Baker Museum

Haven’t been to the Baker Museum yet? Now’s your chance. The Baker Museum is offering free admission on Sundays beginning May 17 and continuing through Sept. 6 along with Art After Hours on the last Wednesday of each month. Summer at the Baker also includes jazz in the Daniels Pavilion.

During May, five exhibitions open, seven close and 25 others continue their runs at Southwest Florida museums. In addition, the Marietta Museum of Art & Whimsy in Sarasota closes for the summer on May 23.

Naples modernist Mally Khorasantchi is featured in this year’s Florida Contemporary art exhibit at The Baker Museum. Each of her compositions in Florida Contemporary is a highly personal reaction to something that happened during Khorasantchi’s life. That’s particularly true of the artist’s four-panel oil-on-paper collage, “Rhapsodie in Blue.”

Reginald O’Neal’s best-known body of work is his Jazz Figurines Series. Paintings and a sculpture from that series are on view in Hayes Hall at Artis-Naples. “The fact that it has a musical connection made it feel really appropriate for our unique institutional context here,” said Baker Museum Chief Curator Courtney McNeil. The series originated from a random stop at a souvenir shop on a visit to New Orleans in 2022.

Southwest Florida’s museums regularly curate traveling art exhibitions as well as artworks from their permanent collections. During April, five exhibitions open, four close and 26 others continue their runs. Headlining the list is "Something Borrowed, Something New" at the Sarasota Art Museum.

During the month of March, three exhibitions open, four close and 29 others continue their runs at Southwest Florida museums, highlighted by 'Discovering Ansel Adams' at the Baker Museum.

100 years ago, the glamorous and opulent styles of Art Deco made its way across the pond and into the American art scene. One of the most prominent artists of that time was Tamara De Lempicka.

In February, 4 exhibitions open, 3 close and 32 others continue their runs at Southwest Florida museums. At the top of the list is “Growing Obsession – The Enchanting Story of Orchids in the Everglades” at Museum of the Everglades.

Baker Museum Chief Curator Courtney McNeil says that the Tamara de Lempicka retrospective is more than an exhibition of her Art Deco art. “It's also a fascinating story about Tamara herself as a person … and the identity she carved for herself in the artistic world at a time that presented many challenges to women artists in general.” Lempicka was a master marketer on par with Dali, Picasso and Warhol.

In 1901, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers were the preeminent dealers of impressionist art in Paris. They decided to organize a posthumous retrospective of an unknown post-impressionist artist. Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Jo, used that exhibition to popularize his art. A similar phenomenon is playing out with Tamara de Lempicka. Her paintings are being featured in a major retrospective at The Baker Museum in Naples.