Anastasia Samoylova, Lost Wig, 2017, Inkjet print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Diana Barrett and Bob Vila Gift, 2024 (2024.322) © Anastasia Samoylova
“Florida is beyond the earthly; it’s spiritual,” comedian Tim Dillon reflected in a recent Patreon episode. “You cannot get rid of the idea of Florida.” He’s right. Florida is a place, sure, but even more so, it’s an idea. Many ideas, really: alligators lounging on golf courses; palm trees swaying in the beach breezes; Tennessee Williams living at 1431 Duncan Street in Key West; Ernest Hemingway tying one on at Sloppy Joe’s Bar and playing with his multi-toed kitties; Spring Breakers; brawls in front of Cinderella’s castle at Disney World; Plus-Size Park Hoppers making Instagram reels about what rides you can squeeze your ass into at the Magic Kingdom; a gator eating a child at the Seven Seas Lagoon; a man on bath salts munching on another man’s face on the MacArthur Causeway; pre-Ozempic Nikocado Avocado spinning around a mosquito-packed Orlando park in a scooter; randy boomers zooming around The Villages in a golf cart wrapped with a colored loofah, the hanky code for senior swingers; Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell lurking around Palm Beach; Miracle Village, a community of sex offenders shoved at the edge of West Palm Beach, which I recently learned about through Ethel Cain’s new swing-squeakingly, bone-chilling song “Punish”; Trump wandering around Mar-A-Lago like Norma Desmond if the has-been star also crashed weddings and made playlists; Roger Stone partying at the Elbow Room, “a decrepit party bar on the spring-break beach strip”; former Trump campaign chief Brad Pascale being arrested in his driveway sans shirt and avec beer; Anita Bryant hocking orange juice and getting a pie to the kisser; a glorious dive bar called Icky Woo Woo’s Tiki Bar in Treasure Island recommended by my favorite comedian Doug Stanhope and visited by my parents; Aileen Wuornos’s last drink at the appropriately named Last Resort in Port Orange, Florida (a ghoulish pilgrimage I’m dying to make); and all those many, many “Florida Man” stories.
Clearly, as a spiritual idea, Florida is both the sacred and mostly the profane. It would be too easy for me to label Florida as the trashiest part of America and leave it at that. But that feels like a cop-out. We have so many other options! However, it is high on the list. And Florida just might best exemplify the current state of America: a place where the widely acknowledged as shaky but still fiercely worshipped prospect of a plastic, consumerist version of the American Dream (The Villages! Disney World! Retiring snowbirds! Palm Beach!) violently and spectacularly collides with its own deterioration, destruction, and falsity, leading to totally wacko, foam-at-the-mouth crazy behavior. Of course, this is a collision course that I find especially inspiring, particularly when it happens all at once. Take a beautiful sea foam green one-story building plopped in a sandy, tropical environment. Is it selling beachy bike rentals? Pool floaties and boogie boards? Ice cream? Nope! This store’s product is plastered right on the side of the building in big, lurking, black silhouettes: militaristic automatic rifles, pointed straight at each other as if in a blazing, bullet-flying gunfight. This trigger-happy, 2nd Amendment-clutching scene, captured in a photograph by Anastasia Samoylova titled Roadside Gun Shop, Port Orange (Wonder how far it is from the Last Resort? Adding it to my pilgrimage list!), made me want to chant with “I love everything bad about America” glee. USA USA USA! God bless this country!
Installation view of Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 14, 2024–May 11, 2025. Photo courtesy of The Met
A rousing one-person outburst of involuntary patriotism would have likely been frowned upon in the small and relatively serene exhibition space at the Metropolitan Museum dedicated to two photographers wrestling with the contradictions of Florida as a dream and in actuality, Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans, organized by photo curator Mia Fineman. If you’re thinking, that seems like a surprising show for the Met; I thought the same. Rarely do institutions nowadays, let alone ones as upper-crust as the Met, give over space to artists who fully engage with the trashier side of America, let alone ones that might include imagery of gigantic handgun belly tattoos positioned as if holstered in a waistband and Confederate flag arm ink that also involves a skull clutching a smoking gun as in Samoylova’s Beachgoer, Naples. This may help explain why the exhibition is squirreled away in a corner off the 19th-century European paintings hallway on the way to the more frustratingly populated Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350. While that was the exhibition that initially drew me to the museum so I could once again contemplate zombie Jesus’s bloody wounds on gilt extravagance, I found much more (tacky) transcendence among the young gators relaxing under a trickling hose shower and breezy vacationer trailer parks in Floridas.
The latter comes courtesy of Walker Evans whose Depression-era photographs of grim, lined faces are much more well-known than his later pics of snowbirds bundled up in coats and fuzzy hats as if they’re not wintering in a perma-80 degree climate or the imposingly ornate and downright ghastly Gothic Sarasota mansion of John Ringling (yes, of the Ringling Brothers) that looks like it would house Dracula rather than a carny. These photos derive from a commissioned book project on Florida’s “forgotten” west coast, capturing an era when Florida maintained its reputation as a steamy, romanticized vacation destination for the new crop of now-mobile Americans. Florida as a travelers’ paradise is even more evocatively showcased in a display of the photographer’s obsessive hoard of penny postcards dating from the late 1900s to 1930s. I’ll admit, I coveted these postcards much more than Evans’s own photos due to the postcards’ sheer outsized American optimism as evidenced by the image of an old car vrooming to the beach with the corresponding ad copy: “See America First!” These postcards reveal exactly how Florida was marketed to the rest of the country, mostly, it seems, through the chompy figure of the alligator. Three swarm the Tampa Bay hotel in one postcard from 1908 while a gigantic gator surfs the back of a train car with the caption “All the Way from Florida.” Who wouldn’t want that reptile delivery? Other postcards are more confounding like my favorite, a delightfully dull collection of six sea sponges. How riveting! Imagine receiving that from your relative’s voyage!
Walker Evans, Resort Photographer at Work, 1941, printed later, Gelatin silver print, 7 5/8 in. × 10 in. (19.4 × 25.4 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Christie McDonald and Joan McD Miller, 2005 (2005.455.20) © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A couple of decades later, in 1941, this juicy Florida orange is mostly still on the vine in Evans’s black-and-white depictions of a tourist posing for a professional photoshoot with two remarkably patient pelicans or a vacationers’ trailer parked next to two lawn chairs plunked under two breezy palms. Although there is something inherently wretched about a trailer, no matter what decade or context, Evans’s Trailer in Camp projects open road potential more than stagnant socioeconomic deterioration. The few flecks of green rot, though, appear even here. Florida Roadside documents the beginnings of the familiarly abrasive visual assault of constant, inescapable advertisements with signs for Coke, Dr. Pepper, and whatever long-lost soda Spur was. Plastered near a run-down shack and a tumble of yucca plants, this is Pop before Pop and, with its imprecise handmade quality, inescapably nostalgic. Sign painting is an enduring fixation for Evans, extending to his later Polaroids. While placards for “Boats for Rent” and the gruff warning, “If you have your own food and drinks, don’t park here” maintain a sense of beach trip nostalgia, the seediness has fully set in by 1974, witnessed in a triptych of Polaroids getting closer and closer (and closer) to a ragged red-on-white “Melons” ad hurled upside-down into a dumpster under a pile of cardboard boxes and an errant wheel. Now, this is the trash (literally) Florida we know and love!
The trash aesthetic can be found in Evans’s photographs, but not so much in his stubbornly flat, cutesy hobbyist paintings of palm tree-flanked homes that would not be out of place in a Tampa flea market (though now that I make that comparison, I love them). However, Evans’s growing rubbish pile has nothing on Samoylova’s photos of contemporary Florida. So much so that I wondered if the iconic photographer was even necessary, a view I’ve since revised. Evans’s work provides essential context to Samoylova’s candy-colored Florida decay. That being said, I still could have done without the “Look how big the Met’s Walker Evans Collection is” slideshow of copious unprinted Florida-based negatives projected on a small TV monitor—and basically did, glancing at them for three or four slides before moving on. I’d much rather contemplate the singular beauty of the spidery tangle of a cast-away, blown-off wig lying on the stick-flecked dirt, trapped in Samoylova’s documenting shadow in Lost Wig.
Anastasia Samoylova, Venus Mirror, 2020, Inkjet print, 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.2 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Diana Barrett and Bob Vila Gift, 2024 (2024.320) © Anastasia Samoylova
One of the brightest and most baffling of Samoylova’s inclusions is Venus Mirror, Miami, in which mirrors and windows collide in a surreal pink and palm tropical hallucination, centered around a floating shape of Venus de Milo’s head-and-arm-less body. It’s a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, much like the Florida imaginary itself, just layers of images. It makes me feel as if I’m having a stroke while looking at it. Is there toast burning? Venus Mirror, Miami is such a goddamn weird image that it overpowers the artist’s more recent experimentations pairing photographic prints with acrylic, including the joyously sleazy Strip Club, with a “Live Girls!” silhouette, and renders them almost beside the point. Florida is tawdry enough on its own, unfiltered and unedited, without any additional alteration. Beyond its bizarro, unstable perspective, something is alienating and lonesome about staring through windows and mirrors into this vacant abyss of, what looks to be, a bougie shopping district. Many of Samoylova’s works don’t feature any people, just deterioration. A heinous rusted old beater mars the cloying sight of a cotton candy-hued apartment complex in Rusted Car while a steep drop from a white door leads directly to an ankle-deep flood lake in Blue Courtyard.
Like the latter, global issues such as climate change and housing shortages hover close to the surface like the looming, hideous condo buildings rising from the swamps in New Condominiums. Samoylova also refuses to shy away from the MAGA specter even if Donnie T’s golden combover pops above three heavy swipes of black paint as if one censor bar wasn’t near enough to get rid of his presence. Like squinting beyond the slathers of paint to see hints of Trump’s face, Samoylova captures the influence of the red hat brigade without the eye roll-inducing, moralizing heavy hand of #resistance Trump art, a genre whose inevitable resurrection I’m dreading. Take, for instance, Dome House with Upside Down Flag, in which a flipped-over flag, a distress signal for Stop the Steal heads who want to inspect those Dominion machines with My Pillow Guy, Mike Lindell, flies alongside a home that looks as if the residents always dreamed of living inside a planetarium. The house is so much more head-scratching to me than the flag (that being said, I attended school with a kid who lived in an octagon house in suburban Pittsburgh so I don’t know why I’m so confused by this). This may be because I can just picture a heated flag battle raging between politically polarized retiree neighbors à la Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito’s wife’s psychotic flag-based warfare when she said, “I’m gonna send them a message. Every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags…I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself.”
Hoo-kay, Martha-Ann!
Even though the show does belie some discomfort with its amusingly curt label referring to the “deeply divisive political situation in Florida and the country at large” (so descriptive!), it’s hard to imagine works like Dome House with Upside Down Flag or Beachgoer, Naples in the Met even a few years ago when they were finger-wagging at the manspreading in Alice Neels’s portraits. Granted, it’s not lost on me that neither of these works is visible in the installation views provided with the press kit. But that’s some insider baseball gripe. Perhaps because she’s Russian American, though she currently lives and works in Florida, Samoylova believably stakes a point of view as a (semi-)outsider curious about American culture and politics that avoids some of the anxiety institutions often have about displaying work that tangles with the more extreme end of American behavior. The most extreme of which is almost always on display in Florida. As someone who is also continually fixated on this aspect of our fine country, I want more of it, much, much more.