HCC Art Galleries’ Now On View brings four hours of interactive art, poetry, theater and dance to three Ybor City venues
By Jennifer Ring with HCC Art Galleries
HCC Art Galleries started Now On View in June 2024 to give Tampa artists the opportunity to tell Tampa’s story in a one-day-only public art festival. Because who better to tell Tampa’s story than Tampa artists?
This year, the story continues with a new crop of Tampa Bay area artists. Each of the six playwrights, poets, designers and dancers thoughtfully considered how to tell Tampa’s story through their preferred medium. On Saturday, February 22, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., they bring those stories to life at Hillsborough Community College’s Ybor Campus, Hotel Haya and Kress Contemporary.
Here’s your guide to what’s happening where during HCC Art Galleries 2nd Annual Now On View.
Walk with us!
Now On View artists will be stationed at three Ybor City locations: HCC Ybor, Hotel Haya and Kress Contemporary. HCC Art Galleries recommends starting at the HCC Ybor Performing Arts Building, where you can pick up an official Now On View Guidebook and experience Emma Quintana and Amanda Gabaldon’s “Legacy Systems.” Then stroll down 14th Street until you hit the HCC Ybor Building, where Jehoshaphat Jacinto hosts a dance battle. Next, stop into Hotel Haya at the corner of 14th and Street and Seventh Avenue for FAX 727 289 3069’s “everything is built on layers on top of other layers on top of other layers” and Kali Rabaut’s “Cosmos” before continuing down Seventh Avenue to the Kress building to see Erin Lekovic’s “Ybor Interrupted” and Victoria Alvarez’s “Back to Black.” Image courtesy of HCC Art Galleries.
Start at HCC Ybor Performing Arts Building
In the fall of 2024, hurricanes became a much larger part of Tampa’s story than ever before, as did our town’s efforts to recover from those hurricanes. UT digital fabrication coordinator Emma Quintana and choreographer Amanda Gabaldon bring that story to life through sound, video, sculpture and dance.
Begin in Gallery114@HCC Ybor, where a hurricane forms and dissipates in a constant loop, as dancers clad in vintage beachwear take part in both the disaster and its recovery. Join in their dance with disaster and pick up a copy of HCC Art Galleries’ Official Now On View Guidebook while you’re there.
Emma Quintana plays with the idea of the picture-perfect postcard image in this Now On View freebie. Image courtesy of Emma Quintana.
Follow the music to the HCC Ybor Building Patio
Here, the dance battle begins. Educator Jehoshaphat Jacinto pays tribute to Tampa’s street dance scene with a dance showcase. Learn how to break, vogue, pop and lock in this immersive street dance battle.
FAX 727 289 3069’s Now On View installation was inspired by layers of fliers the group saw on the old Larmon Furniture building across the street from Hotel Haya in Ybor City. Photo by Jennifer Ring.
Treat yourself to poetry and flowers at Hotel Haya
Get ready to see the largest poem you’ve ever seen outside Café Quiquiriqui. FAX 727 289 3069, creators of St. Pete’s Poetry Alley, brings their act to Hotel Haya during Now On View.
The group, which consists of artists and poets Tyler Gillespie, Keifer Calkins and Eleanor Eichenbaum, dove into Tampa’s archives, looking for images to help them tell Tampa’s story. They’ll pair them with words and wit in poetry and layers of handmade fliers. Check the surrounding pillars and peer through the Café window and you’ll see.
Then head inside, where botanical artist Kali Rabaut tells Tampa’s story through its flowers. Inspired by FloridaRAMA’s Lampscape, Rabaut incorporates mirrors into her work for the first time, bringing an infinity mirror garden to Now On View. Step into her floral galaxy and leave with some seeds to plant in your garden.
Botanical artist Kali Rabaut returns for HCC Art Galleries’ 2nd Annual Now On View.
Follow the crowds down Seventh Avenue
You’ll find Kress Contemporary right in the middle of all the Fiesta Day action. Here, playwright Erin Lekovic brings a young and thirsty Samuel Kress to life in a new 15-minute play. Lekovic, who grew up in Tampa and moved back from Chicago three years ago, specializes in site-specific theater. Starting in Chicago’s historic buildings, Lekovic’s brought theater to all sorts of unexpected places, from furniture stores to the shores of Lake Michigan. Ybor Interrupted will be her first site-specific play in Tampa.
Also at Kress, graphic designer Victoria Alvarez tells Tampa’s history through an LGBTQIA+ lens. Alvarez spent the past year collecting photographs of LGBTQIA+ individuals living and playing in Tampa. She found several within USF Libraries’ Bobby Smith and Rex Maniscalco collections, but expanded her search for Now On View, putting out a community all-call and collaborating with local newspapers to tell an even greater story. Alvarez will assemble the photos into a timeline of LGBTQIA+ life in Tampa from the 1950s to present day. The final touch is yours to provide. Alvarez is covering the entire poster in temperature-sensitive black ink. You must place your hands upon the artwork to reveal the lives hiding beneath the surface.
A hand reveals a self-portrait of Bobby Smith hidden under temperature-sensitive ink. Photograph courtesy of Victoria Alvarez
Before you go: Book an Art & History Tour
Max Herman and Jorge Contreras of Tampa Bay Tours lead three free English-language walking tours, beginning at HCC Ybor’s Performing Arts Building, at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and 12 p.m, during Now on View. A fourth tour, in Spanish, is available at 1 p.m. Tours walk participants through Ybor City, stopping at all three Now On View arts venues and providing fun facts about Ybor’s history along the way. Reserve your spot at eventbrite.com/o/hcc-art-galleries-29623552403.
About the author:
Jennifer Ring began her storytelling journey in 2017, writing and taking photographs for Creative Loafing Tampa. Since then, she’s told the story of art in Tampa Bay through more than 200 art reviews, artist profiles, and art features. She believes that everyone can and should make art, whether they’re good at it or not. Art heals.
Bay Art Files is pleased to partner with the Galleries at HCC in highlighting Hillsborough Community College’s second annual Now on View.
This spring, visitors of the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) have the uncommon chance to view a profoundly whimsical exhibition of works by a preeminent contemporary painter. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, features more than forty-five paintings and works on paper completed between 2019 and 2022. The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and is on view at the TMA from February 23rd through June 4th, 2023.
Born in 1983, in Lahore, Pakistan, Salman Toor resides and works in New York City and exhibits internationally. His oeuvre primarily consists of dreamlike scenes, in which cartoonish figures appear suspended like marionettes, caught in the plotlines of ambiguous narratives. The stories are drawn from moments of the urban lives of imagined queer young men, as well as from the artist’s own lived experience and those of his friends. The emotional atmospheres of his canvases fluctuate between intimacy and isolation, contentment and embarrassment, and tenderness and violence.
This exhibition is important and timely as it draws attention to international human rights issues as well as domestic queer politics. In Pakistan, acts of homosexuality are punishable by life imprisonment, or even death in extreme cases.1 In America, LGBTQ+ rights, representation and recreation are coming under fire from lawmakers, politicians, and homophobic and transphobic members of the public who are banning or restricting drag shows throughout the country.
On view in the museum’s newly constructed gallery space, the exhibition consists of oil paintings done on panel and canvas, several drawings done in charcoal, ink, and gouache, and two of the artist’s sketchbooks. This body of works offers conceptual, material, and technical variety while also showcasing Toor’s characteristic style. Despite the surreal quality of many of Toor’s paintings and the specificity of his subject matter, the moments that he constructs are deeply sensitive to the human condition. There is a naivete to his figures, but their innocence is occasionally broken by the salacious scenarios in which they appear entangled.
Toor’s paintings reward the visually literate and those well-versed in Western art history. Drawing from the European painting tradition, he invites us to traverse through centuries of time without ever leaving our contemporary moment behind. Toor brings this legacy into our times to confront colonial structures that still confine us. In postcolonial fashion, Toor turns the canon on its head by replacing the typical subjects of Western easel paintings with queer, brown-skinned boys and men. Toor demonstrates his mastery over the Western tradition in a bold act of subversion that begs the question of who owns whose art history.
Figure 1: Construction Men, Salman Toor, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 121.9 cm), photo by author. Figure 2: Les Raboteurs de Parquet (The Floor Scrapers), Gustave Caillebotte, 1875, oil on canvas, 40.2 x 57.7 in (102 x 146.5 cm), Google Arts and Culture.
When visitors enter the gallery, they are immediately confronted by Construction Men (Figure 1), a scene that continues the homoerotic celebration of male laborers that can be traced back to Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (Figure 2), of 1875, though with a campy flare evocative of costumes for The Village People. From there, visitors may circulate the room and explore the three thematic categories that the works are separated into, including desire, tradition, and family. Many of the paintings are neatly spaced along the horizon line of the gallery walls, with carefully adjusted spotlights illuminating each one. His smaller works, though, are clustered together on the south wall, in a way that evokes the salon-style displays of public galleries in the nineteenth century. This strategy slows down the viewing experience and aligns with Toor’s connection to artistic conventions of the past, but it also makes it difficult to see the details in each of them closely, especially for viewers whose vantage point is lower than others.
Not all the works in the catalog make an appearance at this venue. Two notable exclusions include The Latecomer, 2021, and the monumental Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe and Flag, 2022, which is featured on the cover of the catalog edited by Asma Naeem and available for purchase at the Museum’s store. The painting is a self-referential triumph that blends symbols from Toor’s lexicon, including phalluses, shoes, used condoms, and tombstones. It is perhaps the standout of the show, but it is not on view at the TMA because it was swiftly purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Congratulations are in order for the artist as this painting is the first of his to be acquired by the prestigious institution, but I lament the missed opportunity for a Floridian audience to view this painting.
While the compositions that underly many of Toor’s canvases are taken from monuments of Early Modern European art, these works find themselves quite at home at the TMA, even though such a collection is conspicuously absent. The TMA has historically been known for its collection of classical art from Greece and Southern Italy, but its exhibition programming and the development of its permanent collection have also been centered around outlier art of the modern and postmodern eras. The humor, irony, postcolonial angst, and queer grunge, that we find on the surface of Toor’s paintings bear an uncanny affinity with the irreverent and kitschy contemporary art scene of the greater Tampa Bay area.
Figure 3: Cakes, Wayne Thiebaud, 1963, oil on canvas, (152.4 x 182.9 cm), Wikiart.
Several of the works made for this exhibition pull directly from works in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s collection of European paintings from the 17th– to the 19th-centuries. Attention to Toor’s references to early modern art is well-established but has perhaps overshadowed his visual connections to later painters. Toor typically uses oil paints over a surface primed with dark brown acrylic paint. His style is painterly, with thick, visible brushstrokes. The built-up textures of his paintings have been described as frosting on a cake, not unlike Wayne Thiebaud, whose paintings of seemingly mundane desserts and pastries, such as Cakes (Figure 3), 1963, were imbued with a postmodern sensibility and likewise question notions of desire, consumption, class, and privilege.2
Figure 4: Night Capture, Salman Toor, 2021, oil on panel, 14 x 18 in. (35.6 x 45.7 cm), photo by author.
The Western canon is not the only power structure that Toor seeks to upend. Toor also takes issue with the endemic homophobia that plagues his home country of Pakistan, as well as most other Muslim-majority nations. The perils that LGBTQ+ people face within these communities is a topic brought forth by several of Toor’s paintings, such as Stone Throwers, Night Capture (Figure 4), and The Vigil. The threat of violence compels us to hide beneath the protective cover of night and within the fickle safety of wooden areas, where individuals may cruise at their own risk. In Shadow Park, Toor provides us a glimpse into the underworld of queer desire that echoes the sexually charged nightmare-fantasies of Robert Gober’s The Heart is Not a Metaphor.
Figure 5: Cemetery with Dog, Salman Toor, 2022, oil on canvas, 43 x 36 in. (109.2 x 91.4 cm), photo by author.
In some of Toor’s paintings such as Thunderstorm and Back Lawn, we see domestic gardens as a space for freedom and unbridled affection. In Cemetery with Dog (Figure 5), Toor explores a different setting entirely, in which the homoerotic paradise of Sa’di’s garden is now a graveyard.3 The scene has the isometric perspective of Persianate manuscript paintings, through which we peer down at above-ground graves and tombstones. Unlike most of his paintings, this one is conspicuously absent of any visible human figures, though it hardly feels like an empty landscape. By searching for a person, we come to the grim realization that a graveyard is never an empty landscape, as the ground literally contains invisible bodies. In the background, there are trees entwined, an established motif in painting, prose, and poetry from the Islamic world for lovers yearning to embrace one another.4 By conflating the garden with the cemetery, and life and death, this painting serves as a dark reminder of the risk of pursuing forbidden love.
Toor is known for his proclivity for green, a color that has, perhaps coincidentally, also enjoyed an emblematic role in Islamic culture. Green is the color of the Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have privileged the color above all others, as well as the color of paradise, which is envisioned as a garden.5 For modern artists in the West, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso, green indicates a sickness manifests on multiple levels. Toor says that he is aware of the poisonous associations with green, but for him, the color is “velvety, nocturnal, and comforting.”6 The conflicting potentialities for the symbolic significance of green in Toor’s paintings, in a way, queer the color itself.
At the heart of his work, Toor celebrates the common love found in causal romances of the sex-positive queer world by elevating it by giving it the treatment of one that is found beyond the realm of the ordinary. He celebrates these because they are valuable, and we take them for granted, forgetting that these small acts of seemingly meaningless affection are a luxury not afforded to all.
Glowing like the green light from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, these gleaming, verdant paintings shine into the night, beckoning us into a world of uninhibited frivolity, misplaced desire, and dangerous trysts. Like Nick Carraway, the narrating protagonist of the hazy tale, Toor seems to find dissatisfaction with the world in which he has entered, where love is free, and therefore made worthless. Lovers are had and then disposed. Forbidden love is no longer forbidden, and therefore has become ordinary. Toor gifts us a fresh perspective by showing the value that remains in public displays of affection and to show us that there is nothing at all ordinary about such love.
Salmon Toor: No Ordinary Love is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through June 4, 2023.The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art.
About the author
Richard Ellis is an adjunct professor at the University of Tampa, in the Department of Art & Design, and at the University of South Florida, in the School of Art & Art History. He holds a B.A. and M.A., both in art history and from the University of South Florida. His areas of interest include Islamic art and architecture, modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the diasporas, as well as Orientalism.
Asma Naeem, “Salman Toor’s Brown Boys,” in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, ed. Asma Naeem (New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art), 10.
Mika Natif, “The generative garden: Sensuality, male intimacy, and eternity in Govardhan’s illustration of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān,” in Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 3.
Michael Barry, “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat,” in ‘Attār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 148.
Mohammad Gharipour, Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts (London and New York, I.B. Taurus, 2013), 24.
Evan Moffitt, “Green as the Night” in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, ed. Asma Naeem (New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art), 49.
Bibliography
Barry, Michael. “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat.” In ‘Attār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle, 135-64. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
Gharipour, Mohammad. Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Naeem, Asma, ed. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love. ed. New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2022.
Natif, Mika. “The generative garden: Sensuality, male intimacy, and eternity in Govardhan’s illustration of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān.” In Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif, 43-64. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.
