired by the subterranean Ancient Roman Garden Frescoes from the Villa Livia (39 BC) in the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome. The first gallery is an immersive installation of her paintings of Florida’s Everglades inspired by her sojourn in this natural preserve at the invitation of the National Park Service’s Artists in Residence Program in 2006. These naturalistic paintings are grouped with her later surreal Movie Theater series of eerily empty outdoor movie theaters that intrude into the wilds of a tropical landscape.

Her subsequent Beautiful Disasters paintings, with their ominous storm clouds, comprise a second room. Thompson painted these by pouring paint onto unstretched canvas on the floor allowing the “accidents” created by the poured paint to dictate the eventual subject and composition of the work. After studying painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1976, Thompson pursued her career in Paris, New York and South Florida. Her paintings were featured in 17 solo exhibitions and multiple group exhibitions.

Situated midway between Miami and Palm Beach, NSU Art Museum is located in the heart of Downtown Fort Lauderdale. The Museum is a premier destination for exhibitions and programs encompassing all facets of civilization’s visual history and is widely known for its significant collection of Latin American art, contemporary art with an emphasis on art by Black, Latin American and women artists, as well as works by American artist William Glackens and the European CoBrA group of artists.