Naples, Florida, three ways ~ Tuesday

Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Baker Art Museum, 10am-4pm; indoor tours 11am & 2pm, sculpture garden tour 10am, $10
Lunch at Heidi’s Place (museum café) à 4pm bicycle tour of Naples, 1200 5th Ave S (Tin City), Naples; $69, 1618173989, Gmail       Dinner at Riverwalk; stop by MonKeyBuntz

 

I planned for us to spend Tuesday in Naples. We started at the Baker Art Museum. The concert hall next door was hosting a Johnny Cash tribute that evening. We didn't arrive early enough for the 10am tour of the outdoor sculpture garden, opting instead for the 11am indoor tour.

Dale Chihuly, Blue Icicle Chandelier

Our docent was a retired art teacher who assumed we knew more about art history than we do, so all her name dropping in the first gallery wasn't very interesting. This large and striking print that was part of the preparatory work for the metal gate you can see in the second outdoor shot above was the only thing that caught my eye on the first floor. 

I enjoyed the "Entangled in the Mangroves: Florida Everglades Through Installation" exhibit on the second floor more and was a little sorry we were on a tour for this part, because I could have sat and looked a lot longer. For instance, Amalia Caputo took the same walk every day for a year to photograph how the environment changed with the seasons and then put them together onto these enormous scrolls. There wasn't enough space to enroll all the treasures she saw.

Below is one of the large-scale sepia-toned landscape prints from Jennifer Basile; she left them unframed with raw edges to show the texture of the paper, as if the scene is unfinished and to invite us into it. There were also a couple of videos from William Osceola (Miccosukee).

I can't remember who painted these life-like vibrant pink spoonbills, but I loved them. My favorite gallery was probably the one showcasing Gretchen Scharnagl's work, because every piece was so different but visually and technically interesting. Here is a set of prints of microscopy pictures of lichen she made with natural dyes.

Us in the middle of a room-sized installation of fish and corals made out of colorful, translucent plastic.

Another exhibit consisted of many of these modern reliquaries with the "bones" of corals that are dying from warming and acidifying oceans.

Then it was up to the third floor for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Obra Sonora" or "sound work," an exhibit that DH didn't enjoy as much as I thought he would, perhaps because many of the pieces were too much like noise.

Above is a hanging aluminum sculpture of the breath of air when the sentence "Listen to the world" is spoken aloud. Below is "Last Breath," in which a dying woman exhaled air into a brown paper bag that an electric bellows continuously moves back and forth through the plastic tubing.

Above: "Sphere Packing: Bach," a 10-foot-wide wooden sphere with 1,128 speakers

 inside that play different snippets of his compositions in waves of sound.

Below: Dale Chihuly, Persian Seaform Ceiling

After lunch in the courtyard next to Dale Chihuly, Red Reeds, we went over to Hayes Hall to look at "Florida Contemporary 2024-25" while listening to the Philharmonic rehearse Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 for the weekend.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean artist who uses multi-media collages to examine race, power, and identity, while Cynthia Mason does fiber arts (this piece reminds me of a spinal cord).

Amer Kobaslija is a Bosnian-American with a cartoonishly dystopian view of life. There was also a installation about Louis Nevelson's creative process for "Dawn's Forest," the white-on-white columns in the foyer. She was a Russian-American sculptor whose accept comes through in the video from the late 1970s or early 1908s, complete with raspy voice from chain-smoking.

Dale Chihuly, Red Chandelier 

After all that, it turned out I had budgeted too much time at the art complex, so we killed an hour in the cool, quiet concert hall lobby: he napped while I did practice questions. We made it down to the Tin City complex of shops with plenty of time to find parking, sit to enjoy ice cream, and then hunt for a bottle of sunscreen that cost less than $17. (Found!) Next was what turned out to be a private guided bicycle tour of some Naples City features: the dock, the main drag of shops and restaurants, the pier that was mostly washed away by a hurricane, and the mansions that are occupied only a few weeks of a year. Oh, and some iguana nests where they're undermining the seawalls.

Finally, we ate dinner on the water while watching the pelicans, happy hour on a tiki boat, and a ship departing for a sunset cruise. We took home a couple of what Yelp assured me were famous MonKey Buntz: "individual"-sized mini Bundt cakes that heat up well in the microwave. We each ate a half plus fresh fruit and either yogurt or a hard-boiled egg for breakfast the next two mornings.

That was Naples, Florida, three ways:

art and music at the cultural center, history and architecture by bicycle, and food by the water.

Day 3: where the wild things are