Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg

Tom Jones: Here We Stand

An exhibition review of Tom Jones: Here We Stand

by Sabrina Hughes

By turns witty, moving, and poignant, the exhibition Tom Jones: Here We Stand at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, makes a clear statement that Indigenous Nations remain connected to their past while ensuring their values are projected into the future. Tom Jones is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.

This is the first major retrospective of Jones’ career and features more than 100 photographic works in more than a dozen series. Tom Jones: Here We Stand originated at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. The exhibition was co-curated by Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, Senior Curator of Photography at the MFA, and Graeme Reid, Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.

Here We Stand showcases Jones’ photographic vision ranging from intimate shots inside his relatives’ homes, to acerbic wit recording appropriated Native names and iconography in the American landscape, to majestic and monumental portraits with hand-beaded embellishments.

Jones’ early series Dear America pairs enlarged collaged historical vernacular photos with diegetic captions that force viewers to confront their assumptions about the Native history they may have learned.

Tom Jones, Sweet Land of Liberty, 2002, Inkjet print and ink.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.

Tom Jones, *Long May Our Land Be Bright*, 2002 Inkjet print and ink.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.

In the image Sweet Land of Liberty, which collages a 19th-century group portrait of Sioux with a jaunty white hunter who has harvested a raccoon, Jones has written a short summary of the largest one-day mass execution in American history–when Abraham Lincoln approved death sentences for 38 Sioux men on December 26, 1862. Jones employs a similar technique with the image Long May Our Land Be Bright, half of a 19th-century stereographic image from Taos Pueblo. In this text inscription, however, Jones celebrates that the Red Willow People of Taos Pueblo have maintained their cultural integrity despite centuries of invasions by colonizers.

The beaded portraits in the Strong Unrelenting Spirits series build on the technique Jones used in Dear America, adding intricate beadwork to the large-scale portraits. Members of the Ho-Chunk nation pose in front of a stark black background, many in traditional ceremonial garb. These portraits are striking in their size as well as in the subjects’ appearance. What, in reproduction, appears to be designs drawn on the black background behind each individual is actually intricate beadwork applied to the surface of the photograph itself.

Tom Jones, *Bryson Funmaker*, from *Strong Unrelenting Spirits* series, 2020, Inkjet print and beadwork. On loan from Mike and Linda Schmudlach. Image credit: Museum of Wisconsin Art.

Even before European colonizers introduced colorful glass beads in trade, for centuries Indigenous artisans created beads from stones, bones, and shells, and used them to create jewelry and embellish clothing.

For Jones, the beadwork on these photographs represent a ritual encounter with ancestors. “Beading is a metaphor for our ancestors watching over us. I am also referencing an experience I had when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My mother took me to see a Sioux medicine man named Robert Stead. He led the call to the spirits, the women began to sing, and the ancestors appeared as orbs of light.” Strong Unrelenting Spirits eschews the formalism of photographic portraits that seek only to show what is before the camera. Combining the realism of photographic portraiture with the spiritual experience of light orbs further cements a Native visual language that can combine the visible and ethereal presences of one’s experience.

Tom Jones, *Fire Pit*, from *I am an Indian First and an Artist Second* series, 2008, Inkjet print.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Museum of Wisconsin Art.

A recurring theme in Jones’ work is the appropriation and commodification of Native culture in America. Two series, The North American Landscape and I am an Indian First and an Artist Second, use plastic figures from Cowboys and Indians playsets to wryly reference the way Native culture has been repackaged and sold as a product. The images in the series “Native” Commodity are deadpan documentary representations of Indigenous culture co-opted by the tourism industry. The series Studies in Cultural Appropriation also presents a witty question: if Native designs are readily appropriated by corporations, why not make use of a variety of Indigenous material designs for high fashion?

Tom Jones, *Blake Funmaker*, 2020, Inkjet print.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.

One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is a portrait of Blake Funmaker (2020) in ceremonial regalia that includes an embroidered and beaded face mask. COVID-19 was a particular danger to Native American communities. Noreen Goldman, demographer and social epidemiologist at Princeton University reports, “Elevated COVID-19 death rates among Native Americans serve as a stark reminder of the legacies of historical mistreatment and the continued failure of governments to meet basic needs of this population.” To promote the protection of the community during the pandemic, the Ho-Chunk Nation Department of Health commissioned Jones to photograph members of his community with facemasks as part of their full regalia.

What is consistent across the diverse bodies of work is the existence of a Native photographic language, one that blends traditional Indigenous art forms imbued with ritual, spirituality, and heritage with the detail and historicity lent to a subject by the medium of photography. In contrast to white photographers who have perpetuated the idea that Indigenous nations have vanished or are frozen in a romanticized past, Jones’ visual language instead reinforces that Native peoples are resisting erasure and maintaining their identities despite attempts by colonizers to assimilate them.

Tom Jones: Here We Stand is on view at the Museum of Fine Art, St.Petersburg through August 27, 2023. The exhibition originated at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. A catalogue, including a major essay by Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase in the MFA Store. Installation photography photo credit: Darcy Schuller, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

About the artist

Tom Jones is an artist, curator, writer, and educator. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. Jones is currently a Professor of Photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more information about the artist, visit his website.

About the author

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and is an adjunct instructor at USF, and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

From Margins to Mainstays

By Sabrina Hughes

From Margins to Mainstays: Highlights from the Photography Collection is a small but impactful survey exhibition highlighting the work of photographers who may have experienced marginalization in their life because of part of their identity. The photos included are largely from the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s impressive photography collection, with a few important loans from area collectors.

The title From Margins to Mainstays refers to artists (and in many cases, portrait subjects) whose identity existed on the margins of social norms. Making visible the work of photographers who were queer, BIPOC, women, and often multiple intersections of marginalized identities is the exhibition’s theme. I’ve been immersed in the history of photography for more than a decade and I still learned a lot from this exhibition.

Richard Avedon (American, 1923–2004) *Marian Anderson (Contralto, New York, June 30, 1955)*, 1955, Gelatin silver print, NEA photography purchase grant. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

A number of the artists included are queer, and that part of their identity was often hidden—either by themselves, such as Richard Avedon and Minor White who kept their queerness private during their lives, or just typically excluded from the general discourse around certain photographers and their work.

While the exhibition’s focus is on revealing the axis of discrimination faced by photographers or other artists (with the subtext that this did not keep them from finding professional success) in many cases there is a concomitant axis of privilege that helped them become Mainstays.

Julia Margaret Cameron is one example. While it’s true that women photographers were a relative minority in Victorian England, Julia Margaret Cameron was far from an average woman. She had an extremely rarified friend and portrait model group that included Robert Browning, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose portrait as The Dirty Monk, is included in From Margins to Mainstays.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879) *The Dirty Monk*, 1865, Albumen print.
Note: The print on display in the exhibition is on loan to the MFA, St. Peterburg from a private collection. This albumen print, similar to the one on display, was sourced online and is provided courtesy of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, United Kingdom.

Cameron wasn’t a woman of average means or connections, so it’s hard to think of her for a stand-in for an average woman in the mid-19th century. Cameron had the means and resources to pursue copyrighting, marketing, exhibiting, and publishing her photographs. During her lifetime, she sold eighty prints to the Victoria and Albert Museum and entered a relationship with an established London print seller to publish and sell her photographs. This speaks to Cameron’s social connections and that assisted her career and legacy. Were there barriers to women photographers in the 1860s that couldn’t be overcome by wealth or connections?

Studying art history, one learns quickly that social connections are disproportionately what determined who eventually got included in the history books when they were written. Yet, it has sparked in me curiosity about some of these photographers’ personal lives.

Another example is Berenice Abbott. I studied her tangentially and momentarily because of her friendship with Eugene Atget, who I researched for a prolonged period. Berenice Abbott was studio assistant to Surrealist Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s, which is how she befriended Atget (Man Ray collected Atget’s photographs).

From the exhibition, I learned Abbott was an out lesbian! Personally, I cannot wait to learn more about this part of her life. It’s sparked for me a renewed interest about her time in 1920’s Paris and I’m glad to know that she likely did not spend all of her free social time with the group of Surrealists that she worked with!

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991), *New York at Night*, 1932, Gelatin silver print, Museum purchase with funds provided by the NEA and FACF. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

Abbott made a name for herself as a photographer in the mid-to-late 1930s for her wide-ranging project Changing New York, funded by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Her photograph in the exhibition, New York at Night (1932), is a dreamlike view from atop a skyscraper, looking down on other buildings and the twinkling lights of the city.

Abbott’s contribution to photography history was likely solidified before Changing New York because she facilitated the acquisition of thousands of Atget’s prints and negatives which eventually became a donation to the Museum of Modern Art and a landmark exhibition and production of scholarship decades later in the 1980s.

From Margins to Mainstays relies on the text to help viewers to make the connections between the exhibition theme and the images. In other words, with a few exceptions, the images themselves don’t communicate marginalization.

Minor White (American, 1908-1976), *Ritual Branch, Frost on Window*, 1958, Silver gelatin print, Gift of the photographer. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

These very minor critiques of a diverse and thoughtful exhibition come from my closeness to the subject matter. I had to purposely turn the volume down on my internal photography historian’s commentary, only because it’s hard to think of some of the artists included as being on the margins when they have become such giants in the field. However, that, I suppose, is the strength of the exhibition. Simply expanding our knowledge about photographers we think we know because they are in the survey textbooks always generates new understanding in the present.

From Margins to Mainstays: Highlights from the Photography Collection was organized by MFA St. Petersburg Curator of Photography
Allison Moore, Ph.D., and will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg through September 26, 2021. For additional information and related programming visit the Museum’s website.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

From Chaos to Order

From Chaos to Order: Greek Geometric Art from the Sol Rabin Collection

By Dr. Bob Bianchi

Some of us, I suppose, might initially be reluctant to attend an exhibition featuring 57 relatively small objects from the obscure Geometric period (about 900-700 BCE) of ancient Greek art placed within the context of ancient Greek epic poetry and philosophy. And, I would also imagine, others among us would suspect that reading labels and slugging our way through an accompanying catalogue would be of boringly little interest. We might even echo the sentiments of Callimachus, a Greek poet writing in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE, who once famously quipped, “A big book is even bigger pain!” But hang on for a second, because big things come in small packages!

The first is the sagacious selection of the objects by Dr. Michael Bennett, Senior Curator of Early Western Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, who curated this exhibition. He made the selection from the approximately 700 in the private collection of Mr. Sol Rabin, who has so exclusively focused for decades on acquiring works of art from that period that his collection is universally considered to be the finest of its kind.

Dancing Bull, Greek, (Olympia?), Eighth century BC, Bronze. Helmeted Warrior, Greek, (Thessaly?), Late eighth century BC, Bronze. Peacock, Greek, Eighth century BC, Bronze. All from The Sol Rabin Collection (Peacock photo courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

The second is the text, both in the labels and panels in the exhibition and in the catalogue itself. All were written by Dr. Bennett. His main essay represents a decades-long distillation of his own thoughts on the Geometric period. It is felicitously written and peppered with contemporary references so that it is a very easy read. He defines in very understandable terms the ancient Greek concept of beauty and the Greek definition of that term within the context of his overarching discussion of ordering chaos.

His syntheses of the so-called Presocratic philosophers, his elucidation of the principles of Pythagoras, his discussion of Plato’s famed “simile of the cave,” and his presentation of passages from Aristotle’s Metaphysics are presented in such a reader-friendly manner that the complex becomes simple. Interwoven within those discussions is the place of oral, epic poetry of both Hesiod and Homer, appropriate passages of which he quotes in English translation. Despite its simplicity of style, Dr. Bennett’s essay represents “a fundamental reappraisal of the birth of Greek art,” as the Museum’s Executive Director and CEO, Kristen A. Shepherd, so aptly states in her “Foreword.” I could not agree more.

A fully illustrated catalogue, written by Dr. Bennett, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase online.

To begin with, the Geometric period was so labeled by modern scholars because of the Geometric patterns found on decorated vases of the period, two of which are featured in the exhibition. The repetitive patterns of their decoration are linked, correctly so, to the repetitive patterns found in the poetry of Homer. Those patterns, I might add, have been suggested to have been based on contemporary, now lost, textiles, ostensibly woven by women, as exemplified in The Odyssey, where Penelope holds her suitors at bay until she completes the weaving of a funerary shroud for Laertes. As an added bonus, visitors to this exhibition might also want to take in the concurrent exhibition, Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles, in order to understand just how the repetition of geometric patterns are inherent in the technical mechanics of physical weaving a textile.

One must always remember that the population of the Geometric period of Greece was relatively small, major urban areas rarely containing more than an estimated 5,000 residents. Those residents were neither dominated by the worldwide web nor bombarded by posts on social media. It was an age dominated by oral, epic poetry, and with the exception of Hesiod, Homer was the only show in town. Consequently, the Geometric period of ancient Greek art can indeed be regarded as an age dominated by the epic poetry of Homer. That the poetry of Homer should so dominate an age should come as no surprise. More than 26% of all papyri containing literary texts recovered from the sands of Egypt during the Roman Imperial Period are Homeric! Dr. Bennett is certainly correct, then, in identifying the bronze statuette of a singer accompanying himself on a phorminx as Homer, because the ancient sources clearly state that Hesiod never learned how to play the cithera, the other stringed instrument of the day.

Dr. Bennett’s linking of certain passages from the epics of Homer with the subjects represented on the bronzes is compelling. His discussion of the role of lions in those epics is consistent with his interpretation of the bronze group of a lion attacking a man. The bronzesmith responsible for its creation may also have relied on the Greek artistic convention of portraying the “pregnant moment,” that is a point in the action just prior to its climax. The lion is about to fell its prey, but is not devouring it. The choice is comparable to the scene in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, wherein the protagonist resolves to blind himself, then exits so that the act is anticipated but not consummated on stage.

Man and Lion, Greek, 8th century BC, Bronze, The Sol Rabin Collection

And there are statuettes of horses, horses galore in this exhibition. Here again, Dr. Bennett is doubtless correct when he observes that this repetition of a type is not a mechanical, knee-jerk, simple replication, but represents a repetitive pursuit of perfection and clarity. To my mind, these horses are also evocative of passages in The Iliad (17, 474-8) where the goddess Hera grants one of Achilles’s horses the ability to speak and in so doing predicts the imminent death of his master; and the final lines of that same poem, “…and thus was their burial of Hector, prince of charioteers.”

Installation shot courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

I would like to conclude with two observations in order to indicate just how thought-provoking this exhibition and its accompany catalogue really are. First, the inclusion of three statuettes of nude women is certainly noteworthy inasmuch as the nude female disappears from the repertoire of Greek art until its reintroduction in the 4th century BCE by Praxiteles. Might these statuettes also represent one of the three goddess whose beauty Paris was to judge, and whose decision sparked the Trojan War? And, second, should we not place Mr. Rabin’s pattern of collecting into the context of the longevity of some of the objects in his collection? The nude, hatted figure driving the horse-drawn cart exhibits unmistakable signs of ancient repairs, suggesting it was long-lived because of its perceived value. I think we owe Mr. Rabin a debt of gratitude for likewise perpetuating the longevity of these objects, the value of which Dr. Bennett has so eloquently explained.

Nude Female with Conical Hat, Greek, 8th century BC, Bronze, The Sol Rabin Collection

Wheeled Cart, Greek, (Samos?), Eighth century BC, Bronze, The Sol Rabin Collection

Dr. Bob Bianchi received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, after which he served as curator in the Department of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. During his career he has been the recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships, has subsequently served as a curator in museums in the States, Europe, and the Middle East, has excavated for 17 seasons in Egypt, and has taught as an adjunct professor at three universities. To date, he has published 96 books, 378 journal articles, and book reviews, and has appeared in 105 telecasts worldwide. As a critical art historian with a specialization in Ptolemaic Egypt, he continues to explore intercultural artistic connections between Egypt, Greece, and Rome. He recently retired, as chief curator, after almost twenty years of service with the Foundation Gandur pour l’Art, Genéve. Dr. Bianchi continues to publish, address international congresses, and serve as a fine art advisor and certified appraiser to collectors and institutions. He can be reached at Dr.BobBianchi@gmail.com.

From Chaos to Order: Greek Geometric Art from the Sol Rabin Collection is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, through Sunday, April 11, 2021. A fully illustrated catalogue, written by Dr. Bennett, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase online.

RELATED MUSEUM PROGRAMMING

Thursday, January 14, 7 pm- 8:30 pm
From Chaos to Order with Dr. Michael Bennett and Dr. Sol Rabin
An online ZOOM conversation between Senior Curator of Early Western Art Michael Bennett Ph.,D. and art collector Sol Rabin, Ph.D. to discuss the special exhibition. Dr. Rabin has been collecting in this area for over 30 years, and the vast majority of the works in his collection have never been on public display. Free for MFA members; Not-yet members $20. Online registration required.

Radical Pleasures

by Sabrina Hughes

“I didn’t know that that work was even radical in the way that I see it as being radical now until I started to have a conversation with people—even black people—who thought that my work was “positive.”
Derrick Adams, Artnet News, February 5, 2020.

Derrick Adams: Buoyant is on its last tour stop at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg through November 29, 2020. The exhibition was initially conceived by the Hudson Valley Museum and curated by James E. Bartlett, founder of Open Art and former Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, in Brooklyn, and Laura Vookles, Chair of the Hudson River Museum’s Curatorial Department.

Installation view of *Derick Adams: Buoyant*.
Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

On entering, the exhibition may strike a viewer as many things: joyful, fun, playful, enticing, or whimsical. The twelve large-scale paintings in the exhibition are an explosion of neon and novelty. Radical may not be the first word that comes to mind upon visiting the exhibition when the subject matter, groups of people and individuals relaxing on novelty pool floats, is so patently ordinary.

The Floaters series was created over a span of three years (2016-2019). This is a rare opportunity to see works on loan from private collections, and to see some of the Floaters together as a group, which creates a much different feeling than would seeing any one on its own. Walking into the gallery is walking into a space occupied by paintings of African Americans. Part of the impact of the exhibition is that it highlights how rarely we see representations—in art or popular media—of Black people simply existing. This everyday reality of Black life in America suffers from erasure by omission.

*Floater 66*, 2018, Acrylic paint and collage on paper, Collection of D. Rebecca Davies and Jeremy Kramer. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

In relation to the picture planes of all of the Floaters, the viewer is left rather floating themselves. With the exception of one, the backgrounds of the paintings are one solid shade of blue (one painting has a darker blue at the top that seems to denote the difference between sky and water, the only horizon line in the gallery). The paintings are acrylic on paper, so there are ripples in the paper most noticeable in the blue background as the paper absorbed the paint and dried. The ripples and the occasional variations in the blue field—not a different color, but from more or less paint on the brush—enhance the suggestion of water and gentle motion.

Figures are anchored to their novelty pool floats, but beyond that there are no clues to what kind of space they occupy, other than that it’s water. Without a horizon line, the viewer is left in an uncertain space. Some of the figures are looking out of their space, making eye contact with viewers while many others are engaged with other figures or are simply looking elsewhere.

The swimsuits of each figure are collage elements of different fabric, adding another visual flourish to the already dazzling paintings.

In an interview with Charles Moore for artnet news that I’ll refer to several times, Derrick Adams uses the phrase “Black radical imagination” which, as he sees it, can be a tool to create the future. It is worth exploring this idea so we can fully appreciate how radical these day-glo spaces inhabited by patchwork figures are.

Representation reflects and creates reality. We have seen this thought repeated a lot over the last decade or so—representation matters. Everyone wants to be able to see themselves and their possibilities reflected in the popular media they consume. When Adams conceived the Floaters series in 2015, he searched Instagram for #floaties and the algorithm returned only pictures of white people. In this instance, the representation failed to align with the reality that he had experienced.

Digital Reproduction from *Ebony,* June 1967. Installation view of *Derick Adams: Buoyant*. Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

In further research, Adams found inspiration in an Ebony feature from June 1967 of Coretta and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a tropical escape to Ocho Rios, Jamaica (also included in the exhibition). While the article makes clear that this is not a vacation (King wanted a month in a place without a phone to write his book Where Do We Go from Here?), the photo essay is almost exclusively comprised of images showing Dr. King at rest: walking on the beach, relaxing in the pool, having breakfast on the balcony in his robe and slippers, reading the newspaper in bed. This fascinating editorial shows a seldom-seen side of Dr. King, but also shows what is necessary to fuel his public acts in the struggle for equal civil rights: rest, quiet, isolation, time to think and to put thoughts in order. Time and space to just exist.

It’s worth quoting Adams at length because his intent with the Floaters series was to depict Black people at rest, similar to how Dr. King had been photographed for Ebony.

*Floater 74*. Installation view of *Derick Adams: Buoyant*.
Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

“What I love the most is when I’m at an event or a party at someone’s house and I look around and everyone in the room is doing something. It’s all Black people doing all these amazing things and I’m like, wow, this is great. And I say to myself, this is what we should be making work about, this type of atmosphere. Young Black people should see that there are very normal, very consistent spaces like these—regardless of what’s happening in the news, regardless of what’s happening on social media. With all the conflicts that we’re having, we’re still finding the time. And not everyone in this room has money! These aren’t people who are all well off!

That’s what I’m thinking about in my studio: What can I reveal that has not been shown? And it always goes back to the simplest of things, like normalcy. Black people—not entertaining, just being, living. Letting people deal with that as reality. We’re sitting on this pool float. We’re thinking about life. We’re thinking about nothing. We don’t have to think about something every day. It’s a real human experience not to ponder on things constantly.”

The paintings that resonated most with me were both paintings of women. I’ll describe them but they’re not reproduced here, so you’ll have to go to the exhibition to see them for yourself.

Floater #28 depicts a woman on a white unicorn float. Her bathing suit is neon animal print with hearts and stars, like a Lisa Frank notebook. She looks out of her space and is smiling. Though the blue fields that the figures float on often have the effect of suggesting water through the variations in paint application, most of the geometric planes that comprise the figures are more even in tone—less painterly, more hard-edge. This figure is different. The paint application on her legs and abdomen create a variation in tone within the planes that most of the other figures don’t exhibit. It’s like seeing the natural variation in skin tone across different parts of someone’s body. Adams has also employed the grey-tone paint—usually reserved for the parts of the figures bodies that are underwater—on the figure’s arm and face that couldn’t be the only part under the water if the rest of her is not. It’s the kind of variation that feels like improvisation on the theme. It’s just different enough to have made me stop and look a lot more closely.

Representations like Floaters reflect one reality experienced by Black folks in America, one that aligns with the experience of love, community, family, and just living life. It hints at another reality from the not-so-distant past—the reality that all-Black spaces were backed by apartheid laws and violently enforced by police and mercenary groups. Pools and beaches were sites of contestation. Here in St. Petersburg, the beaches downtown were segregated. From Spa Beach north was designated whites only. The beaches for African Americans were South Mole at what is now Demen’s Landing and Lassing Park.

The subject matter of the paintings contain the tension of present and past, even while Adams is trying to create a future where celebrations of everyday Black life are more commonplace.

We see Black lives snuffed out on live Facebook broadcasts. We see representations of Black Americans working, struggling, mourning. We see them relative to the white supremacist political and economic system that their kidnapped ancestors were forced to build, and that largely controls what type of images are disseminated in the public sphere. It is rare to see representations of Black people resting. Images of Black bodies at rest are radical.

Floater #17 portrays a pregnant woman lounging on a hot pink float. I imagine the buoyancy of her body, with or without the float, is a welcome relief from gravity’s pull on the extra bulk of her body carrying a baby. Black women experience overlapping oppression of misogyny and racism, represented by the term misogynoir. As a class, they have always been expected to work (when white women may have been homemakers, Black women may have been their maids or nannies) and have had the highest labor force participation among all women for years. The United States has a dark history of sterilizing Black women without their consent throughout the 20th century. Yet look back earlier, when African Americans were enslaved and performing forced labor, and Black women’s bodies were commodities that grew the labor force.

Artists are worldbuilders. By making these paintings, Adams populates our world with many more images of Black leisure. Adams realizes the power of the artist to create reality—to create the world in images so that later people can create it through action. If you want an action to succeed, you have to be able to imagine it has happened, and then imagine what happens next. Adams invites viewers to co-create a future where images like this aren’t “positive” in comparison to other pictures, where all aspects of Black life aren’t adjunct to their white counterparts, presented as the default.

The term radical seems to be used with such frequency that the impact of the word has faded. From radical feminism to radical self-care, radical honesty to the radical left, radical is just as often used by Instagram influencers to sell protein powder as in any political reformist sense. We live in a radical-saturated world. Invoking Black radical imagination asks for a rethinking of all assumptions about Black life in America, from the roots up. Ask why things are the way they are and why they seem unchangeable. And then imagine what systems need to be torn down to their foundations and rebuilt differently. In 2020 conversations about prison abolition have entered mainstream political discourse. This is radical imagination at work.

As I’m writing this review, the verdict in Louisville has just come in. Nobody is going to be criminally charged for Breonna Taylor’s murder, though one officer is being charged for endangering the lives of her white neighbors. I’m thinking about Breonna who was not only at home, but was sleeping, literally at rest, when she was killed. Imagine if this had had a different outcome. Imagine what needs to be torn down and rebuilt to ensure future Black lives are valued and protected. I’m also thinking how even though Adams’ intent was to show Black joy and play and people just existing, it seems that there is no neutral in the representation of African Americans. It becomes political as soon as it enters the public because Black people just existing is a radical and revolutionary act. Unless we are part of the communities that Adams is talking about, we may not see the experience that he’s talking about. Black people just living, just being. Black figures at rest. Black people not othered by the implicit or explicit comparison to whiteness. Being in the gallery with so many Floaters makes me wonder if it’s a pool, how enormous the pool must be to hold the figures, the floats, and to still not see the horizon. Are we floating with them? Part of the party? Or interlopers?

Related Exhibition Programming

PANEL DISCUSSION: AFRICAN AMERICAN LEISURE IN THE SUNSHINE STATE & BEYOND WITH DERRICK ADAMS
October 15, 2020, 6:30-8 pm
Free for members, and $10 for not-yet-members.
An online conversation featuring Derrick Adams, Dr. Gretchen Sorin, author of Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights, and Cynthia Wilson-Graham, co-author of Remembering Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation in Silver Springs. The discussion will be moderated by MFA Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill.

BLACK FANTASTIC, BUOYANT AND BOLD: ART’S WAYS OF LEVITATING OVER THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD WITH AUTHOR TENEA D. JOHNSON
October 22, 2020, 6-7 pm
Free for members, and $10 for not-yet-members
Author Tenea D. Johnson will read joy-centered selections from her latest book, Blueprints for Better Worlds (May 2020)as well as the forthcoming collection, Broken Fevers.

POETRY AND SPOKEN WORD WITH DENZEL JOHNSON-GREEN
October 25, 2020, 3-4 pm
Free for members, and $20 for not-yet-members.
Join poet and author Denzel Johnson-Green in the time-honored tradition of utilizing spoken word and poetry to both raise awareness of, and develop mechanisms for addressing, the world around us.

About the author:
Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

ANCIENT THEATER AND THE CINEMA

By Dr. Bob Bianchi

You may not realize it, but if you’re a movie buff you may be surprised to learn about just how indebted Hollywood is to the civilizations of Greece and Rome. I’m not just talking about the obvious, like Gladiator (2000) or 300 (2006), but about films like the eleven in the Star Wars series. As one critic has perceptibly noted, filmmaker George Lucas admits his indebtedness to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (1951), for which Asimov likewise acknowledges his indebtedness to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). All rely on the binary interaction of benevolent forces of good against malevolent powers of evil, think Caligula (1980).

And that is why I am so enamored of Ancient Theater and the Cinema, on view through April 5th at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, carefully researched and curated by Michael Bennett, Ph.D., Senior Curator of Early Western Art, and mounted to great effect in the intimate, upstairs Works on Paper gallery. This exhibition features magnificent ancient works of art, principal among which are outstanding examples of theater-themed vases from Magna Graecia, as the southern part of the boot of the Italian peninsula was affectionately named in antiquity.

Installation view of the exhibition *Ancient Theater and the Cinema*.
*Photo Credit:* Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Art St. Peterburg.

Upon entering an environment bathed in a deep red, one is encouraged to follow the prescribed line of march, dictated by the carefully chosen and thematically grouped movie stills, on loan from Tampa’s University of South Florida Special Collections Library, which line the four gallery walls. One looks at the stills, one walks, and one turns only to find a series of exhibition cases conveniently arranged in the center of the gallery with each object in each of those cases presenting its principal side toward the stills. You do not have to walk around the case in an attempt to figure out what to look at first.

Object Head of Dionysus
2^nd – 1^st century B.C.
Bronze, copper-tin alloy, silver-plated eyes
Anonymous loan L 2019.7.
*Photo Credit:* Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

And while you may recognize the famous actors and actresses and the productions from which the stills are taken, you will probably be introduced to the theater-themed ancient art for the very first time. So here’s a quick “Theater-themed Ancient Art for Dummies.” Ancient Greek drama developed around the cult of Dionysus, popularly regarded as the god of wine and the party. However, via aspects of his cult’s transformational characteristics, Dionysus became the embodiment of impersonation or role-playing. There is an original Greek, hollow-cast bronze portrait of Dionysus (on anonymous loan) on view in this gallery, one of only six ancient Greek originals in America. Dionysus became the patron of ancient drama, which, as we know it today, was invented in Athens, and consisted of annual competitions with prizes for tragedy and comedy. The trio of award-winning dramatists—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—are well known; the authors of comedy, less so. And that comedy evolved from the often very personal and satiric attacks in the comedy of Aristophanes to the phlyax (pronounced fli-ax) plays, derived from the Greek noun meaning gossip players. Introduced during the fourth century BC in Magna Graecia, phlyax plays were basically absurd or ridiculous portrayals of traditional myths and daily life or even satirical burlesques of classical tragedy. Less than a half a dozen of the authors of these plays are known by name, and even less is known about the actual titles of their plays or their plots. Consequently, the depictions of phlyax actors on the vases exhibited in this gallery play a critical role in one’s understanding and assessment of those lost plays. Like those plays, the names of the painters and potters of these vases from Magna Graecia are generally not preserved, so that scholars have traditionally grouped vases which are stylistically similar to one another together, and have named the painter after the most significant example of that group, usually by the name of the collection in which that particular vase is housed.

Object Red-Figure Bell Krater (Wine Mixing Vessel)
South Italian, Apulian, c. 375-350 B.C.
Attributed to the Berkeley Painter Ceramic
On loan from the Collection of Willian Knight Zewadski.
*Photo Credit:* Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

A leitmotif, or recurrent theme, of the depiction of those phlyax actors on those vases is an inherent eroticism, suggested by the bawdy, salacious nature of their content. A case in point is the subject matter of a red-figure (so-called because the figures are reserved in the red color of the clay) bell krater, or ancient kind of punch bowl in which wine was mixed with water, attributed to the Berkeley Painter working in the south Italian city of Apulia. The phlyax wears a padded bodysuit emphasizing his pot belly and cellulite buttocks to which has been attached an oversized phallus, which incidentally, is often associated with the aroused, male followers of Dionysus. He holds a crooked cane as he confronts a (male actor in the guise of a) female figure, clothed in a loosely-fitting garment, who gesticulates with her right hand.

*Photo Credit:* United Artists presents “Satyricon” (1969) starring Martin Potter and Hiram Keller (Produzioni Europee Associati), directed by Federico Fellini and produced by Alberto Grimaldi, film still. @MGM. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Peterburg.

Although no phlyax plays have survived, one can gain a vicarious impression of their nature with the screening at the MFA on March 5th from 7-9 pm of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), based upon the novel of the same name by Petronius (circa 27-66 CE), writing during the reign of the infamous Roman Emperor Nero. (This screening is free to museum members; non-members will be charged the museum admission fee plus an event fee of $5.00.)

The theater stills on view were gifted to the University of South Florida by William Knight Zewadski, who also loaned from his personal collection most of the original antiquities on view in this exhibition. Curator Michael Bennett will interview Bill Zewadski as part of the museum series In the Shade of the Stoa on February 7th, from 11-12 pm. Mr. Zewadski will also present a lecture, Drama in Ancient Greek Pottery with Bill Zewadski, at the Museum on March 10th, from 2-3 pm, in an event which is sponsored by and free for members of the Museum’s Friends of Decorative Arts. (For those who are not, the usual admission plus lecture fees apply. All planning on attending are advised to arrive before 1:45 pm.)

One can only be impressed by the synergy generated by this particular type of programming which enables visitors to confront original works of ancient art in tandem with vintage film stills and select screenings, and made possible in large part by the passion and vision of a local collector.

Dr. Bob Bianchi received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, after which he served as curator in the Department of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. During his career he has been the recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships, has subsequently served as a curator in museums in the States, Europe, and the Middle East, has excavated for 17 seasons in Egypt, and has taught as an adjunct professor at three universities. To date, he has published 96 books, 376 journal articles, and book reviews, and has appeared in 96 telecasts worldwide. As a critical art historian with a specialization in Ptolemaic Egypt, he continues to explore intercultural artistic connections between Egypt, Greece, and Rome. He recently retired, as chief curator, after almost twenty years of service with the Foundation Gandur pour l’Art, Genéve. Dr. Bianchi continues to publish, address international congresses, and serve as a fine art advisor and certified appraiser to collectors and institutions. He can be reached at thedrbob@verizon.net.

ANCIENT THEATER AND THE CINEMA is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in downtown St. Petersburg, FL, through Sunday, April 5, 2020.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Friday, February 7, 11 am- 12:00 pm
In the Shade of the Stoa with Dr. Michael Bennett — Theater in the Classical World with Bill Zewadski
Free with Museum admission

Thursday, March 5, 7–9 pm
Ancient Theater and the Cinema Film Series
Satyricon (1969)
Cost: $5, plus Museum admission

From the Museum’s website: Petronius’ Satyricon, written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome, inspired Fellini’s 1969 Italian fantasy. The film is divided into nine episodes, following the scholar Encolpius and his friend Ascyltus as they try to win the heart of the young boy Gitón, whom they both love, within the film’s depiction of a surreal and dreamlike Roman landscape and culture. Vincent Canby of The New York Times noted that Satyricon was “the quintessential Fellini film, a travelogue through an unknown galaxy, a magnificently realized movie of his and our wildest dreams.”

Tuesday, March 10, 2-3 pm
Friends of the Decorative Arts Lecture Series
Drama in Ancient Greek Pottery with Bill Zewadski
$10, plus Museum admission; $10 for MFA members; and free for MFA Friends of Decorative Arts members.
Complimentary coffee and cookies.
Doors for the lecture do not open until 1:45 pm.
Early attendees are invited to view the gallery.

Time+Space+Place

A Look at Tempus Projects’ Residency Program

by Caitlin Albritton

Combining the best of immersive time in the studio with the added perk of travel, artist-in-residence programs have become the norm for artists to pursue just as much as exhibitions. Allowing for the opportunity to disrupt routine and refresh oneself in an unknown location, work made during residencies can change the course of artists’ careers.

In order to nourish the art community, Tempus Projects – an artist-run non-profit gallery housed in Seminole Heights now reaching their 10^th anniversary this year– stepped to the plate to bring a residency experience to the Tampa Bay Area. While there are other local residency programs, like Morean Art’s Center for Clay’s AIR or USF’s invitation-only Kennedy Family Artist and Scholar in Residency, there is a gap in open-application residencies for national and international interdisciplinary artists.

“It was something that I had wanted to do with Tempus from the beginning. When we had the opportunity for the apartment above the Project Space, we took it,” says Tracy Midulla, Founder, Programing Director and Board Chair of Tempus Project.

Artist Kalup Linzy supervising the installation of **Suns. Moons. Stars. Dreams. Recent Works by Kalup Linzy**, May 21 – June 26, 2016, at the Tempus Projects’ Project Space.

Tempus Project’s residency started in 2016 with an invitation extended to Kalup Linzy, who is a previous graduate from the University of South Florida’s BFA and MFA programs. Commingling with local artists to use as actors in his performances, Linzy used his studio time to create scenes for his soap opera videos that he has become known for.

A 2016 evening view of Tampa’s **Tempus Projects** building featuring the work of Kalup Linzy in the Project Space (the far-right storefront). The second-floor live-workspace houses the Artists in Residency Program.

In a live-work environment, artists implement both the upstairs apartment and the back half of CUNSTHAUS (an additional exhibition and project space next to Tempus Projects that’s main goal is to create an engaging space for a variety of cultural programs and experiences with a low-key emphasis on showing women artists) as their studio space, where they have access to a modest collection of tools to suit their needs along with a $1,000 stipend. To celebrate the end of a residency, the artist presents their most recent works in an exhibition that is usually accompanied by an artist talk at the opening reception and a private cocktail party for the Sustaining Members, whose contributions help fund these residencies along with general operational funding (and previously from ACHC grants).

Decisions, decisions: the difficult selection process

As Tempus Projects begins to get its name out, they have seen residency applications from all over the globe. The open call for their Sunistra exhibition–with over 280 submissions—helped get them on artists’ radars. With their most recent residency open call, Tempus received 63 applications, many of them coming from Georgia, New York, and Florida.

While they don’t give a preference to a certain type of artist, they prefer non-Tampa-based artists since they feel that they can best support local artists in other ways. Trying to do as many residencies as possible in a year, typically two artists are selected from the open call, while other residents are selected by referrals.

“The reason we do our selections as a committee is because we all look at it differently. We are a well-balanced committee, so some may look more closely at their resume and writing, while others might look more closely at the imagery. Everybody has something that they look for, but we don’t give preference to any particular artist. We tend to look at work that is more engaging and relevant to social topics. We look for the most challenging work,” Midulla explains. “Overall, it’s been pretty easy for us to select artists. What it comes down to is that we all have two or three of the same favorites, then we look at the best fit.”

While “success” in terms of how a residency concludes is highly subjective, Tempus Projects has found that the most successful projects revolve around a strong work ethic and the ability to balance time well.

“We’ve had some artists where they didn’t make any work while they visited, then we had other artists that highlighted their time here, and this was indicative in the work they made. They were immersed in local culture, but also made the time for their work. They really got to know our city and community of artists. Kalup Linzy has roots in New York but lives here part-time. While Jenal Dolson (2017 AIR alumnus) was here, she ended up being recruited by USF for their master’s program. Roxanne Jackson (2018 AIR alumnus) is always trying to find reasons to come back to Tampa, and I think that’s exciting that even if they don’t stay here, they have a long-term relationship with us. That’s how we’re serving Tampa and our visiting artists through this residency,” Midulla says.

The artist’s residency experience: creating lasting bonds

Though it may have a small grass-roots foundation, Tempus Projects’ influence and notoriety has spread. Whether having heard about the residency online or meeting a Tempus supporter or board member in passing, sights have pointed artists to Tampa with Tempus becoming a noteworthy destination in itself. In Jenal Dolson’s case, an initial interest in the Tampa Drawers Sketch Gang [a drawing collective previously run out of Quaid Gallery, which was previously housed in Tempus’s Project Space] turned into an exhibition opportunity, which led to her learning about the residency.

Studio work-in-progress for Jenal Dolson’s ***Artificial Paradise***, February 11 – March 10, 2017, Tempus Projects’ Project Space

“My residency proposal talked about my interest in the visuals of choropleths and geology. I was thinking I’d try to focus on something thematic as I’ve always been fascinated with the solid spaces of land, which seemed to be at odds with the marshy swiss-cheesiness of Florida. I was—and still am—interested in the duality of meanings that can be grown out of these notions,” Dolson says. “I love a change of scenery when starting a new body of work. I started projecting images onto panels and editing stills of them on my computer, which helped me look at the space around the work in a new way. It helped me take the step towards breaking a few boundaries or rules I was stuck in, and let me explore a more desired inventory of materials.”

In between studio time, Midulla invited Dolson to all of the local arts and culture events as well as set up studio visits with folks within the art community like Tempus Board Members, local artists, curators, and college faculty and recent MFA graduates.

“It made me feel very welcome, and I’m really grateful to have made some lasting relationships. I had always been interested in doing an MFA a few years after I graduated from the University of Waterloo, but I had never lived anywhere other than Ontario. When people in Tampa learned that I was looking at grad schools, they suggested I apply at USF, so I did. I felt like there was a community to insert myself into here. Despite getting into another program I thought I was set on at the University of Guelph, the universe said, ‘Go to Tampa.’”

Community ties

Other than one-on-one studio visits, many artists have taken their residency opportunity to work collaboratively with local artists and institutions.

Cuban Artist Marian Valdez Rodriguez & Tampa Master Printer Erica Greenberg Schneider at **Bleu Acier** working prints for
Rodriguez’ 2017 exhibition.

“We research the artist’s work, get to know them for a few days, and try to get them in touch with people in the area to help them facilitate their needs,” Midulla says. “Cuban artist Marian Valdez Rodriquez was part of our International Artist Exchange Program, and she worked on a print edition with Bleu Acier [a Tampa-based limited edition fine art publisher and collaborative workshop run by Master Printer Erika Greenberg-Schneider].”

“The Tempus Projects residency is well-suited to artists who work collaboratively and are interested in community engagement,” says Katherine Pill, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Art in St. Peterburg and a long-term Tempus Projects Board Member. “It’s always important to remember that we don’t exist in a vacuum. Creating bridges between different arts communities is extremely valuable in terms of gaining an outside perspective and being introduced to new ideas and ways of doing things. A 2017 panel discussion we organized at the MFA allowed for a public talk regarding the US-Cuba artist exchange that Tempus initiated with the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro.” Christina Humphreys, a San Francisco-based artist and a graduate of USF who was able to spend a month working in Havana, and Cuban artist Marian Valdéz Rodriguez, who had spent a month in Tampa, were present and were able to speak about their respective exchange experiences.”

Artist team LIZN’BOW were selected for their new youth project A Talk Show with LIZN’BOW, which was set up like a workshop series at Community Stepping Stones, a local Sulpher Springs-based non-profit organization using arts-steeped pedagogy to educate and inspire at-risk youth, using a talk show format for the kids to explore different social and identity potentialities.

***A Talk Show with LIZ’BOW***
January 27 – February 17, 2018, at CUNSTHAUS

“Our project with Community Stepping Stones needed every minute we had: we were teaching workshops several days a week and editing the footage from class at night while preparing for the talk show. The actual show ended up being a live audience and live stream performance using work different elements from our classes to bring it together,” LIZN’BOW say. “The kids had so much fun and always had something to say. We really like giving kids a lot of agency, which they like a lot and aren’t used to in normal classroom settings. Every time we had a different workshop session, they had big reactions because we pushed them to experiment, like during our makeup sessions. They got pretty wild adding globs of lipstick all over their face. At first, they would judge the experience, but after actually doing it they would get excited, laugh, and want to do it again.”

The community overall was helpful in supporting LIZN’BOW’s project and helping it come to fruition, allowing for additional informal collaborations to nourish the next generation of artists and thinkers. By the end of their residency, LIZN’Bow had two exhibitions: a LIZN’BOW Retrospective in one gallery, and A Talk Show in the other.

“The day of the show was really special and a lot of folks really liked what we did with them, including the kid’s parents. The Stepping Stones kids and Tempus Projects folks became our community during that time,” LIZN’BOW explain. “I think that ideas that are worked out and through between a group of people can be more powerful than an idea coming from just one person. Doing creative and social work can also be very difficult materially and emotionally, and having the support from several different places and people can be crucial in seeing a project and concept grow.”

Even well after these projects have finished, students at Community Stepping Stones who participated in the Talk Show still brag to new students about their live-feed gallery debut.

“The most notable moment in these projects is the pride the kids take in their work. We can really see the difference it makes to them. First, they might be standoffish with new artists or dismissive of the medium—these are some pretty skeptical kids—but as the lesson unfolds and they connect to these new experiences, they become very excited and confident about it. It is really just the best thing to see,” says Michelle Sears, Director of Programs at Community Stepping Stones.

Installation view of the second-floor live-work space during ***I WOULDN’T GO THERE UNLESS I COULD FIT EVERYTHING SHE OWNS IN MY MOUTH***
**Recent Works by Mike Stasny,** September 17 – October 8, 2016
Tempus Projects

Mike Stasny from Atlanta was another Tempus resident artist who came to work with these students for two 2-hour sculpture classes. The young artists were asked to imagine their subject (whether a dog, an old-fashioned radio or a person) stretched out in strange ways to pull the animals and objects out of proportion. Using foam and wire, they created new and unusual artistic “monsters.”

“They were so excited and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. We try to introduce as many different artists and experiences as possible to our classes,” Sears says. “These are extremely meaningful collaborative experiences to the students. It opens their world view and exposes them to new ways of thinking about how they connect to people and their world in general, and they take these experiences home. Our students’ families visit our classroom regularly and they see what the kids are doing and they have conversations about it, and I believe those conversations strengthen bonds and open doors to possibilities and a new understanding of many different things.”

Tempus Projects has hosted eleven artists and two artist groups since their first residency, but what’s so special about Tampa as a destination to drive artists to come? Whether being enchanted by the tropics, wishing to work collaboratively with the community, or a myriad of other reasons, it’s clear that there’s a fascination with this place; there’s something luscious and mysterious that causes artists to gravitate to this area that encourages a different kind of growth.

“We have other interesting projects here that bring people here, but I think the weirdness of Tampa is the driving curiosity for these artists,” Midulla says.

—————-

Caitlin Albritton is a freelance writer based in Tampa with a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. A practicing artist, you can learn more about her practice by following her on Instagram @caitlinalbritton or visiting her website.

We Must Go…

By Sabrina Hughes

The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s newest exhibition is Theo Wujcik: Cantos, a series of works based on Dante’s Inferno. The exhibition is in turns lyrical, poetic, and dark in keeping with Wujcik’s literary inspiration for the paintings.

If, like me, it’s been decades since thinking about Dante in any way, substantial or otherwise, a refresher on the basics of the Inferno will help add layers of interpretive flesh to the works in the exhibition. The Inferno is the first part of Florentine poet Dante Alighieri’s three-part epic poem The Divine Comedy. In this part of his journey, Dante travels through the nine circles of hell guided by ancient Roman poet Virgil at the behest of his love Beatrice who is in heaven and notices that Dante has wandered off his proper path. Dante trades the offer of fame in the living world for the tortured souls’ stories. Each canto in the poem is analogous to a chapter in the story.

*C-2-C Invocation of the Muses*, 1998. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Alan J. and Sue Kaufman.

Like any proper epic poem, Theo Wujcik: Cantos begins with an invocation of the muses. In Dante’s second canto, he calls upon the muses to ask for creative aid in recounting his story faithfully. Wujcik’s paintings in the introductory gallery C-2-A and C-2-C, both subtitled Invocation of the Muses (1998), are not only an introduction to the themes of Cantos but also to the visual fragmentation and recombination that has come to be Wujcik’s stylistic hallmark. These first two paintings in the exhibition had at one time been part of the same canvas, but Wujcik excised these sections from the whole creating two distinct works. C-2-C, with its simple and recognizable votive holder motif paired with the title sets the mood for ritual experience.

Wujcik moved to Tampa in 1970 to join the staff at Graphicstudio as a master printer at the University of South Florida. He lived and worked in Ybor City until his death in 2014. Wujcik found inspiration in comic strips and other found imagery of the mass media. Several collages are included in the exhibition, revealing the way he combined and composed drawings, photos, and comics. The personalized symbolism that manifests in his work is pop filtered through the visual language of Florida. Ever present in his work since the mid-1980s is the diamond chain link fence motif. This visual device further heightens the fragmentation and visual confusion that begins in collage and ends on the canvas.

*Men Were We Once (Canto XIII)*, 1997. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of The Terrier Foundation, Tampa, FL.

Wujcik’s personal symbolic structures are reworked in Cantos to metaphorically reference Dante. In Men Were We Once (Canto XIII) (1997), red drapery and a white button-down shirt represent Virgil and Dante. In this canto, the travelers enter the seventh circle of hell and meet those who have committed violence against themselves–suicides. These souls have been transmuted into tree stumps that speak and bleed. The empty wooden hangers directly reference both the wooden form of the souls as well as part of the punishment—that the flesh they used to “wear” now hangs like clothing among the trees. The comic strip imagery below the hangers hint at conflict and violence that they may have experienced in life, as well as the forest Dante describes in the story.

Theo Wujcik: Cantos is anchored by two large-scale paintings in the MFA’s collection: Canto II (1997) and Gates of Hell (1987).

*Canto II*, 1997. Polymer emulsion and charcoal on canvas. Gift of Bonita L. Cobb in memory of Nikki C. Cobb.

In Inferno, it is in Canto II that Dante learns how and why Virgil was sent to him—directed by three women in heaven looking out for his well being: Beatrice, St. Lucia, and Mary. Virgil has told Dante that they must travel through hell to get back on the proper path, and while Dante is at first brave, he quickly loses his resolve. He wavers not out of fear but from self-sabotage, uncertainty, and feelings of unworthiness.

In Wujcik’s Canto II, the viewer is confronted with an overwhelming fragmentation of images—one’s eyes slide over the monochrome surface looking for purchase, something solid to focus on. The element that resolves first and most prominently, that gives the eye a place to rest, is a large bolt in the upper right quadrant. The winding threads of the bolt may reference the concentric circles of hell that Dante is about to spiral into. Three butter knives are situated in the center of the canvas, large yet somehow almost invisible among the cacophony; below them appear three chain links all rendered naturalistically while surrounding and overlaid are cartoons and the ubiquitous diamond fence. Perhaps this jumble of overwhelming image fragment foreshadow the chaos and distress that Dante will experience in hell. Or perhaps it is all of the memories that Dante is attempting to make sense of to create a coherent narrative.

The Gates of Hell references Canto III when Dante and Virgil set out into the underworld. The gates are inscribed with verse ending “Abandon hope, who enter here.” This canto describes an area called the vestibule of hell where souls reside who took no sides in life. They are not in hell but neither are they out of it—eternally trapped in the liminal doorway due to their relentless self-interest in life. The sage figure on the left, presumably Virgil, encounters one such soul who, as described by Dante, is sentenced to eternally chase a banner while themselves being chased by bees (!). Further into the pictorial space is Charon, the ferryman for the souls who are driven by celestial balance to enter hell proper.

*Gates of Hell*, 1987. Acrylic and collage on canvas. Gift of Susan Johnson in honor of Katherine Pill.

In contrast to the thick chain link device that fragments the surface of Canto II, in Gates of Hell, the familiar device serves a different visual purpose. The figures and planes appear to be shaped from a diamond-wire armature. All are made of, behind and in front of the ubiquitous chain link motif. In this painting, the chain armatures are tantalizing. They create figures that are paradoxically solid and hollow. Like shades encountered in the underworld, they are simultaneously there and not. Rather than creating lines that obstruct and confuse the viewer’s progress through the pictorial space, here it creates and shapes the space.

The only solid elements in the painting are the pink door frame mouldings defining the edges of the space. Even these solid surfaces, however, when examined closely, reveal the chain links texturally embedded and painted over. Wujcik used paper towels, polymers, and other inclusions on the canvas surface to produce dimensionality on his otherwise relentlessly flat painting surfaces.

*PSST!*, 1997. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Beth Daniels, Largo, FL.

Cantos provides viewers a way out of Wujcik’s Inferno with the paired paintings We Must Go (Canto XXXIV) (1997) and PSST! (1997) where the exit from hell is fittingly made of cantilever patio umbrellas. In We Must Go, the horizontally-mirrored umbrella canopies float on a white ground. It is a simple yet elegant composition that so subtly references the Inferno that were it not for the title, I think a viewer would not make the connection. PSST! is a painting after a preparatory collage included in the first gallery. Here, one umbrella canopy shape is filled in with a domestic scene from what looks like an interior design publication decades old even at the time of the painting’s creation. The mirrored canopy contains fragmented comic strip imagery, juxtaposing two different rendering styles, one an idealized interior space, the other a cartoon. In Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXXIV is the final one, where Dante and Virgil have come to the center of hell where Lucifer resides in stasis. In order to leave hell, they must climb down Lucifer’s torso to a point, only visible to those who know to look for it, where a threshold is crossed, gravity is inverted, the world is topsy turvy, and they are no longer in hell. In PSST!, especially as it is in conversation with the preparatory collage where the composition is inverted, the question is which is the ninth circle of hell and which is the way out? Is the ideal home scene hell or the way out?

Wujcik’s Cantos represent a theme that he returned to over the span of more than a decade. In other words, it wasn’t a thought that was completed easily. As Dante experienced, hell is not traversed easily, and the only way out is through.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Theo Wujcik: Cantos is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg through June 2, 2019. In tribute of the artist’s love of the Ybor City night club scene, the MFA’s support group The Contemporaries is hosting a dance party fundraiser “Theo’s Inferno” on Friday, May 17th at the Museum. 1980s punk and new wave tunes spun by Tampa-based DJ Gabe Echazabal, Ybor City-themed food offerings, and an open beer bar will set the retro tone for the evening. General admission is from 7 – 10 pm with an extra special VIP offering starting at 6:30 pm featuring a private tour by Susan Johnson of the Theo Wujcik Estate and MFA Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill. Advance tickets available for purchase online at the Museum’s website.

The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg received generous support for this exhibition from Ann and Bill Edwards and The Gobioff Foundation.

LACMA Photography Curator to speak at the Museum of Fine Art St. Petersburg

Conversation with a Curator: Really! This is (So) Not a Selfie
Thursday, October 25th, 7-8 pm at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
FREE with Museum admission, $10 on Thursdays after 5 pm.

The current exhibition This is Not a Selfie is drawn from a single collection, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA, will be at the Museum on Thursday, October 25th for an informal 7 pm gallery talk to discuss the history of self-portraiture photography and its role in today’s image-driven, media-rich environment. #notaselfieMFA Image: Anne Collier, Mirror Ball [detail], 2004, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Anne Collier, courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles

We can selfie if we want to

Snapchat photo by Sabrina Hughes, the author of the upcoming post titled: *My Camera, My Sel(fie)* using Alfred Stieglitz, *Self-Portrait, Cortina*, 1890, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

The upcoming essay by St. Petersburg photo historian Sabrina Hughes, My Camera My Self(ie), which will post on Bay Art Files next week, examines the complex relationship between photographic self-portraiture and the selfie. That such a relationship might exist and be scrutinized is explicitly suggested by the title of the current traveling exhibition at the MFA, St Petersburg, This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self- Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection. The title asserts that a clear distinction can be drawn between the two.

The Irmas Collection, on display at the MFA through November 25th, is a deep and rich survey of photographic self-portraiture by considerable artists and is, as such, definitely worthy of one’s time and attention and a visit. In conjunction with the exhibition there are also selfie stations situated in the galleries where one can photograph oneself with various backdrops; projected, optical and otherwise. To take the exhibition’s title at face value, as it were, we are being asked to make a comparison between the art on the walls and the selfie one might take whilst at the exhibition.

Undoubtedly, this is a complex and involved question. The fact that a comparison is being asked to be drawn, in itself, entertains the notion that there is a spectrum on which both can be assessed. There are commonalities between museum-quality photographic self-portraiture and the selfie, and that these two distinct practices should be fairly judged and reviewed one and together, at the same time, and in the same place is surely a provocative question.

It is one that Hughes insightfully and deftly examines in her Essay, My Camera, My Self(ie). Alone, the artists and their works on display definitely deserve one’s time and attention. The issues raised in the essay, it is hoped, will add a further perspective that provokes thought and encourages discourse. And indeed, in addition, add to one’s overall enjoyment of this exhibition. That is our intention.