Anastasia Samoylova, Floridas, New York, NY (2024)

I love when I plan a museum visit to see a specific show and unexpectedly discover a new artist. That’s what happened when I attended the Met’s Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350, a display of over 100 of what some consider examples of the Western world’s first true manifestiation of formal painting (as the canon defines it today). The curators identified a trove of paintings of Italian masters from Siena, not Florence, on the cusp of the Renaissance. The works were luminous gold and religious intensity everywhere.

But what surprised me was a show I almost missed. Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans was tucked away in a handful of rooms on the photography floor; I easily would have missed it except the flamingo pink walls caught my attention. This clever and visually rich show demonstrated how the juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate artists can coalesce.(1) Samoylova’s, a photog based in the Sunshine state, pieces were a tropical mash up of old and new: photo collages bathed in West Palm pinks and blues, sprinkled with baby alligators, chain link fences and NRA-approved tatoos. Wonderful and wild.

Anastasia Samoylova, Venus Mirror, (2020)

Photo (above): Anastasia Samoylova, Strip Club, 2024

(1) While I’ve seen quite a few Walker Evans photographs I had no idea that he was enamored with the state—and apparently neither did a lot of people. And as noted in a quote from him in the show’s catalog, it may have been a love-hate or love-to-hate relationship: “Florida is ghastly and very pleasant where I am,” Walker wrote to a friend during his first visit there, in 1934. But he went back repeatedly taking a series of his signature black and whites, as well as color snaps that captured the state’s idiosyncratic zeitgeist.