Focusing on a seldom-seen side of one of the most indelible American artists of any kind, “Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum” will be the biggest and widest-eyed survey of Dylan’s visual artwork ever presented in the U.S. when it opens in Miami this week. After an earlier run two years ago at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, the exhibition at the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University will feature close to 200 paintings, drawings, and iron sculptures by a familiar figure better-known for the way he wields words.
The show spans some 60 years of Dylan’s career and includes what an exhibition description calls “immersive and interactive displays” that “simultaneously illuminate the context of his artistic evolution, in tandem with Dylan’s musical and literary canon.” It was curated, for its 2019 premiere in China and now in its amended form in Miami, by Shai Baitel, MAM’s artistic director.
In a press release about the show, the ever-elusive and enigmatic Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, said, “Seeing many of my works years after I completed them is a fascinating experience. I don’t really associate them with any particular time or place or state of mind, but view them as part of a long arc; a continuing of the way we go forth in the world and the way our perceptions are shaped and altered by life. One can be as profoundly influenced by events in Morretes, Brazil, as they can be by the man who sells El País in Madrid.”
