In the 1960s, Bob Dylan was the voice of anti-war protest and civil rights. In the 70s, he traveled through country music into contemporary gospel, an icon of the born-again Christian. Since the 1980s, he’s been touring on the Never Ending Tour with an ever-changing cast of band-mates. He’s sold over 100 million records and has won Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer citation, a Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And all that time, he’s been making art other than music, as well.
Since 1994, Bob Dylan has shown his paintings in major art galleries all over the world and published eight books of his own drawings and paintings. His debut exhibition, “The Drawn Blank Series,” was shown in Berlin in 2007. He’s had art hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Palazzo Real in Milan, and the Shanghai exhibition at the Modern Art Museum.
His newest work and largest-ever exhibition is set to go on display soon in the United States. Set to debut in Miami, at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in late November, “Retrospectrum” will air almost 60 years of Bob Dylan’s artwork.
Dylan’s newest series “American Pastoral” will be featured in the exhibition, a series of paintings based on his lifetime of travels through the U.S. Perhaps most iconic of this set is “Sunset, Monument, Valley,” a large triptych of Highway 163 leading straight as an arrow into the gap between buttes, the setting sun pouring golden down the road. His views of both “American” and “Pastoral” are very broad – another painting in the series is a dark industrial urban scene.
So far, Miami is the only announced stop for this exhibition, but by the time it closes there in April 2022, there will almost certainly be more stops on its path. And Bob Dylan, now nearly 80, has no plans to stop creating.
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