I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Jacksonville for the first time last month. It is a relatively small three floor museum that you can easily get through in an hour. There were very few visitors when we were there (it was the end of the day on a Saturday) so we had no trouble seeing the collection. The one floor is their permanent collection, the next is their rotating exhibitions and the last floor was an interactive children's zone. The rotating exhibition was the most interesting to me. It was a collection of three artists from different time periods who used black to unify and transform found objects.

Chakaia Booker used different types of tires and transformed them into 360 degree sculptures that brought to my mind sea creatures and barnacles. These pieces evoked different references from different angles and were very dynamic. The museum used strong lighting to bring out the contrast in the forms between shadow and light. Unfortunately this washed out my photographs so you can not see the full effect in my images.

While Booker’s work reminded me of underwater objects Laura Fensterstock transformed actual underwater objects with black paint so completely into Victorian floral decay that at first I could not tell what the underlying objects were. She also used black paper and charcoal to create floral pieces. These cabinets were my favorite pieces. Fensterstock was the youngest of these three artist.

The exhibit was centered around Louise Nevelson as sort of the originator and oldest of these artists. Her pieces came from found objects (mostly wooden) rescued from the city streets. She used the black paint to unify the pieces and put the focus on the contrasting textures of the objects. These works were the least interesting to me as they were not as transformative. It was hard for me to look past the original objects.

This bench was on the fourth floor in the children’s area. I thought this was a clever design for a spacial divider/bench back. Reminiscent of the exhibit before it transforms pool sticks into something else through the use of repeated colors and pattern.

View of an adjacent downtown building from the top floor of the museum.