The Orlando Museum of Art presents Floridiana: Material Culture from the Sunshine State, an exhibition of more than 130 works from Gary Monroe's collection of Floridiana, which the museum describes as having been collected, researched and expanded over many years.
The works are said to offer insight into the act of collecting and to provide a portrait of a bygone Florida. The objects on view range from material rooted in Seminole ancestry and heritage to citrus and theme park memorabilia, tourist souvenirs, commercial photography and roadside ephemera, along with familial, devotional and spiritual items and self-taught Outsider art.
According to the museum, the objects testify to actual times, places, industries and people, while also floating in a collective imagination of what Florida is supposed to be, since many were made to sell an image of leisure, sunshine and exotic nature. The museum says the collection assembles a portrait of a state suspended between memory and desire, myth and reality, and that beauty and cliché, nostalgia and exoticization, and acclaimed appeal and controversial history can coexist within the same space of a private collection made public for the duration of an exhibition.
Press release issued by Orlando Museum of Art:
https://omart.org/news/floridiana-collecting-treasures-oddities/
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