Naples art galleries

Art Exhibition | 10/16/21 – 05/15/22
Works from the Jay H. Baker Collection | Baseball Heroes
Naples

Baker Museum Naples
5833 Pelican Bay Blvd Naples FL 34108
239-597-1111

Baseball Heroes: Works from the Jay H. Baker Collection will grant museum visitors exclusive access to one of the most extraordinary collections of baseball memorabilia outside of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in an immersive multimedia installation that celebrates baseball as an integral part of American life for nearly 200 years.

This exhibition celebrates five of the sport’s greatest players: Babe Ruth Lou Gehrig Joe DiMaggio Mickey Mantle and Derek Jeter. These players who spent most or all of their careers with the New York Yankees transcend partisan team passions and generate unparalleled adulation. Baseball Heroes examines these icons not only as baseball players but as human beings who rose from humble or modest backgrounds and through their talents and dedication ascended to the pinnacle of achievement.

The eminent cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” In many ways the sport encapsulates the qualities traditionally linked with the American spirit: pursuit of a dream hard work confidence ambition and the ability to capitalize on opportunities. Baseball Heroes presents original documents and artifacts coupled with historical photographs film from iconic moments in the sport and dynamic large-scale graphics to inspire visitors to reflect on baseball’s influence on American identity.

More than 100 iconic artifacts from the unparalleled collection of Jay H. Baker are included in the exhibition beginning with objects such as Ruth’s earliest known game-used bat Mantle’s high school yearbooks and first signed professional contract and the jersey worn by Jeter for his Yankees debut in 1995. Seminal moments in the history of the sport are represented in the contract by which the Red Sox sold Ruth to the Yankees giving rise to the legendary “Curse of the Bambino” and the uniform worn by Don Larsen when he pitched the only perfect game to date in a World Series.

Through this extraordinary collection of public and private artifacts and documents visitors will gain a heroic as well as an intimate view of the players under consideration and witness how they contributed to the game and to American life.

Art Exhibition | 10/16/21 – 05/15/22
Selections from the Art Collection of Patty and Jay Baker | Love in All Forms
Naples

Baker Museum Naples
5833 Pelican Bay Blvd Naples FL 34108
239-597-1111

As a complement to Baseball Heroes this exhibition will paint a fuller portrait of noted collectors and philanthropists Patty and Jay Baker through the presentation of selections from their remarkable collection of fine art. From the Impressionist painting of Claude Monet to the art deco portraits of Tamara de Lempicka to the abstract sculpture of Henry Moore the works in this exhibition represent some of the most significant art historical movements of the past 150 years.

Art Exhibition | 10/21/21 – 07/17/22
Works from Florida Artists | Florida Contemporary
Naples

Baker Museum Naples
5833 Pelican Bay Blvd Naples FL 34108
239-597-1111

Florida Contemporary an annual exhibition organized by Artis—Naples The Baker Museum highlights the work of notable visual artists active in Florida. The artists invited for its ninth iteration are Colombian Gonzalo Fuenmayor Hawaii-born Akiko Kotani and California native Noelle Mason. With their distinctive backgrounds and artistic preoccupations these three artists provide an array of compelling works in diverse media that testify to the state’s vibrant art scene as well as its ever-changing human geography which is continuously injected and bursting with multicultural creative talent.

The exhibition provides insights into these artists’ unique visual lexicons in three galleries each one dedicated to a single artist. Overall the show focuses on their enduring visual investigations into a range of crucial aesthetic notions including transcendence beauty and visuality as well as topical questions regarding identity belonging surveillance and border crossing. This show creates a space for viewers to become both inspired and exalted while simultaneously allowing one to engage with critical dialogues about the role that art plays in this multicultural nation and in our connections to nature land and geography.

Image detail of artwork from the Florida Contemporary Exhibition
Gonzalo Fuenmayor
Born and raised in Barranquilla Colombia in 1977 Gonzalo Fuenmayor lives and works in Miami. He has created an astonishing body of charcoal drawings and photography imbued with a sense of magical realism. His work poignantly addresses Latin America’s colonial past and its legacy as well as the multilayered cultural influences that have impacted both his artistic practice and Latin America as a whole. With a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Fuenmayor has built his professional artistic career in the United States over the past two decades.

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Image detail of artwork from the Florida Contemporary Exhibition
Akiko Kotani
Hawaii-born fiber artist Akiko Kotani (b. 1940) is professor emerita of art at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and resides in Gulfport. She was named Pittsburgh Artist of the Year in 2013 and in 2019 Artist Laureate by Creative Pinellas. From her massive site-specific installation pieces crocheted with plastic trash bags to minimalistic stitched works that distill impressions of nature and landscape Kotani’s art exemplifies the boundless innovations taking place in contemporary fiber arts. She has significantly contributed to redefining fiber arts’ relationship to the fine arts transcending the customary boundaries between the two. Stitch by stitch she integrates traditional women’s handcrafts into stunning contemporary artwork.

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Image detail of artwork from the Florida Contemporary Exhibition
Noelle Mason
Born and raised in San Diego California multidisciplinary artist Noelle Mason (b. 1977) is associate professor of art at the University of South Florida Tampa. Her art is the result of her intensive research into surveillance technology and issues of border control. She works in a wide variety of media ranging from cyanotypes and collodions to handwoven tapestries. Mason holds an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she has garnered many awards and residencies throughout her career including the South Arts Southern Prize (2017) and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Artist Grant (2013). She held a residency at the esteemed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine among other commendations.

Art Exhibition | 12/18/21 – 07/24/22
Ocean Gleaning | Pam Longobardi
Naples

Baker Museum Naples
5833 Pelican Bay Blvd Naples FL 34108
239-597-1111

Pam Longobardi has channeled her lifelong love of the ocean into an artistic practice that transforms the mountains of plastic debris that wash up on beaches around the world. For more than 15 years Longobardi has utilized found ocean plastics as her primary source material arranging hundreds of plastic pieces into meticulous wall-mounted artworks or turning them into monumental floor-based sculptures. She refers to this body of work as the “Drifters Project.” Working collaboratively with communities around the globe Longobardi has cleaned beaches from Hawaii to Greece to Panama and dozens of locations in between removing tens of thousands of pounds of plastic from the environment and converting them into thought-provoking works of art that shed an unflinching light on the effects of global consumption on the natural world.

Longobardi is regents’ professor at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She was the recipient of the prestigious Hudgens Prize in 2013 and has exhibited her artwork in museums and galleries throughout the United States and globally. Longobardi is represented in public and private collections including the Maier Museum of Art Lynchburg Virginia; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Bentonville Arkansas; and many others.

Artis—Naples The Baker Museum is proud to partner with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida to enhance the educational impact of this exhibition in our community.