{"id":304492,"date":"2026-06-11T23:12:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/304492\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T23:12:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T23:12:21","slug":"south-florida-artists-scale-up-for-orlando-museums-florida-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/304492\/","title":{"rendered":"South Florida artists scale up for Orlando Museum\u2019s Florida Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

A trio of vibrant pyramids, built from almost 100 canvases, tower from floor to ceiling. Photographs explore motherhood and the American landscape. A bed of dried rose petals bears the imprint of a body. Walls are covered in hand-drawn sacred symbols. A pink installation of sculptures made of goat\u2019s milk soap is built around intimacy and well-being.<\/p>\n

One gallery after another at the Orlando Museum of Art belongs to a Miami-Dade County artist in this year\u2019s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, making the state\u2019s premier contemporary art exhibition feel unexpectedly close to home for Miami audiences.<\/p>\n

Eight of the exhibition\u2019s 12 artists and artist duos have South Florida ties, including Miami artist Francisco Mas\u00f3, whose \u201cThe Coronation of Gladiolus\u201d received the exhibition\u2019s $20,000 top prize.<\/p>\n

\"Miami Miami artist Francisco Mas\u00f3 \u201cThe Coronation of Gladiolus\u201d received the $20,000 Florida Prize. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon, senior curator at the Orlando Museum of Art, who organized the exhibition with associate curator Katherine Page, credits what she calls the county\u2019s \u201cecosystem for artists\u201d as one of the reasons that so many are from Miami.<\/p>\n

\u201cMiami has just this incredible pool of artists, but those artists are there because there\u2019s a great support system for them,\u201d she says, pointing to organizations such as Bakehouse Art Complex, Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, Bridge Red, and other spaces that provide exhibition opportunities, studios, and a community that allows practices to develop over time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you think about Miami as this ecosystem for artists, you have incredible spaces for creation,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"Coralie Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon, senior curator at the Orlando Museum of Art. (Photo courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art) <\/p>\n

Once selected for the Florida Prize, artists are given something many times unavailable to them: room to create, to push their ideas and to mount something that can be seen for an extended period of time by a range of visitors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you give artists the space to create, a lot of them want to scale up,\u201d Claeysen-Gleyzon says.<\/p>\n

While Miami may have studio complexes, what the Orlando Museum of Art offers with its Florida Prize is that local artists basically get the chance to exhibit in what amounts to solo shows in a major museum.<\/p>\n

Page, who started at the museum six months ago, says she and Claeysen-Gleyzon immediately started working on finalizing the artists that would be selected for this year\u2019s exhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we are thinking about the artists to select, we think about what spaces will work best for their work, what will highlight their work. They have room and space to grow and we work with them to figure out what that means. Many of them already have something in mind that they\u2019ve been dreaming about,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s really great to be a part of that dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Miami Miami Beach-based artist Charo Oquet\u2019s installation at the Orlando Museum of Art became an opportunity to unite works dating back to 2014 with sweeping wall ink drawings created specifically for the museum show. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

Artists aren\u2019t selected through an open call. Instead, the Florida Prize is built through years of studio visits, exhibition research and conversations as curators follow artists\u2019 careers before extending an invitation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe process to select the artists for the Florida Prize is actually something that takes several years,\u201d says Claeysen-Gleyzon.<\/p>\n

Dreaming Bigger<\/p>\n

When Mette Tommerup first visited the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, she looked at the soaring gallery walls and hoped one day she would be invited.<\/p>\n

This year, the Danish-born, Coconut Grove-based artist got her wish.<\/p>\n

Across a 90-foot wall at the Orlando Museum of Art, Tommerup assembled three monumental pyramids built from canvases dragged through the ocean and Biscayne Bay, dried in flowering trees and tossed from rooftops at dusk, surrendering part of the creative process to nature itself.<\/p>\n

\"One One of the towering pyramids in site-specific installation as part of the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art by Danish-born Coconut Grove-based artist Mette Tommerup. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

Each pyramid has a color that represents the three elements of ocean, earth and air with newly introduced gold leaf accents. The canvases, carefully arranged in structured compositions, rise in the gallery like geological formations or ancient architectural monuments, according to Claeysen-Gleyzon.<\/p>\n

\u201cI try to relinquish authorship, so my work is not all about me,\u201d says Tommerup. \u201cI try to listen to the canvases.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opportunity to be selected and work with curators to realize ambitious projects is what makes the Florida Prize such a milestone, Tommerup says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Florida Prize is a significant invitation in an artist\u2019s career to be trusted to take on these large gallery spaces at a substantial museum,\u201d Tommerup says. \u201cThis is, for most artists, the highest level of achievement in the state of Florida for an annual contemporary art survey show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Maria Maria Theresa Barbist\u2019s series \u201cDER GRUND AUF DEM ICH STEHE\u201d (\u201cThe Ground on Which I Stand\u201d) traces psychological transformation through five stages of trauma healing in psychotherapy. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

The exhibition also gives artists the freedom to experiment with new materials and approaches.<\/p>\n

Maria Theresa Barbist embraced a new process, replacing traditional canvas with industrial tarps that allowed her to work on a larger scale while embedding transferred Polaroid photographs collected over years in Miami and Austria.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time I\u2019m painting on tarp,\u201d Barbist says.<\/p>\n

For Charo Oquet, the exhibition became an opportunity to unite works dating back to 2014 with sweeping wall ink drawings created specifically for the museum show. Surrounding sculptures, assemblages and brightly colored forms make the space feel part sanctuary, part dreamscape. The drawings mark the first time the artist has worked directly on gallery walls, she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in the language of the sacred,\u201d says Oquet, who has spent nearly four decades researching Afro-Dominican spirituality. \u201cI don\u2019t want to do exactly the religious thing,\u201d she says. \u201cI want to take that idea and bring it to contemporary art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Working Working primarily in black-and-white film, Miami-based photographer Rose Marie Cromwell draws visual and conceptual references to photographers such as Ansel Adams and Robert Frank. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

Rose Marie Cromwell, who makes bodies of work about different geographies having worked in Panama, Cuba and Miami, likewise expanded her practice beyond its usual boundaries. Her gallery combines monumental photographs with the idea of what the American West looks like through a feminist approach to landscape photography. For one large piece, she hand-stitched photographs together.<\/p>\n

In another room an installation video shows her mother and her daughter climbing on rocks juxtaposes bodies and how they age. All of the work grew out of documenting her postpartum experience during the pandemic, then turning her attention to motherhood, generations and the American landscape.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that there was some power in sharing a story about motherhood with the world,\u201d Cromwell says. \u201cI had never turned the camera really onto myself or my own body or my own life. I realized as my daughter was getting older, my mother was in her 70s, and I suddenly felt at the beginning of my 40s, kind of on this hill of life that I have never really been on before, where I could more clearly see the beginning and the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"We We Are Nice \u2018n Easy transformed a gallery into a glowing pink environment built around intimacy, vulnerability and care. Husband-and-wife artists Allison Matherly and Jeffrey Noble cast their own bodies in goat\u2019s milk soap. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) Room To Experiment<\/p>\n

We Are Nice \u2018n Easy transformed a gallery into a glowing pink environment built around intimacy, vulnerability and care. Husband-and-wife artists Allison Matherly and Jeffrey Noble cast their own bodies in goat\u2019s milk soap, embracing a material that changes over time. In each sculpture, the figure holds its head in its lap.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of our work in previous years has become more controlled and manufactured looking. We wanted to introduce a medium that had more variables,\u201d says Noble, welcoming the unpredictability of a process that echoed the themes of the installation itself.<\/p>\n

\"Miami-based Miami-based artist Jessy Nite\u2019s work with durable synthetic materials and intricate knotting techniques explored resilience, preservation and the ties that bind communities together. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

In Jessy Nite\u2019s exhibition, the gallery became a warm apricot-colored environment where language intersected with sculpture. Bold phrases are stretched across walls, while monumental paracord textiles and a suspended woven vessel invite visitors to linger over words such as \u201cRetreat,\u201d \u201cEndure\u201d and \u201cSiempre.\u201d Working with durable synthetic materials and intricate knotting techniques, the Miami artist explored resilience, preservation and the ties that bind communities together, turning simple text into quiet moments of reflection.<\/p>\n

Ema Ri took a more contemplative approach, filling a darkened gallery with intimate paintings that were a meditation on transformation, grief and renewal. Beneath one canvas, a pedestal covered with dried rose petals featured an impression of the outline of the artist\u2019s body, extending the paintings into a reflection on mortality and resilience.<\/p>\n

\"Beneath Beneath one canvas, Ema Ri presented a pedestal covered with dried rose petals featuring an impression of the outline of the artist\u2019s body. (Photo by Zaire Aranguren, Rheo Creative) <\/p>\n

St. Petersburg artist Jason Hackenwerth, whose massive, suspended balloon sculpture greets visitors in the museum\u2019s rotunda, and the collaborative duo of Meredith Laura Lynn of Tallahassee and Katie Hargrave of Chattanooga, Tenn., bringing perspectives from riffs on naturalist explorations in a multi-media installation, rounded out the exhibition.<\/p>\n

The range of work presented a challenge for guest juror Jade Powers, curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, who spent an afternoon studying the exhibition before selecting the recipient of the Florida Prize\u2019s $20,000 award.<\/p>\n

\u201cI appreciated how each artist engaged with relevant contemporary questions,\u201d Powers says. \u201cWhether addressing religion, censorship, aging, the body, historical narratives, or personal and collective trauma, every installation approached these subjects in a distinct and thoughtful way.\u201d<\/p>\n

She ultimately selected Mas\u00f3\u2019s \u201cThe Coronation of Gladiolus,\u201d an installation that first appears celebratory. Gold folding panels, hanging banners and historical imagery seem almost ceremonial. A constant drumbeat and the scent of gunpowder are meant to evoke an atmosphere of a public gathering before revealing references to surveillance, repression and resistance in Cuba.<\/p>\n

The striped abstract paintings throughout the installation are based on polo shirts worn by Cuban state security agents who blend into crowds during protests, while gladiolus flowers reference the Ladies in White dissident movement. Gold folding panels<\/p>\n

For Mas\u00f3, the work is meant to make hidden systems visible.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, art should be useful,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m giving you the tools for understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Powers says selecting a single winner is a tall order. \u201c(It) is never easy, particularly when the overall quality is so strong, but spending time with both the artworks and the artists\u2019 ideas helped clarify the strengths of each presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Katherine Katherine Page, associate curator at the Orlando Museum of Art. (Photo by Heerak Shah, courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art) <\/p>\n

A Conversation Across Galleries<\/p>\n

Page says there\u2019s a deliberateness in giving over most of the museum to the show. It invites visitors who may not be frequent museumgoers into something more accessible. Visitors can also cast a People\u2019s Choice vote for their favorite Florida Prize artist.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really invites a deeper kind of thinking about the work and about which artists visitors find they connect with the most. I think that is very special.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the artists\u2019 varied approaches, Claeysen-Gleyzon says the exhibition\u2019s conversations emerge naturally.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe works aren\u2019t supposed to talk to each other,\u201d she says. \u201cBut somehow they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is inevitable that intentionally or unintentionally, the exhibition creates a conceptual content conversation and that becomes the most intriguing component of this year\u2019s Florida Prize. To get the true sense of where contemporary art in Florida stands in 2026, the Orlando survey show does just that.<\/p>\n

If you go:<\/p>\n

WHAT: 12th Annual Florida Prize in Contemporary Art<\/p>\n

WHERE: Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N. Mills Ave., Orlando<\/p>\n

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; closed Mondays. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. third Thursday of each month. Through Sunday, Aug. 23.<\/p>\n

COST: $20, $12, seniors 60 and older, $10, students with ID, $8, children ages 6 to 17; children 5 and younger and museum members free admission.<\/p>\n

INFORMATION: (407) 896-4231 or omart.org.<\/p>\n

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don\u2019t miss a story at www.artburst.com.<\/a><\/p>\n


\n \"Profile
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Amy Reyes is the Assistant Managing Editor of the Miami Herald overseeing the visuals, sports and growth teams. She also edits education plus arts, entertainment, Broward, food and race & culture.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A trio of vibrant pyramids, built from almost 100 canvases, tower from floor to ceiling. Photographs explore motherhood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-304492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}