In Good Company: Strength of Character at Creative Pinellas by Jessica Todd
In her latest exhibition, Strength of Character at Creative Pinellas, curator Katherine Gibson welcomes the viewer into the gallery with warm familiarity. Oak seats and fruit chandeliers allude to home. Rich colors, natural materials, and hints of domesticity soften the formality of the impressively grand galleries of Creative Pinellas. There’s even a scent of cedar in the air.
The Art world is still shedding the restrictive boundaries between “Fine Art” and Crafts and Design. The Western Art canon has long excluded work due to medium, process, functionality, and proximity to the domestic. While oil painting and marble sculpture dominate the collections of major institutions and the pages of Art History books, a wealth of works in traditional Crafts media such as ceramics, wood, glass, fine metal, fibers, and paper have been largely ignored.
This exclusion is not due to a lack of artistic merit. Rather, it is deeply rooted in classism, racism, and sexism. Availability of materials, differing cultural applications of art objects, and restricted access to education and patronage led to different kinds of artmaking throughout history. To assert the dominance of the upper-class Western European male, the materials and functionality associated with the art of socially repressed groups were deemed inferior. And the tradition lives on.
Today, we see artists and curators challenging this bias. Audiences’ enthusiasm for Crafts media, Design, and functional work continues to push it into the mainstream. We see materials, processes, and forms we’re accustomed to living with in our homes now in gallery and museum spaces. This familiarity offers an entry point to the viewer. It democratizes Western art in a revolutionary way.
Gibson’s curatorial work is, in this sense, revolutionary. She integrates Crafts media with painting and sculpture, functional with conceptual work, and self-trained with academically trained artists. She integrates these works into the gallery seamlessly. Most importantly, her exhibitions are not “about” Art hierarchies. They’re about placing thoughtfully made artworks in a space and allowing them to converse with each other and with the viewer.
Strength of Character beautifully iterates this concept. We see the abstract paintings of Edgar Sanchez Cumbas next to the carved wooden furniture of David and Kathleen Bly alongside the sculptural installations of Kendra Frorup, which integrate printmaking, casting, and metalwork. Chandeliers converse with stretched canvas. Stools talk to framed paintings.
The harmony of the work in the gallery is a reflection of the collaborative installation process. The curator, artists, and Creative Pinellas staff came together to design an exhibition that is both cohesive and unexpected. Gibson isn’t afraid to ask the viewer to look upward or downward – “gallery height” is merely a suggestion. She’s a master of balancing scale in improbable ways: the Blys’ four petit Live Oak sculptures hold their own resting on the ground catty-cornered to Frorup’s wall-sized installation and substantial Sugar Apple Chandelier.
Each artist also contributed their unique perspective to the installation process: Frorup’s talent for collaging objects, Sanchez Cumbas’s eye for color and form, and the Blys’ engagement with architecture. Freddie Hughes (Gallery and Facilities Engagement Manager for Creative Pinellas) was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to life with his extensive installation knowledge and technical support. Serendipitous moments, like finding an old fence post outside to anchor Sanchez Cumbas’s Brush, or Frorup upending a utility cart from her studio to hold Banana Chandelier, reflect an openness to experimentation and play.
Though diverse in their media, the works in Strength of Character are united visually. Warm, rich earthy tones dominate the palette with intermittent pops of teal and quiet moments of textured white. Voluminous abstract shapes uncovered in the natural wood patterns of the Blys’ Live Oak series mirror Sanchez Cumbas’s explorations of human form in his Skinless series. Frenetic feather-like shapes in Sanchez Cumbas’s Compression Series and Reduction in Volumes are reflected in the crisscrossing screen- printed palm fronds of Frorup’s untitled installation. After seeing the symmetrical wood-turned bumps of the Blys’ work, Frorup responded with similarly shaped spun metal hardware to hang her Sugar Apple Chandelier.
Conceptually, all of the artists in the exhibition start with process. Frorup’s practice begins with collecting objects. She then problem solves through active making. Frorup engages in a range of art-making processes – from casting to papermaking to screenprinting – to arrive at her installations and sculptures. Her high regard for process is evident in her untitled installation featuring used screen-printing screens. The fruits that appear in Frorup’s work are an homage to her Bahamian roots and her mother’s farm that she grew up working on. Much like the artwork, the fruits are the sweet end result of a long cultivation process.
The Blys’ work is similarly driven by collected materials – reclaimed trees from Tampa’s urban neighborhoods. Their sculptures are a collaboration with the tree that bore the wood, which evolves throughout the making process. The tree tells them where to carve and when to stop. They work the wood while it’s still green, rather than fully dried, so that after their intervention the wood continues to bend, move, and crack. The resulting sculptures, many of which function as furniture, act as monuments to the downed tree from which they were sourced.
Sanchez Cumbas responds to the world around him through the cathartic process of painting. His kinetic brushstrokes in Compression Series and Reduction in Volumes reflect the turbulent war in Afghanistan and politics of 2010, when they were made (he notes, still relevant today). These works mark a turn from his figurative paintings, the last of which is Brush, also in the exhibition, a nod to the Buddha and his own Buddhist practice, a piece that is notably calmer and more grounded. The much more restrained works in the Skinless series sensitively explore bodies and skin, and issues around skin tone in the Latinx community. Each piece is a visual reflection of the emotion with which it was created.
It’s evident when speaking with Gibson and the artists of Strength of Character that they all share an immense respect for each other’s practices. The joyful spirit with which they engaged in this collaborative project is palpable in the gallery, and reflected in the enthusiasm of Creative Pinellas’s passionate staff. Head to Largo and make yourself at home in this beautiful exhibition, up through April 28, 2024.
A special thanks to the Gobioff Foundation for supporting this exhibition through their Microgrant program.
Creative Pinellas is Pinellas County’s non-profit local arts agency providing funding and support to artists while connecting businesses, tourism and the public with the arts community.
Jessica Todd is a curator, writer, and artist based in Tampa, Florida. She is passionate about building the creative infrastructures that support artists, and studying and addressing issues of equity, access, and inclusion in the arts. In October 2022, Jessica opened Parachute Gallery in Ybor City, first serving as an exhibition space for national artists and later a retail gallery representing local artists. Parachute Gallery currently operates remotely through online resources and off-site programming. Jessica has worked with a number of arts organizations since moving to Tampa in 2020, including Tempus Projects, Artspace Tampa Initiative, Crab Devil, and the Morean Arts Center. For six years, prior to moving to Tampa, she was the Residency Manager for the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. Jessica holds an MFA in Jewelry/Metals/Enameling from Kent State University, a BA in Art from Penn State University, and a Diploma of Hispanic Studies from the University of Barcelona.
Any museum exhibition that even hints at celebrating debauchery is welcome in my book. At the time of this writing, American culture has sustained a “No-Fun Zone” mentality for at least a decade. I’m not naïve enough to expect outright fun in any museum, but there’s no reason exhibitions can’t be titillating, even sleazy. Museums themselves, however, seem dead set on convincing the public of how fun and carefree they are through a glut of programming like Teens’ Night, yoga classes, dance performances, and concerts. These programs are often hosted directly inside, and thus interrupt, the galleries. Designed to give the impression of “accessibility,” these programs can’t disguise the reality that museums are perpetually stern institutions. Museums are largely about propriety. I accept that – I’m an adult.
There is no horror quite like organized fun. Admittedly, my thirst for anything remotely stimulating has sometimes led me to initially qualify things as good in the negative: this TV show wasn’t as preachy as it could’ve been, that movie wasn’t as predictable as most movies lately, etc. When I heard that Judy Pfaff had an exhibition in Florida, about Florida, I had every reason to be primed to enjoy it.
It turns out Pfaff has a history with Florida; in particular: Sarasota. Known primarily for her engulfing multimedia installations, Judy Pfaff has worked as a prominent visual artist for over fifty years. In 1981, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art. Just over a decade ago, she was invited back to Sarasota by the educational program ARTmuse. This program was created by the Sarasota Art Museum’s founders as an embryonic platform for what would ultimately become the brick-and-mortar museum itself. Things have come full circle as Pfaff has an exhibition up at the Sarasota Art Museum titled Picking Up the Pieces.
The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains the most vibrant work and the least like installation. While they have oblong shapes, flex in multiple directions, and even reach out towards the viewer, each artwork is discernably contained. It isn’t that hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. “My mind is wired as a painter,” Pfaff admits, and that primary sensibility is on display here.
Multiple panels line the wall of various shapes and sizes. They all appear to be made of acrylic. Some are intrinsically pigmented, others superficially by staining the surface with resin. Most of these panels have “limbs” that extend outward, complicating their initial flatness. These extensions are mostly welded steel lines that blossom into other forms: more panels, crescent shapes for leaves, tubes of neon twisting jaggedly. The long arm of Alexander Calder can’t be ignored. Flashes of Frank Stella blink within these works, too. Specifically, Stella’s wall sculptures that seem equally inspired by fluorescent lighting, the Art Deco revival of the 1980s, and cocaine.
Regardless of how saturated and active these panels are, they all maintain a degree of translucency. Some light can pass through, some sections disguise themselves against the supporting wall, some areas let you see yourself looking at them. Moments like these are reminders that the materials here aren’t actually moving, aren’t really fluid, aren’t truly alive, but are entirely fake.
In fact, Pfaff’s work relishes in all things fake. This is a key point that isn’t directly addressed in the supporting text. There’s no question that, “Pfaff’s impressions of Florida’s sun-soaked, life-affirming landscape, fecund nature, and leisurely rhythm of life,” are presented. There are “…a plethora of readymade faux flowers, fruits, and vegetables…and three-dimensional elements that resemble flora and foliage,” all over these galleries. However, that’s only half right. There should be more emphasis on the word “faux,” as I see Pfaff’s work as a celebration of Florida’s evident natural life and obvious affinity for the artificial. That is Florida’s power: the cheap but seamless harmony of the natural and the synthetic worlds; a shotgun wedding between the Jurassic and the plastic.
This unorthodox synthesis is evident in this room’s only free-standing sculptures. In the center, a long table extends diagonally across the gallery next to a lawn chair. Or, it used to be a lawn chair. The tight network of warp and weft has become just the slightest bit molten, the littlest bit loose. Now, the plastic strings are frozen in limbo: a permanent refractory period. The table itself is smeared with detritus. Before the viewer lies an opulent spread of fake deserts, plastic bags, half-drunk cocktails, fabric flowers, and neon lights, all entombed in goo. Neon is a sharp analogy to Florida, as neon is a natural element but registers as otherworldly and disposable: hypnotic garbage.
As fun as these works are, they are often too literal. Fake fruits and fake flowers are used to represent…Florida’s real fruits and real flowers? That’s a bit too on the nose for me. Other works, like the two-panel pieces on the righthand wall, entertain more subtlety. The first, measuring at about 3’ x 3’, is an orange panel erupting into circular steel shapes. Lacing those shapes are small lights that blink in a gentle rhythm akin to Christmas lights. This all reads like flowers and bees without literally being those things. It’s also one of the pieces with the darkest color palettes: could those lights be little stars? The piece is backlit with surreal blue and green lights that recall a gas station at night. The panel piece to its right is a larger rug with a multicolored neon light zipping through it like a waterslide.
With all this activity, one almost misses the rug-turned-tablecloth that flows off the table at almost completely ninety- degrees. Itself covered in resin, it looks like roadkill in the final stages of rigor mortis, or a stray sock in a teenage boy’s room. One can hear the sound it would make if it fell on the floor. Across the gallery, another rug undulates like a tongue as it belches a small meal of plastic margarita glasses.
All these are richer strategies than “cocktail glasses to represent cocktail glasses.” Still, the work encapsulates Pfaff’s acute sense of the fun, futureless frivolity of Florida. This state is the perpetual butt of cheap jokes and single-minded analyses: heralded as a bastion of freedom and family values, derided from afar as “America’s dick,” or grimly presented as the canary in the coal mine of right-wing fascism and censorship that’s ready at a moment’s notice to leap onto the country writ large.
Florida is much richer and dumber than all that. It’s a place of off-season carnivals, dinosaurs past their prime, strip malls, strip clubs, loose morals, endless lawsuits, lush landscape, low taxes, low education, violent storms, finger foods, and the brisk exchange of fluids. The weather is nice, and the people are mean. It values transience and expedience: cheap thrills year-round. Obviously, this means no community, no history and no future, and absolutely no real obligations. That’s not exactly a role model. But what history matters in a place so relentlessly present? What future could ever happen in a state that is designed with no attention span? That has one season? Whose main business is tourism: strangers leaving just as quickly as they came? Pfaff astutely and lovingly distills Florida’s Multiple Personality Disorder into more digestible forms without reducing its amusement and frustration.
One gleans quite a different reading from the exhibition documents and the title itself, Picking Up the Pieces. Both the title of the exhibit and the title of a large-scale installation in the second room, refer to Hurricane Ian. According to the museum text, Picking Up the Pieces is inspired by, “Hurricane Ian’s devastating impact on southwestern Florida in September 2022.” The text continues to correctly describe Hurricane Ian’s “bewildering chaos and tumult” and the “indelible mark” it left in its “aftermath.” Some of this aftermath is presented in a video projection that accompanies the installation. Pfaff herself bore witness to Ian’s “destructive power” at Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island.
Words like these are apt descriptions of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian. What’s less apt is the implied equivalence between the somber memories of Hurricane Ian and the experience of Pfaff’s work here. Yes, twisted metal, pools of plastic, flying panels, and shorn fabric abound. Random objects from drinking glasses, neon lights, seashells, and honeycomb cardboard stock are married by the stirring forces of wind and flood. Natural disasters make their own mixed media installations out of our lives. Pfaff communicates that point well enough.
The issue is that Pfaff’s work just isn’t that sad. She may have felt sadness seeing what Hurricane Ian left behind – who wouldn’t? – but that’s her business. Sorrow is not evident in these galleries. But the supporting text and the dismal documentary-style of the video imply a mournful experience that just isn’t there, and a degree of chaos when the work is usually quite prim, for better or worse.
That said, the second room is notably more muted in color. Starburst candy colors are out, and the paler shades of taupe, beige, and grey are in. Largely, this is the result of a material swap: cardboard, polyurethane foam, concrete slabs, aged wood, and a monochromatic video dominate this room. There are still colored acrylic panels and neon lights, but they’re accents against a quieter backdrop. Speaking of backdrops, the room’s architecture lends to this new atmosphere. Instead of having the titanium white gallery walls of the first room, the second room exposes the weathered bricks of the original building, a former high school. These bricks, in their smeared glory, contribute heavily to the industrial, nautical feeling of the gallery. Dimmed lights allow viewers to see the video projection, obviously, but also induce a hush.
The centerpiece is a large installation of steel pipes, stone, colored panels, LED light strips, and sailboats suspended mid-air. They don’t move, but you can. Viewers can walk through this space, around these objects and their various harnessing apparatuses, to get the simulated, safer, lower-resolution experience that they’re in the eye of the hurricane. A single skylight window beams down soft, natural light roughly in the installation’s center. The power cords of the LED strips, the unnatural light in the room, are disguised, hilariously, by flooring tape with a “wood floor” image on their backside. Some large strips of that same tape are slapped against the gallery walls where their camouflage does them less good.
Again, where’s the doom and gloom? Viewers are impressed by this installation, not depressed. “How did they get these pieces in here?” “How do they all stay still?” “Who could think of this?” “Why is this so fun?” These are a few of the questions I overheard other visitors compelled to ask out loud. Some visitors preoccupied themselves with the logistics of how it was assembled, a common and distracting Achielle’s heel of most installation art. Many people, however, easily let go of those questions and drifted off into the museum VR-experience of matter swirling around them. My personal favorite of these Twister floating objects are the sunflowers and their towering stalks sealed in intergalactic platinum paint.
Well, if you don’t find sadness in this exhibit yourself, it’ll be handed to you. Opposite the installation is a large wall with a projected video. This video documents various sites of the destruction of Hurricane Ian from the vantage point of a car window. Collapsed buildings, enormous boats slammed into one another, long stretches of land filled with scrap: all presented in black and white, in case you didn’t register how solemn this is supposed to be. This is a flimsy juxtaposition to the vibrance and Fantasia-style animation of dead objects in the rest of the gallery. It’s a needless bummer. Presumably, the viewer is supposed to interpret this pairing as evidence of the exhibition’s sophisticated duality: holding the vividness and pleasure of the natural world with its hazardous potential for carnage. How mature.
This just belies Pfaff’s organic interests and the obvious effects of her work. It’s just as useless to insist on even a shred of this exhibit being mournful as it is to insist on Goya being happy-go-lucky. Quieter, yes. In fact, the artwork lining the walls surrounding the installation are some of the best works by Judy Pfaff that I’ve ever seen. On the left, two enormous wall pieces comingle cardboard, foam, and metal until they look like mutated hornet’s nests. When you get closer, the layering of colors, adjustments from gloss to matte, and degrees of opacity are so rich that they deserve the same reverent vocabulary used to describe oil painting. The porous cardboard stock rhymes nicely with the aforementioned sunflowers.
On the back wall, a horizontal steel frame acts as the skeleton for a billowing mass of plastic. It reads almost like a color spectrum, beginning on the left with some green and deep blues, transforming into violet and red, and then evaporating into translucency. A select amount of LED and neon lights breathe the most tender amount of life into this rubble. Beneath the circulating web of plastic neurons is the cortex: a multicolored disco ball. Despite the mass of material blocking out much of its already faint light, it spins faithfully: beaming out whatever signal it can.
The wall closest to the video projection holds a similar sculpture. This time, there’s no color: just steel, a white LED light, and translucent plastic. No disco ball, either. Unlike its sister sculpture, this one appears devoid of life. Backlit by the sterile white LED light, it suspends like a ghost waiting to cross over. Or maybe that’s pessimistic: what if its blankness isn’t the end of life, but the beginning, like a stem cell?
Underneath that is a large display of objects not dissimilar from the sordid table in the first room. This piece is more securely (i.e. more conservatively) positioned near a wall against which a large LED light projects. It appears to be a slab of concrete coated with foam tinted in various shades of blue, resin, seashells, plants, and dilapidated pottery. Both the seashells and the plastic twinkle as one walks by. Small orifices gape while masses of urethane foam crest and rock, all giving the appearance of a seafloor caught in the moment where the current stops just before shifting directions.
In my mind, these artworks display the most technical acumen and emotional resonance of the work on view. That said, their resonance is not that potent. If there’s any sadness in this exhibition, it’s the realization that the work isn’t as loose or audacious as their initial jolt suggests. After the sugar rush comes the crash. Granted, it’s not a major crash, there’s interesting and fun artwork here, but there is a noticeable dip in enthusiasm once one takes a second lap through the galleries.
While Pfaff’s piquant visual interests are obvious, so is her ultimate conventionalism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the brashness of the work ques the viewer up for an experience that is, frankly, rather innocuous. Just as exotic sea life and reptiles flaunt vibrant colors and dizzying patterns to signal danger, I wish these works had more of the venom I felt they promised me. Alas, I left the gallery not sucking out the symbolic poison or asking a loved one to urinate on my metaphorical jellyfish sting.
Picking Up the Pieces has the distinct feeling of butterflies in one’s stomach as they get ready for a party – the imagined possibilities of laughter, music, dancing, getting buzzed, getting laid, blowing off steam. Then, they get to the party and it’s just a little smaller, just a little quieter, the lights a little too bright, the decor a little too neat, the conversations a little stiff, the people a little more sober than one had hoped, the specter of etiquette hiding just behind the door.
The exhibition Judy Pfaff: Picking Up the Pieces is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, through Sunday, March 24, 2024.
Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in Orlando. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.
I wrote about the model in a previous 2021 Bay Art Files article when I reviewed Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The film is now out and a screening was scheduled in late August at the Cincinnati Art Museum. There happened to be a 21c Museum Hotel not far, so my decision was made. I would see the film, stay at the 21c, take in Cincinnati and write about all of it! I snapped out of my summer slump, rejuvenated to have plans and an assignment. (In case you didn’t know, I am the official roving correspondent for Bay Art Files – Atlanta, Miami, Nashville, and now Cincinnati.)
The screening of This World Is Not My Own was part of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s programming during Creating Connections, Self-taught artists in the Rosenthal Collection, which included a Nellie Mae Rowe crayon-on-paper drawing, titled Pink Pig. The accompanying wall text read: “Her whimsical compositions feature animals and other motifs drawn in saturated, jewel-like colors. Here, the calm simplicity of the pig enclosed in a heart is in contrast to the rest of the drawing crowded with animals, a human figure, and a large flowering tree.” I think of Rowe’s actual Playhouse as like the image in Pink Pig, a centered, creative calm in the midst of encircling influences. (To understand the context of The Playhouse, see the previous Bay Art Files article The Important Work of Nellie Mae Rowe.)
The World Is Not My Own was screened at several film festivals in the Spring and recognized for Best Cinematography at the 2023 Atlanta Film Festival and the film has received 100% on Rotten Tomato’s tomatometer (an amalgamation of film and television critics recommendations). Festival programming promoted TWINMO as “a documentary film that traces the lifespan of artist Nellie Mae Rowe through motion capture technology to replicate human expressions and movement, performed by actor Uzo Aduba.”
As a result, there are some well-written reviews, excerpts of which I will share.
Sheri Linden, of The Hollywood Reporter: “…Rowe took her independence seriously, as the captivating film portrait This World Is Not My Own makes vibrantly clear. After years of farm work and many more years as a domestic servant, the twice-widowed Georgian decided, in the powerful words of one of her great-great-nieces, ‘to design my life the way that I want it while I’m on this journey passing through.’ Linden goes on to describe the Playhouse: “Rowe turned her house — alas, no longer standing — into the Playhouse, filling it with her art, hanging the trees in the yard with her creations as well as found-object adornments, and inviting friends, neighbors and strangers to explore. There were drive-by harassers lobbing rocks and firecrackers at the ‘hoodoo witch,’ but there was also Judith Alexander, scion of a prominent Atlanta family who would become Rowe’s friend, gallerist and champion.”
Golden Globe entertainment journalist Brent Simon writes: “Stylistically, This World Is Not My Own challenges documentary conventions in its mixture of forms and, most especially, its editorial construction. Working with editor Princess Hairston, co-directors Petter Ringbom and Marquise Stillwell execute a narrative vision attached more to feeling than strictly linear storytelling.“
The way the creatures of the film swirled in stories linking personal interviews with historical footage was masterful, magical really. Never moving too far away from Rowe’s artistic interpretations, fragments of her dream-like drawings would start to fill the screen as though Rowe was drawing in real-time. Because the film is not linear, it’s so much more “Nellie.” Rather than a consecutive storyline, the film is more a collection of stories woven together by elements of Rowe’s drawings, serving as a whimsical narrator, a colorful through-line, transitioning from one story to the next.
The many entertaining and insightful interviews with leaders of the time, museum curators, friends and family provided glimpses of Rowe’s personality and her generosity in sharing her Playhouse environment. One family member said – with a big smile and a chuckle, “She was a fun-going lady.” I especially enjoyed learning more about the unique and beautiful friendship between Rowe and her gallerist, Judith Alexander which is an important and relevant focus of the film.
At a gathering honoring Alexander’s life (shared on JA Foundation site), the artist’s great-grandnieces, Cheryl Mashack and Cathi Perry, described the unique relationship between Judith and Nellie Mae, using a quilt analogy: “The focal point consisted of two people Judith Alexander and Nellie Mae Rowe, although two different textures they were cut from the same cloth. Their business acquaintance grew into a relationship and from that into a wonderful friendship and from friendship into family that has spanned over two decades. Judith had a passion for art — especially Nellie Mae’s art — and together with their eccentric and often quirky ways they started to stitch the fabric of all our lives together. Judith with her big heart extended herself not only to Nellie but to Nellie’s family as well.….Judith had an unassuming manner but a very forthright way in getting her point across and letting you know exactly how she felt, and with this came her unyielding zeal to expose Nellie’s work to the world because of the joy it brought to her heart. She wanted this joy to become contagious to all those around her; however it was very difficult for her to part with any of her “Nellie’s” as she so affectionately called them.”
Marquise Stillwell, one of the film’s creators and directors, was present at the Cincinnati Art Museum and entertained questions after the screening. He described the making of the film taking 6 years and went on to say (paraphrasing), the film mixes traditional documentary techniques with 3-D animations and scripted scenes shot using the Playhouse models and created sets.
Following the film, I returned to 21c moments after the dining room closed, however, room service was available – score! The bartender made me a Basil Hayden Old Fashioned (big grin) to keep me company while waiting for a room delivery of seared sea scallops served with corn grits, rainbow chard and honshimeji mushrooms. It was damn good.
Morning coffee was set up in the restaurant hosted by one of the life-sized golden yellow penguins which is the 21c Museum Hotel designated color for Cincinnati. The penguins turn up around the property and play various roles in greeting, guarding and generally marking their territories. 21c Museum Hotel Cincinnati is a boutique hotel, contemporary art museum, and restaurant housed in downtown Cincinnati’s former Metropole Hotel, a 100-year-old landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Among one of the largest private art museums in the United States, it is North America’s only collection dedicated solely to art of the 21st century.
There’s something about historic buildings that don’t always translate into welcoming, spacious lobbies – depending on previous configurations. I love a pronounced main entrance or a snappy foyer that properly greets you and peaks your curiosity at the same time. I found this particular 21c entrance confusing and oddly configured — wasn’t actually sure I had walked through the intended door. But then, my eye caught sight of a strange scultpural figure in the lobby, also a huge vivid purple photographic landscape, both part of 21c’s current exhibit, “The SuperNatural”. Short attention spans are not always a negative. Something I do love about 21c environments is their clever use of common areas and unexpected niches as exhibition space — often to my surprise and always to my delight. Given my short stay, I wasn’t able to take in the full exhibition like at other 21c locations I’ve visited (Durham and Nashville). The remaining five Museum Hotels are in my future. A colorful penguin punch card is underway.
Before hitting the road, I made a beeline for a recommended place to get a good Reuben – just a few blocks away. Downtown Cincinnati was bustling and I walked through an active town square — it was a perfect day — coolish and clear. Most of the people I saw or encountered were young — or at least younger than me — and I wondered if that was a city trait or just me feeling older. Later, I learned the diner I visited was an authentic old-school Cincinnati diner, Hathaways, there since 1957. One of those things you “stumble on” if you ask the right local. The Reuben sandwich was perfect, complete with ridged and broken Lay’s potato chips.
A final serendipitous treat occurred en route to the airport. From the backseat of my taxi, I saw a spaceship — yes, a spaceship — midway up a distant hillside, across Kentucky’s border. An all too familiar tie to the Tampa Bay area.
The Cincinnati Art Museum, 21c Cincinnati Museum Hotel, This World Is Not My Own, downtown Cincinnati — a complete sensory overload — any one of these experiences begs for more time to properly absorb and enjoy. I’ll be back!
Note from the author:Arthouse3 and Bay Art Files are currently working on bringing the film to St. Petersburg, Florida. To do this, we will need movie ticket buyers, a few volunteers and sponsorship dollars to bring in one of the directors to speak about the film. If you have an interest in any of these roles, please let me know soon. The number of committed individuals could sway the schedule! (kg@arthouse3.com)
Katherine Gibson, creator of ArtHouse3, works with clients to find and place regional art, objects and furniture. Gibson is an independent curator, art consultant and creative design maker-upper living in St. Petersburg, Florida.
“The main appeal of the name is that it speaks to how an artist collective functions on exhibition night: one shared space with many distinct voices.” – Katelyn Montagna and Adam Mathieu
Separate Checks is an artist collective founded in the summer of 2018 by Katelyn Montagna and Adam Mathieu, who created the group to reconnect with friends and encourage each other to produce new work. Additional members include McKinna Anderson, Aaron Castillo, Krista Darling, Jonathon Dorofy, Anna Dunwody, Nabil Harb, Andres Ramirez, Erika Schnur, Kristy Summerson, and Jessica Thornton. Many members are University of South Florida alumni who came through the School of Art and Art History’s photography program or the School of Advertising and Mass Communications. It is easy to imagine that assembling the group’s roster had a definite “getting the band back together” feeling.
While the USF connection forms the backbone of Separate Checks, other artists have joined by contacting Adam and Katelyn on social media. Adam amusingly recalls how member Aaron Castillo slid into his DMs on Instagram before meeting with him and Katelyn in person. They describe the encounter as feeling like they were on a blind date with a photographer, but thankfully everyone clicked and the date did not end in awkwardness and disappointment.
Installation view of Narrative Nowhere exhibition at Gallery221. Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.
The many distinct voices of Separate Checks will be in conversation with each other in Narrative Nowhere, showing at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery221@HCC Dale Mabry from November 2 – December 10. Visitors are encouraged to view the show in person, by making an appointment on the Gallery221 website and following guidelines on social distancing. Originally slated to debut this spring, it is yet another exhibition that was postponed because of the coronavirus. The show’s change in schedule also led to a change in content, as the extended timing allowed artists to respond to their experiences over the past eight months of this turbulent year.
The initial concept of Narrative Nowhere was to invite other artists to collaborate and reflect on personal histories and the geographic spread of the group, but some members have refocused on addressing Covid-19, racial tension in the United States, and the U.S. Presidential Election. The collective has worked in concert with Gallery221 director Amanda Poss to adjust to these atypical conditions and deliver a show well-suited for this cultural moment.
Andres Ramirez is one member whose work confronts the political, with the artist reacting to the Trump administration’s brutal border policies. His images in Narrative Nowhere are “about facades and what hides behind them; whether they’re digitally invented or not, these images are constructions much like the norms of our society.” This year he has been grappling with the concept of borders and their violently divisive nature, as he questions whether they should even exist.
Anna Dunwody, Sempiternity I and Dioscorea bulbifera 1-5, 2020, cyanotypes. Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.
Anna Dunwody’s recent works tangle with themes of loss, discovery, and regrowth. Here she displays a series of cyanotypes that she created while in quarantine. She draws connections between the unpredictability of this year and her chosen media, musing that with cyanotypes “you can do everything with such care and intention and each one always comes out a little different and maybe not how you wanted or expected, much like life.” She says that in her work she seeks to find the constantly surprising and occasionally beautiful.
Installation view of Narrative Nowhere exhibition at Gallery221. Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.
The current exhibition at HCC represents a major sign of growth for the young collective, who previously held one-night-only showings in venues like the Creative Loafing Space and Dojo Sounds recording studio in Ybor. Those events emitted a special “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” energy, where it was exciting to see a show in an unfamiliar space and not already know everyone there. However, Adam is thankful for the opportunity to display work in a fixed space like Gallery221, where the group can reach a wider audience and their works are given ample time and room to breathe.
The Main Course one-night-only show held at the Creative Loafing Space in 2018. Image taken by Anna Dunwody.
The members of Separate Checks meeting during simpler times. Image taken by an unnamed family member of the group. Sorry, fam!
Why join an artist collective in the first place? For McKinna Anderson, the group offers her friendship and a sense of accountability, without being restrictive or stifling her voice. Living in Nashville in 2018, she knew Adam and Katelyn from her time as an undergrad at USF and she found herself wandering through a similar post-graduate fog until she joined Separate Checks. She explains that the group has a tethering effect, acting as a lighthouse that always leads her back to the art community.
Separate Checks logo designed by Jonathon Dorofy
The group’s identity is still in flux, but it adopts several traits from its founders. Adam’s Fine Art background blends with Katelyn’s graphic and advertising skillset to produce something with an art school sensibility and savvy self-promotion. The mixing of elements is persistent among the membership, with both Aaron Castillo and Kristy Summerson moving between the Fine Art and advertising worlds. Member Jonathon Dorofy is also heavily involved with the group’s branding, where he imbues quintessential Florida motifs with a sleek veneer and graceful simplicity.
In a subtle way, the collective also has a quiet confidence that reflects Adam’s and Katelyn’s personalities, wherein his calm demeanor and her animated enthusiasm form a perfect partnership.
Separate Checks is currently finding its place in the Tampa Bay art community alongside established collectives like QUAID and the photography-centered Fountain of Pythons. USF photography professor Wendy Babcox is a member of FOP, and Katelyn remembers being intrigued by the group when Babcox mentioned it in class. Babcox’s guidance has had a lasting impact on Adam and Katelyn, and they single her out as an important mentor from their undergraduate days. Additionally, FOP member Selina Roman also serves as a member of Gallery221’s Advisory Council, and she proposed the Narrative Nowhere show to HCC. She was one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of Separate Checks, and she continues to offer her encouragement on its ventures.
What is next on the menu for the young collective? The group plans to eventually host a juried show, and they have kicked around the idea of having their own permanent exhibition space. They are becoming friendly with other artists collectives such as Portland’s Small Talk Collective and are discussing a show exchange and curating each other’s work. For now, they seem content with taking things as they come and not looking too far ahead.
When it comes to Separate Checks, part of the excitement is in not knowing what comes next. For many viewers, the Narrative Nowhere exhibition is likely their first exposure to the group. This show provides a rare chance to see numerous artists creating work together in the early stages of their careers. These separate voices are coalescing into something new right before our eyes. Don’t blink and miss the moment.
Narrative Nowhere runs from November 2 to December 10 at Gallery221@HCC Dale Mabry campus. To learn more about the gallery and make an appointment to view the exhibition, follow these links:
James Cartwright earned his M.A. in Art History from USF in 2017. He focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in art production, while occasionally wandering into the realm of contemporary art criticism. He is an adjunct Art History instructor at USF and the University of Tampa, where he uses his liberal arts background to joyfully corrupt the impressionable youth of America.
Over the past 15 years Catherine Bergmann has served as the Curatorial Director at the Dunedin Fine Art Center where she has organized over 300 thoughtful and thematic exhibitions for the Center’s seven galleries. Last year she was recognized by Creative Loafing magazine as “Best of the Bay” Visual Art Curator. Her innovative and engaging exhibitions have drawn on connections with artists from Florida, the southeastern United States, and invitational exhibitions open to artists from around the country and internationally. In 2017 Nathan Beard joined the curatorial team and became the Assistant Curator in 2019. Together the critical eye of Bergmann and Beard, both also well-established visual artists, have put together some of the most creative and original contemporary art exhibitions being presented in the Tampa Bay area.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Spring exhibitions had to be altered and experienced virtually as the Center was forced to close for three months. Summer exhibitions opened to the public under the banner of the “Art of Social Distancing” with limited access to the galleries. Re-envisioned shows used the mantra, “The Distance Brings Us Closer,” and included the engaging show, I’ve Come to Look for America, with thirteen diverse artists “representing the complex cultural fabric of our county, and beyond that – our humanity.”
Catherine Bergmann and Nathan Beard in front of paintings by Carol Dameron and Herb Snitzer included in the exhibition Between | Us which is on view through October 18, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
The Fall 2020 DFAC exhibitions have opened despite the logistics of organizing shows during a pandemic. Three new exhibitions expand our appreciation of the creative talents in our community while challenging us to open our minds to new artistic expression. Between | Us, co-curated by Bergmann and Beard, is on view through Oct. 18 and documents six “It” art couples working in the Tampa Bay area. The show provides a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the work of these highly regarded artists. The well-written wall text and artist statements afford a personal look into the media, processes, and “creative partnering” of these couples, and the mutual respect, collaborative support, and years of encouragement for aesthetic, community, and even social issues as hallmarks of their artistic successes.
Between | Us: A collaborative print by artists Mickett and Robert Stackhouse. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.Between | Us: CarrieJadus, Walking with Scissors I + II, 2020, oil on panel and Mark Aeling, Lip Series 2 of 10: A Cutting Remark, 2017, stainless steel scissors. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The artists include painters and retired art educators, Dolores Coe and Bruce Marsh; painter Carol Dameron and photographer Herb Snitzer (Herb even includes an endearing painting of his wife); painter Carrie Jadus and sculptor Mark Aeling; painter/emeritus art educator Mernet Larsen and multi-media artist Roger Palmer; joint collaborators and multi-media artists Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse; and, photographer Janelle Young and multi-media artist /art educator Ryan McCullough. This is a celebratory exhibition and gallery viewers will greatly appreciate and learn from its engaging theme.
The exhibition Heroes + Sheroes is an intriguing look at “shining a light on those who’ve shown us the light” was co-curated by Bergmann and Beard. Each curator selected a “Hero” and a “Shero,” including musician (Ronny Elliott), artist (Joan Duff-Bohrer); humanitarian/entrepreneur (Andre Heller), and poet (Hilary DePolo), respectively. The “four celebrants” were then asked to invite their Heroes or Sheroes to participate in the exhibition, thus making for a highly original and insightful exhibition to inspire “the many faces and forms greatness takes in our midst.”
Heroes + Sheroes: Gallery installation. On view through December 24, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
Vespertine is an impressively poetic and cerebral multi-media exhibition curated by Nathan Beard. The word “vespertine” is defined as “of, relating to, or flourishing in the evening.” The reference, as defined by Beard is “the daylit logic of scientific and technological concepts or processes, … while probing the shadowed and paradoxical possibilities of the unknown …”. In organizing the show, Beard thoughtfully examined the work of artists who represent a scientific or technological searching for a liminal space of becoming. The nine invited artists include three from the Tampa Bay area: Elizabeth A. Baker, McArthur Freeman, II, and Luke Myers. Myers, an MFA student at USF, is fascinated with bugs, specifically the Florida Deep-digger scarab beetle (Peltotrupes profundus). Through video he documents the transformative “poetry” of the inch-long scarab moving “more than a pound of sand, one mouthful at a time” up from depths of as much as ten feet below. Massachusetts artist Lisa Nilsson, with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, explores the topography of human anatomy through scientific reproduction of lateral cross-sections intricately created through the collage of Japanese mulberry paper and the gilt edges of old books. She represents one of the six artists Beard selected from around the country, including Julia Buntaine Hoel, Kysa Johnson, Anne Mondro, Elsa Muñoz, and Michael Reedy. Each of the artists in Verspertine incorporates fascinating approaches, utilizing either traditional media to explore macro- or micro-cosmic worlds or newer media, like video, transposed scientific data, and 3-D printing, to convey their artistic and scientific discoveries. If you spend time studying the bios and statements of these artists, you may realize we are on the cusp of artistic evolution.
Vespertine: Gallery installation. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.Vespertine: Lisa Nilsson, Male Pelvis, 2012, Mulberry paper collage. Courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, NY.
Additional exhibitions on view through the end of the year are Hold Me, an invitational exhibit by contemporary ceramic artists from around the nation and PHANTOMS and Bandits, a tribute to the Center’s past Wearable Art Runway events. Lastly, if the above exhibitions have not convinced you to visit to the Dunedin Fine Art Center soon, the show lining one of the hallway galleries is Velvet Elvis. Artists were invited to create their own kitschy versions of the nostalgic art form on supplied velvet canvases. Velvet Elvis is a fundraiser, so purchase tickets before October 18th for a chance to win your favorite piece – and as Elvis would say, “Thank you, thank you very-much!”
R. Lynn Whitelaw was the founding director and chief curator of the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, located on the Tarpon Springs Campus of St. Petersburg College. In 2015, Mr. Whitelaw was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Association of Museums. An active independent curator and writer, he has served on numerous statewide and local boards and art committees and has been a judge for over 18 outdoor art shows and juried exhibitions throughout the state of Florida.
Tongue and Groove – Exploring a Common Visual Language Creative Pinellas, Largo, FL July 11 – July 28, 2019 Opening reception: Thursday, July 11, 6 – 9 pm The curator and the artists will do a gallery walkthrough at 6:30 pm and 7:30 pm. Free and open to the public
Traditionally, the creative process is considered to be a solitary one. So it is that there is something very interesting about examining how artists’ works might work together and the results that happen when that occurs. Kathy Gibson, an independent curator with a considerable resume of exhibitions, gallery experience, and leadership, has brought together two artists to examine how very real synergies might arise out by combining the work of two artists. Specifically here, Babette Herschberger and Ry McCullough whose works have been brought together for the exhibition, Tongue and Groove, showing at Creative Pinellas from July, 11th. The exhibition’s subtitle ‘Exploring a Common Visual Language’ makes explicit as to how a dialogue between two artists can be productive. Gibson states, “There is a palpable visual connection, a similar visual language regarding line, color, shape, and composition…. this exhibition celebrates a third element that is created when the works of these two artists are combined.”
Installation in progress view of Tongue and Groove – Exploring a Common Visual Language
Both Herschberger and McCullough are relative newcomers to the Tampa Bay Area. They both arrive with an impressive track record and their contribution to the local art scene is already one to be much looked forward to. Furthermore, it should be noted that also relatively new Creative Pinellas is quickly developing into a cultural powerhouse. At their headquarters at the former Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo there has already been a very impressive exhibition program in their splendid galleries.
Here, at Bay Art Files we are very pleased to be sponsoring a Coffee and Guava drop-in on Thursday, July 18th, between 10:30 am – 1:30 pm. The artists and the curator will be in attendance and open to questioning/discussion. We do hope you will be able to attend.
About Babette Herschberger
Babette Herschberger was born in Indiana and graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale with honors. After many years as a successful working artist in Miami, she moved to St. Petersburg where she has created a live/work studio. Her work has been in exhibitions at Visceglia Gallery, Caldwell University, The Gulf Coast University Gallery, The Hollywood Art and Cultural Center, The Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and The Florida State Capitol Building. She has also been represented at “Art Basel Miami/Scope Art Fair”, “AAF Contemporary Art Fair”, New York, “ArtExpo Atlanta”, “Art Expo New York”, and is in the corporate collections of American Airlines, Bank of America, The Fontainebleau Hotel, The Four Seasons Hotels, Neiman Marcus, the University of North Carolina, Continental Real Estate Companies, Crescent Miami Centers, White + Case LLP and Quantum on the Bay Collection. Her work is represented by Cheryl Hazan Contemporary Art, New York City and Mary Woerner Fine Arts, West Palm Beach.
About Ry McCullough
Ry McCullough is an artist and educator, working in Tampa. He earned is his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio where he concentrated in the areas of printmaking and sculpture. Upon completion of his undergraduate work he served as the Director of Sculptural Studies as well as teaching printmaking at Stivers School for the Arts. McCullough received his MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from the Lamar Dodd School of the Art at the University of Georgia. He currently is serving the Department of Art + Design as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tampa. McCullough has exhibited internationally and is the founder of the Standard Action Press Collaborative Zine Project.
About Katherine Gibson
Katherine Gibsonis an independent curator and regional art consultant living in St. Petersburg. She has curated exhibits for the Morean Art Center, Florida CraftArt Gallery, Lake Wales Art Center, Hillsborough Community College (HCC) Ybor Art Gallery and pop-up galleries in Polk & Hillsborough counties. Gibson is the former Director of HCC’s Dale Mabry gallery that she rebranded Gallery221. While Director, she doubled the exhibition space, established a permanent art collection and organized 30+ exhibits. Gibson received a 2018 Individual Artist Award from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance for her Drive-by Window project.
In this month of March, celebrating Women in History, Sarah Howard, USF Curator of Public Art & Social Practice, will lead a free walking tour on Wednesday, March 27th of site-specific public art on the Univerity of South Florida campus in Tampa. The one-hour tour starts at artist Nancy Holt’s Solar Rotary at noon.
USF’s public art collection includes some significiant examples of works by major female artists. It is of particular interest to see how artists have applied their practice to site-specific commissions in the university environment. It is the sense that thoughts which should be of interest; relationships with place, environment and, indeed, with each other as a community, are explored and provoked is the remit of successful public art, especially so in a place of education.
Specifically, the women represented in this tour have added significantly to important gender equity issues over time. Women in History Month seeks to highlight and celebrate, indeed educate the public of such contributions. The nexus of important matters and public art within the university campus, irrespective whether they are accurately, in fact, purely a historical matter should be of great interest to us.
Alice Aycock, Maze, 2000. Photography courtesy of USF Public Art.
Per the USF Facebook event page, “The tour will feature site-specific works by renowned artists such as Alice Aycock, Lynda Benglis, Nancy Holt, Stacy Levy, and Janaina Tschäpe. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about the history of the program, and the artists and collaborators who created the public artworks. Tour will begin at Nancy Holt’s Solar Rotary, adjacent to the USF Communication & Information Sciences Building (CIS), weather permitting.”
Bosco Sodi, Muro. Installation view in Washington Square Park, New York. September 2017. Photo: Diego Flores and Chris Stach. Courtesy of the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL.
Bosco Sodi’s MURO (WALL)
A one-day public installation and performance in conjunction with USF Contemporary Art Museum’s current exhibition Visible Turn: Contemporary Artists Confront Political Invisibility.
Over some 10 hours on Thursday, January 24th, from 10am onwards at the USF Contemporary Art Museum artist Bosco Sodi’s Muro will be installed and then dismantled. Literally, at 20 feet long and 6 feet tall and composed of 1080 clay brick timbers, a wall be will be constructed. The public is invited to experience the wall’s construction and participate in the wall’s deconstruction and walk away with one of the timbers in a customized tote bag along with a certificate of authenticity. This will be the third iteration of Muro after similar installations in New York’s Washington Square Park in 2017 and in London’s South Bank in 2018.
Bosco Sodi’s Muro is one component of USFCAM’s Visible Turn: Contemporary Artists Confront Political Invisibility curated by Christian Viveros-Faune, who is the Museum’s Curator-at-large and the Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and History. During his tenure at USF, Viveros-Faune has curated a series of challenging and thought-provoking exhibitions which concentrate on politically based artistic practice.
In the sense that art can engage, be part of a society’s political dialogue, and bring to bear witness, this exhibition seeks to reveal the concealed and acknowledge that art has the potential to redress the imbalances of representation that are all-to-often defined by prevalent political and cultural hegemonies. Perhaps, it is in the nexus of the questions “How we see ourselves?” and then “What we don’t see?” that Viveros-Faune is elucidating issues which are important but have been marginalized and unnoticed.
With respect to Bosco Sodi’s Muro, a wall will be made visible, but only ever so briefly, before it will be taken apart and distributed to this community. In this way, it speaks to what might be considered the precarious nature of visibility and also to our ownership of that “visibility” or specifically, the lack thereof. The timbers are handcrafted in the artist’s studio in Mexico by craftsmen, many of whom have had the experience of being migrant workers in the United States of America. Without a doubt, there is a poignant irony attached in using a material made by a specific constituency to build a wall which by implication can be potentially seen as a barrier to that exact same constituency.
In this case, to read a wall as a barrier can be interpreted as to what we want to keep out and make invisible: what we want to exclude. Importantly, a wall determined by such factors directly reflects back upon ourselves. It refers to our insecurities as to what we may fear and out of such emotions the hubris of a wall is made explicit. Superiority, control, authority, and making invisible the visible are all provocatively questioned by Sodi’s Muro. That there is also a present controversy about what is largely considered a futile wall only adds further power to this.
As an installation, questions are raised through the process of building a wall as to how we might isolate, insulate and conceal. The response to dismantle and so diminish such exclusionary tendencies presents the possibilities of a politically-based art practice. Engagement and participation are critical factors in an open and free society and Viveros-Faune has cogently and powerfully asserted through this exhibition and installation that art has a significant role to play in understanding ourselves as political beings: that art, in such instances, does have a peculiar and particular power to convey.
Art Thursday, January 24, 2019Bosco Sodi, MuroPublic installation and performance.USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL
10am-3pm: Viewing of Muro installation
3-8pm: Dismantling of Muro by the public
6-8pm: Public Reception; remarks by Bosco Sodi at 6:30pm
All events are free and open to the public.
The Stanton Storer Embrace the Arts Foundation is the major supporter of The Visible Turn: Contemporary Artists Confront Political Invisibility. Bosco Sodi, Muro is sponsored by The Gobioff Foundation and USF World.For additional information visit about this event or the exhibtion visit: www.usfcam.usf.edu
Photography credit: Bosco Sodi, Muro. Installation view in Washington Square Park, New York. September 2017. Photo: Diego Flores and Chris Stach. Courtesy of USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL.
Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Eleanor Eichenbaum
Artist Patricia Cronin’s “Aphrodite and the Lure of Antiquity” is the inaugural exhibition in the Tampa Museum’s Conversations with the Collection, which puts contemporary art in dialogue with classical antiquities. The exhibit fills two large galleries and the outdoor terrace on the Museum’s second floor. Cronin, a widely recognized Brooklyn-based artist, offers a show that is thoughtful, feminist, materially dazzling, and asks dimensional questions of the fragment and the whole.
The exhibition features three main series of works, all of which engage materially and conceptually. The works feature tactile media; from stone to glass to blue painter’s tarps, to create a densely layered experience. The works echo with female multiplicity— the woman as artist, the woman as symbol, the woman as present, the woman as absent. Cronin interrogates what is missing – in the history of women, of women artists, and in physical reality. Sculptures may be partial, paintings may contain traces, negative space may be charged.
Walking through the exhibition, a viewer threads connections between thoughts and works. Seams – flickering lines of betweenness— are integral to the character of the show. Cronin’s works hinge on the possibility of questions made visible, of touching the ephemeral through noticing the absent.
Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.
The gallery closest to the stairs, where the visitor arrives, features works from the Aphrodite Reimagined series. Cronin’s mastery of material choices resonates in this cool bluish room where the sculptural pieces converse with the layered works on the walls. Large paintings with gossamer transparencies depict outlines of individual Aphrodite sculptures from various museum collections. The paintings show the different presences of these particular Aphrodites; the form of the sculptural body is featured in relief, the background rendered as an aqueous field. Viewing these many traces of Aphrodites, a viewer may consider multiplicities in Aphrodite’s symbolic identities and in the histories of these sculptures. Cronin’s paintings are soft and illuminate the ineffable space between line and body. These works conjure what is ghostly, what is fluid— a seam of the permeable that runs through the show.
Of particular interest is Cronin’s Aphrodite (Metropolitan Museum): a two-part sculpture made of deep green cast glass displayed on a pedestal, its two halves set apart by a cushion of space. This piece is Cronin’s first work in cast glass and displays the sculptural body as impression. The seam, a site of joining to create a potential whole, is rendered visible here through the two halves that the viewer may work to visually assemble. In addition to its watery translucence, the apt material choice holds the moment the molten glass stills. This quiet interrogation of the momentary resonates in the exhibition.
Cronin’s moving Memorial to a Marriage and works that focus on the 19th-century American female sculptor Harriet Hosmer share the next large gallery. These works amplify questions of presence and absence. Memorial to a Marriage is functional as an iteration of memorial sculpture in Woodlawn Cemetery for Cronin and her wife, the artist Deborah Kass. They are depicted in marble, asleep and embracing under folds of sheets. The sculpture witnesses the connected lives of two female artists and holds both tenderness and contemplative melancholy. The creamy stone is perhaps the exhibition’s most taut moment of absence, as it materializes questions of mortality. Memorial to a Marriage was initially created in 2002 and predates the legalization of gay marriage by the United States Supreme Court by thirteen years. Another kind of booming absence – one of equality.
Through the project Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonne, Cronin illuminates Hosmer’s work and asks that the viewer see the artist’s works that have been lost to history. Cronin renders these lost works as watery shimmering outlines on paper and as towering abstractions on fabric – revealing each as a glance, a shadow, a ghost. The threads of what was lost are realized in two monumental wall-mounted silk pieces: Queen of Naples and Ghost. The fabric cascades far above the viewer’s height and the air in the gallery animate these pieces with slight billows. The works are both subtle and imposing, like an urgent but hazy memory or like blinking in a dark room trying to find her.
Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files
.Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.
The her that the viewer ultimately finds is Cronin’s outdoor sculpture, Aphrodite Reimagined. She towers above the viewer and dialogues with light and landscape, her face towards the Hillsborough River. The piece, a whole composite Aphrodite, was inspired by a fragmentary 1st-century AD sculpture in the Museum’s classical antiquities collection. In fact, the viewer may encounter the ancient marble torso on display in the gallery, before proceeding to the terrace. This impression of the fragmentary flashes and is enforced in Cronin’s monumental, Aphrodite Reimagined. Strikingly, her legs, feet, arms, hands, and head are translucent resin, pale green and watery while the draped torso is gray and fixed in stone. Outside, these glassy hands catch light. Light slips through them – a prismatic recasting of stubborn histories. Hands, the means by which we count, gesture, touch, and hold are rendered physically anew from a material that mimics absence and calls attention to what we can now see.
Eleanor Eichenbaum is a writer and educator based in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is also an independent curator of visual arts and has organized exhibits in New York, New Jersey, and California.
Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through March 17, 2019. For more information, visit the museum’s website at tampamuseum.org.
Patricia Cronin (American, b. 1963), Aphrodite Reimagined, 2018. Cold-cast marble and resin. Tampa Museum of Art, Commission. Installed on the Bretta B. Sullivan Terrace. Courtesy of Patricia Cronin Studio; Photographer: Selina Roman.
Museums please don’t stay still and keep on moving. So it is with Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection at the Tampa Museum of Art on view through January 6, 2019. This is the inaugural exhibition of a biennial series of commissioned contemporary art explorations which seeks to examine the synergy that might be wrought from their collections.
In many respects, it is a challenge for museums to avoid the ‘end-of-the-line’ sense of the collections that they hold and display. Broadly speaking, a ‘permanent collection’ for the purposes here, by definition, might be termed as a ‘set’ of related objects and the relationships between the objects define the notion of the collection. Specifically, one of the major curatorial charges is to communicate such a sense of collection…the bonding agent if you will. In particular, the notion that is over and above any individual constituent itself. Consequently, to continually engage a community and to cultivate new appreciations, it is important that museums challenge the stasis of their collections.
There are two roots to the word ‘education’ i) ‘educare’ which means to train or to mold and ii) ‘educere’ which denotes the drawing out of a meaning.
Perhaps, it is with this in mind that the Tampa Museum of Art has embarked on this program of special exhibitions. Specifically, in this case to ‘educere’ and extrude a new sense within which their significant Classical Antiquities collection can be re-seen and (re-)interpreted.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this collection is central to the Museum’s remit and as such, every schoolchild in Hillsborough County is invited to see the collection. I dare to say, that distinct from my day, today’s school children’s visits are more ‘educere’ than the ‘educare’ they were for me. I do hope so. It remains to say that, presently, there are interesting and important curatorial developments in ‘cajoling’ the traditional understanding of ‘collections’ into a contemporary practice.
Such a sense of intellectual vigor is very much evident in Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection. Cronin’s work is informed by her deep interest in the ancient world. Significantly, this exhibition is a strikingly productive crossover in which she combines advocacy, research, and knowledge with (her) considerable creative energy. In taking, as inspiration, the museum’s antiquities collection this exhibition is a very successful dialogue with contemporary art practices. Cronin’s particular methodology is apposite in ‘synergizing’ the idea with which we might previously have viewed the museum’s antiquity collection.
At Bay Art Files we have asked St. Petersburg-based Eleanor Eichenbaum to write about the exhibition and this will be published online soon. In bringing a sense of crafted space and tempo to her impressions and experience, the piece reads poetically and reflective in ways that a traditional review might not read. Just as the Museum’s biennial ‘synergy’ series reconsiders its holdings, so it is hoped that you might see this exhibition anew through Eichenbaum’s writing.
