A comprehensive visual exhibition of Bob Dylan’s artwork will show in the U.S. for the first time in November when it touches down at Florida International University’s Frost Museum. Retrospectrum is described in a release as the “most expansive and detailed” exhibition of Dylan’s artwork ever seen on U.S. soil.
The show will open on Nov. 30 at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum on the FIU campus, and will span six decades of Dylan’s drawing, painting and sculpture. “
The exhibition’s curation has been designed to showcase the development and diversity in Dylan’s visual practice, while immersive and interactive displays will simultaneously illuminate the context of that development in tandem with that of his musical and literary canon,” read a statement announcing the show.
“When I saw the catalogue representing the beautiful and comprehensive Bob Dylan: Retrospectrum exhibition that premiered in Shanghai in 2019, I knew immediately that I wanted to bring this iconic artist’s rarely seen visual works to South Florida, to be enjoyed by our students, our broader community and visitors from across the country and around the globe,” said FIU president Mark B. Rosenberg about the collection that focuses on Dylan’s life-long visual artwork as part of a broader look at his Nobel Prize-winning body of musical accomplishments.
The exhibition will open at the same time as FIU’s humanities and arts hub, The Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL), will present DYLAN@FIU, a symposium “exploring the myriad facets of Bob Dylan’s career and cultural influence.” Both will be timed with Miami Art Week, with further programming and event information to be announced soon.
The first exhibition of Dylan’s artwork, The Drawn Blank Series, opened at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany in 2007 and since then his work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Palazzo Reale in Milan and the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai in China, for which Retrospectrum was initially conceived and where it drew 100,000 visitors in its first three months.
