Photo by Chris Barlow for AliveTampaBay.
You don’t even have to walk in to the Tampa Museum of Art to appreciate Laura With Bun, a sculpture by Jaume Plensa. The piece resides outside the museum in the open air.
Plensa is an internationally acclaimed artist who has exhibited his sculptures in museums all over the world. “In locations as diverse as Seoul, Paris, Chicago, Bordeaux and London, Plensa’s monumental sculptures have reaffirmed the power of art to transform a public space into a community,” the Tampa Museum of Art website notes. “This is aptly demonstrated in his first major commission in the United States, The Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park (2004). Two 11-story LED towers face each other across a thin pool of water, with images of a changing and diverse city reflected in the water, a continuously cycling metaphor for the life of a city.”
At more than 23 feet tall, this artwork expresses both individual and universal traits at great scale, inviting viewers to consider multiple aspects of beauty and human nature.
The Tampa Museum of Art is located at 120 West Gasparilla Plaza.