FT. LAUDERDALE.- A great love of collecting the art of our time is shown in the private holdings of Gordon Locksley and Francie Bishop Good + David Horvitz. All three individuals are tireless collectors passionately engaged in the contemporary art scene. The Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale has brought together over one hundred selected works from these two collections for this exhibition, With You I Want to Live, the title taken from a neon wall sculpture by Tracey Emin in the Locksley collection. The Locksley Collection, installed in the second floor galleries, will remain on view through March 22, 2010; and the Good+Horvitz Collection, in the first floor galleries, will remain on view through October 12, 2009.

“Collecting is a very personal adventure; and Gordon Locksley, Francie Bishop Good, and David Horvitz have been very generous to share their choices and their enthusiasm for the art of today. Fort Lauderdale is privileged to have such assiduous collectors; and in a broader sense, it is exciting that we will be able to feature so many young artists whose work will be shown here for the first time,” said Irvin M. Lippman, Executive Director.

Gordon Locksley has amassed extraordinary holdings of contemporary art since 1960. He and business partner George Shea began their careers as art dealers, opening in 1964 the Locksley Shea Gallery in Minneapolis, representing artists who are now considered modern masters: Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Brice Marden. After leaving Minneapolis and living in Rome and Cannes, Gordon Locksley settled in Fort Lauderdale. He continues to actively collect and commission new work, some of monumental scale that will be on view for the first time in this exhibition.

The minimal art of the 1960s is a particularly strong suit of the Locksley collection. Gordon Locksley had a long association with Donald Judd, one of the twentieth century’s great artists. His sculpture made of industrial materials is neither representational nor referential. In addition to an aluminum wall sculpture (1985), the exhibition includes 16 pencil drawings from 1977. But it is the inclusion of an 11-panel polychromed Rain Wall (108 x 198 inches) made by Northwest American Indians commissioned by Judd for his SoHo apartment and recently acquired by Gordon Locksley, that underscores how personal and special this collection is.

Other prominent artists associated with this movement and included in the exhibition are Dan Flavin (red, yellow, blue, and green fluorescent light installation from 1987), Joel Fisher (100 drawings in pencil, charcoal, conte & found fiber on handmade paper, each 6x6 inches from 1977/83), Brice Marden (oil and wax canvases from 1971), and Robert Mangold (Four Triangles within a Square from 1974).

The exhibition also includes a 1964 installation by Robert Morris: a twelve-foot painted plywood board, stripped to its essential features which simply, yet dramatically, braces the corner of the room. This work is a recent gift to the Museum from Gordon Locksley.

The strong formalist approach is also seen in the bold and colorfully-constructed canvas (2006) by Anselm Reyle as well as Peter Halley’s thirteen-foot acrylic, day-glo, and pearlescent painted canvas (2003). The collection diverges stylistically with the bold Pop aesthetic of Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara; the graffiti artists Bansky, Nick Walker, Blek La Rat; and the Chinese artists Luo Weidong, Minjun Yue, and Wang Guangyi.

Tracey Emin’s eye-catching pink neon wall sculpture, With you I want to live (2007), immediately was realized as the appropriate title for the exhibition. The title plays on a certain ambiguity which is so much a part of Emin’s work, which is grounded within the feminist discourse that is very much the theme of the collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and includes two works by Tracey Emin – the video Finding Gold (1966), and I think it’s in my head, a blue and pink neon wall sculpture (2002).

Francie Bishop Good + David Horvitz Collection has as its special emphasis the contribution of women to the field of contemporary art, encompassing cutting edge visions from artists working in painting, drawing, photography and video from the 1960s to the present.

Francie Bishop Good is a photographer and multimedia artist and her sensibility is strongly reflected in what she and her husband David collect. Their holdings include the work of seminal photographers Tina Barney, Sophie Calle, Rineke Dijkstra, Sally Mann, and Catherine Opie, as well as up-and-coming photographers Katy Grannan, Loretta Lux, and Alesandra Sanguinetti. Important works in painting and sculpture are represented by Ingrid Calame, Tara Donovan, Inka Essenhigh, Ellen Gallagher, Elizabeth Murray, Wangechi Mutu, Cornelia Parker, and Amy Sillman.

The collection also features works by South Florida artists, and those who have a significant relationship with the burgeoning South Florida art scene. Among these are Naomi Fisher, Jacin Giordano, Beatriz Monteavaro, Carol Prusa, and Betty Rosado.

Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz are among Florida’s most prominent arts activists and philanthropists. In 2006, they opened the Girl’s Club, a private foundation and alternative space located at 117 NE 2nd Street, a former warehouse that was redesigned by Margi Glavovic, who has won several awards for the exterior staircase and bridge she designed on the Museum’s Plaza to access the second floor sculpture terrace. The current exhibition at the Girl’s Club is Under the Influence (through September 30, 2009), a multi-media exploration of how artists influence one another. Included are sixty recent works which show their shared ideas and methods of making art. The exhibition makes a strong reference back to the feminist collectives of the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the isolation and originality of the individual artist.

These two exhibitions will each be accompanied by a publication featuring interviews with the collectors. With You I Want to Live inaugurates a series of exhibitions of private collections planned by the Museum. The Pearl and Stanley Goodman Collection of Latin American Art is scheduled to be on view from May through October 2010.