Hockney Tampa Exhibition Opens With 140 Works After His Death

Three and a half months after David Hockney died at 88, the Hockney Tampa exhibition gives Florida a full-scale look at six decades of the British painter's career. "David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation" opens to the public at the Tampa Museum of Art on Thursday, September 24.

Hockney died on June 11 at the age of 88. In the weeks since, museums and public broadcasters have revisited a career that stretched from 1960s London to the iPad paintings of his final years. PBS NewsHour marked his passing with a tribute segment describing him as one of the most celebrated art icons of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The museum is framing the show as a chance to meet the ideas behind the fame. Interim Executive Director Tom Hochhausler said the exhibition gives the community an opportunity to encounter the ideas that made Hockney a transformative artist.

What is in the show

The Hockney Tampa exhibition brings more than 140 prints, collages, photographs, and iPad drawings to downtown Tampa. Visitors will find intimate portraits, sunlit swimming pools, theatrical stage designs, expansive landscapes, and lively interiors, covering the subjects Hockney returned to throughout his life.

It is organized in five sections: On Stage and Page; Interiors and Exteriors; Tradition and Innovation; Ordinary Objects and Extraordinary Renderings; and Portraits of Self and Others. The title points to Hockney's long interest in how images are made and seen. He spent much of his career testing ways of showing movement, memory, and time on a flat surface, challenging the rules of one-point perspective.

One of the through lines of the show is Hockney's habit of treating new tools as art supplies. The exhibition traces his use of etching and lithography through Polaroid collage, office copiers, video, the iPhone, and the iPad. The late iPad drawings, made in his eighties, sit alongside prints from decades earlier.

That mix is deliberate. The museum notes that Hockney's portraits of friends, family members, and partners brought an emotional directness to contemporary art, while his openness about his own life widened the range of stories and relationships shown in museums.

Who organized it and why Tampa

The exhibition was organized by the Honolulu Museum of Art in cooperation with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, and it is curated by Catherine Whitney, Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Katherine Love, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, both at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Jordan D. Schnitzer established the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation in 1997 to make works from his collection available to the public. According to the museum's announcement, the foundation has since organized more than 180 exhibitions with over 130 museums, helping schools and communities encounter work they might otherwise miss.

Schnitzer said in the announcement that Hockney embraced new technologies, from Xerox machines and Polaroid photography to the iPad and iPhone, and used them to create a body of work that took millions of people on an artistic journey. He added that Hockney's color, clarity of vision, and way of seeing were immediately recognizable and deeply influential.

The timing fits a wider season of major art openings. The Schomburg Center in New York recently opened its largest show devoted to Black women artists, covered here last week.

Visiting details

The Tampa Museum of Art held a ticketed opening celebration on Wednesday, September 23, giving guests a first look before the public opening on September 24. The show runs through February 28, 2027. Ticket details are available at TampaMuseum.org.

The museum, established in 1920 in downtown Tampa, presents ancient, modern, and contemporary art, with collections ranging from Greek and Roman antiquities to modern and contemporary sculpture, photography, painting, and new media. It also runs year-round classes, lectures, tours, and community programs through the Vinik Family Education Center.

With six decades of work on the walls, the Hockney Tampa exhibition is built to reward slow looking, from early etchings to the iPad drawings of his final years.

The Tampa Museum of Art announced the exhibition on September 18, and the show opened to the public on September 24, 2026.