Category: Tampa Museum of Art

Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

In 1986, the Tampa Museum of Art acquired 175 ancient objects from the eminent collection of Joseph Veach Noble, thought to comprise the largest private collection of Athenian vases in North America at the time. This acquisition became the cornerstone of the Museum’s burgeoning permanent collection of antiquities. This article (1) highlights significant events in the life and career of Mr. Noble; (2) presents the significant personalities and events which led to the acquisition of his collection by the Tampa Museum of Art;  (3) assesses the importance of that collection; and (4) passes in review some of the more interesting objects in the extraordinary exhibition currently on view at the Museum.

JOSEPH VEACH NOBLE 
It’s funny sometimes, isn’t it, when an accidental hobby develops into a life-long pursuit which is successfully integrated into one’s professional life? The trajectory of the life and career of Joseph Veach Noble, whose career and collection are being celebrated by the Tampa Museum of Art, is a case in point. (Figure 1)

Figure 1
Joseph Veach Noble, captured in a pensive moment in this photograph taken in 1965, as he thinks about an Attic, black-figure Pan-Athenaic amphora after consulting the seminal work by John Beazley. Vases such as these were awarded to victors of athletic contests staged at Athens, which feature an image of the goddess Athena, the patron of that city.
(Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-born Canadian, 1908-2002), Portrait of Joseph Veach Noble (black and white photograph). Library and Archives Canada, 1987-054, vol. 197, sitting 12547, no. 35.
Photograph courtesy of the Yousuf Karsh Archive)

THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Mr. Noble was born in Philadelphia in 1920. He honed his collecting interests early in life when as a child, he trudged up and down the planted rows of vegetables on his paternal aunt’s small farm in rural New Jersey in search of native American arrow-heads; later, he also collected fossils. His interest in antiquity was piqued during the Saturday mornings spent at programs for school-aged students hosted by the University of Pennsylvania for which he, as a young, project leader, created models of pharaonic and Roman imperial villas, reinforced by visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia with its collection of casts of classical sculpture, and his study of Latin in high school. He took art classes, drawing still-lives in charcoal or conte crayon. Noble would while away the evening hours at home learning how to photograph and develop negatives in the family kitchen turned darkroom by his father who had worked his way through dental school from income earned by photographing dentures and restorations

EMPLOYMENT NOT A DEGREE
Mr. Noble enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania as a pre-med student, but never graduated because concurrent with attending classes he was also a member of the non-university affiliated Photographic Club of Philadelphia which enabled him to exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Six of his photographs are on view in the present exhibition from which one can gain an impression of the scope of his work. (Figure 2) By his own admission, Mr. Noble explained how he impulsively responded to a  random call to that Club for a full-time still photographer from a Philadelphia-based firm specializing in what one now terms film. He put his academic studies on the back-burner by attending night classes. He soon abandoned college altogether to devote himself to his full time post  in 1946 which, shortly after his hire, required him to master the art of cinematography. Two years later he produced and directed, Photography in Science, which won the 1948 Venice Film Festival award for scientific documentaries. Thereafter Mr. Noble was hired by  Film Counselors, Inc. in New York as their  Executive Vice-President. He now had motive and opportunity for pursuing his collecting interests in earnest as his quotidian included repeated visits to dealers in New York City and an ever-increasing awareness of dealers abroad, whose inventory could be perused through catalogues and photographs. 

Figure 2
Youth by Joseph Veach Noble Mr. Noble’s interests in photography, nurtured in his youth by his father, eventually led to his career as a cinematographer.

(Joseph Veach Noble (American, 1920-2007), Youth (black and white photograph; undated, ca. 1945-1956). Tampa Museum of Art, Gift of Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1991.009.002)

A VERY CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Mr. Noble’s eureka moment occurred  in 1953 when he acquired a very large vase, 21 inches in height, which was described as an Etruscan vase representing a mounted  Amazon. Mr. Noble, justifiably proud of this recent acquisition, showed its photo to a European dealer who chanced to be in New York at that time. The dealer urged Mr. Noble to contact Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer, the assistant curator in the Greek and Roman Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who, it was reported, was in the process of writing a book about the Amazons, those legendary, formidable female warriors of ancient Greek mythology. And so an  appointment was arranged for November.

As an art advisor myself, I am often placed in a seemingly awkward situation in which I am obliged to inform a collector of a mistake. As Dr. von Bothmer recalls the meeting, his assessment of that vase was ruthless.  The vase was not Etruscan. It was created in Apulia, in South Italy. Furthermore, the subject was not a mounted Amazon, but rather a  generic South Italian warrior. I t was the dealer who was to be faulted for the erroneous information, but the collector should have been more circumspect in his blanket acceptance of the data. The critique, admittedly disappointing, made a profound impression upon Mr. Noble, who volunteered that, undaunted, he would still seek out that curator’s opinion in future. 

HANDS-ON EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY    
On subsequent visits, Dr. von Bothmer introduced Mr. Noble to his colleague, Christine Alexander. She then orchestrated his European trip in 1954, a kind of pub crawl during which the Noble family visited museums and  dealers in Rome, London, and Paris.  The culmination of that trip was a personal visit with Homer and Dorothy Thompson, stalwarts of the excavations of the Agora, or market place, of ancient Athens, which was the flag ship of the archaeological activities in Greece of the  American School of Classical Studies. That meeting reinforced Mr. Noble’s  interest in the technical processes by which Greek vases were crafted as he mined Athenian clay for use in his experiments at home involving a kiln in the basement of his home. On view in the current exhibition are examples of the actual objects that Mr. Noble fired in that kiln. (Figure 4)

Figure 4
These four plaques represent some of the examples of experimental archaeology which Mr. Noble conducted using the kiln in the basement of his home. Here he is experimenting with the chemical composition of the black glaze used by potters in ancient Athens.
(Noble’s experiments [ceramic plaques; undated, ca. early 1960s]. Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection)

Every cloud has a silver lining.  A few months later, in January, Professor A. D. Trendall, an internationally recognized authority on South Italian vases who was based in Australia, came to the States and was shown photos of the vase. Professor Trendall’s research had enabled him to group those vases into categories. Mr. Noble’s vase was an outstanding exemplar of one of his groups. In keeping with academic practice, since most of the classical vases were neither signed by potter nor painter,  vases are assigned a name generally based on their present location. Accordingly Professor Trendall assigned that specific group of  Apulian vases to The Maplewood Painter, named after the town in suburban New Jersey in which Mr. and Mrs. Noble were residing.  (figure 3)

Figure 3a-b
Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer’s ruthless critique of this vase which revealed that the mounted warrior was not an Amazon but rather a generic depiction of a warrior cemented his friendship and collaboration with Mr. Noble. This vase was then to become known as the eponymous Maplewood Painter vase, the name given to this classification of vessels by Prof. A. D. Trendall, in honor of the Noble’s hometown in New Jersey where Mr. Noble’s collection was housed.
(Eponymous Maplewood Painter vase (ceramic column krater; Apulia, Italy; late Classical period, ca. 360-350 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, Museum Purchase in part with funds donated by Mr. and Mrs. William Knight Zewadski, 1986.102)

ULTERIOR MOTIVES
Contact with Dr. von Bothmer continued. He, then, with a hidden agenda of his own, introduced Mr. Noble to Mr. James Joseph Rorimer, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Noble’s account of that visit, in the director’s Manhattan apartment, is fascinating because it demonstrated how Mr. Rorimer’s very long and drawn out conversation was actually, in hindsight, a camouflaged job interview, which lead to Mr. Noble’s appointment in 1956 as that institution’s Operating Administrator.  

SCIENCE IN THE SERVICE OF ART
Now, as a colleague of Dr. von Bothmer, Mr. Noble could spend his time every day before his official duties began and after they had ended in prolonged contact with an enormous collection of Greek vases. He now had added resources at his disposal to continue his research into the technical processes by which Greek vases were manufactured because Mr. Noble, as Dr. Suzanne Murray, remarked, 

….not only collected the finer examples, but also was interested in the pots that showed mistakes: misfiring that failed to turn figures from red to black, spalling that showed the clay had not been properly prepped, ancient repairs to broken vessels. These less-than-perfect products helped Mr. Noble with his research.

Many of these “mistakes” are on view in this exhibition. (figure 5 )

Figure 5
Mr. Noble was interested in “mistakes” made by ancient potters. This lump of clay is a fragment of a type of wine cup called a kylix. The potter probably crumpled the cup while it was still malleable because its shape did not come out successfully, as compared to Figure 11. Perhaps it was used as a support in the kiln as it was actually fired in this state. It is among the oldest artefacts in the Noble collection.
(Crumpled wine cup (ceramic kylix fragment; Pylos, Messenia, Greece; Mycenaean period, ca. 1400 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.005)

Mr. Noble was also keenly aware of the fact that Ms. Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, a former curator and predecessor of Dr. von Bothmer, had taken classes in throwing and firing pottery which provided her with the hands-on knowledge from which to draw for her publications about aspects of Greek vases. As instructive as those publications were, and still are, their subject matter was restricted to the physical manipulation of the clay, whereas Mr. Noble’s concerns focused on the chemistry involved, such as the component elements of the glazes used and how those elements were effected by the temperature within the kiln. He summarized the results of his investigations in an article published in 1960, which he expanded into a book published five years later. So significant were his observations that a revised  edition, published in 1988, still remains one of the first go-to sources.

FINGERING A FORGERY WITH A PEN KNIFE AND A PRIVATE EYE 
In the late 1950’s, during one of his by now routine visits through the museum’s galleries, his attention was drawn to a monumental, Etruscan terracotta statue of a warrior which had been given pride of place by virtue of  the way it was exhibited. (Figure 6) It had become in many ways the trade mark for the museum’s classical collections, although some nay-sayers were progressively expressing grave reservations about its authenticity. Aware of the controversy, Mr. Noble’s attention was arrested by the presence of its black glaze. He reasoned that an analysis of the chemical composition of that glaze might help resolve the question of its authenticity. In order to do so, he needed a sample, which he candidly admitted he obtained by surreptitiously taking his pen-knife out of one of his pockets which he used to scrape off a sample of the glaze when the attention of the gallery’s guard was temporarily distracted. In possession of that precious sample, Mr. Noble recognized he faced a conundrum. If the glaze were tested by the museum’s own staff and deemed to be ancient, conspiracy theorists could claim the analysis was rigged so as not to condemn the authenticity of the warrior. He, therefore, resolved to entrust the sample to a disinterested, but highly competent, third party who would analyze the sample in confidence. Within a short period of time, the results of the spectroscopic analysis were received which revealed that the coloring agent for the glaze was manganese, not iron. Magnanese was never  employed before the late Medieval period; it was iron on which the potters of ancient vases exclusively relied as their coloring agent.  

Figure 6
The monumental “Etruscan warrior” which was exposed as a modern forgery by Mr. Noble because of his analysis of the black glaze found on its surfaces and his orchestration of cloak-and-dagger face-to-face encounters with the forger.

(Colossal Etruscan terracotta warrior (Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 21.195). Image taken from Gisela M. A. Richter, “Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMA Papers 6 (1937), pl. 1)

Realizing that corroborating evidence would substantially support his case, Mr. Noble then enlisted Dr. von Bothmer’s assistance. Like every competent curator who meticulously tracks the art market, Dr. von Bothmer  had maintained files of dealers, their inventories, their associates, and other data that he deem so necessary to document the provenance, or chain-of-possession, of the classical vases which were the area of his expertise. The two then collated the data from those files with the museum’s own acquisition records which revealed that the warrior had been acquired in pieces over the course of three separate purchases made in 1915, 1916, and 1921.The pieces were then re-assembled by the museum. The vendor’s identify was known, but Dr.von Bothmer’s files revealed that that antiquarian often worked in partnership with another individual who might be able to shed additional light on the purchases. Via a complicated series of cloak-and-dagger operations not unlike those detailed in detective novels, Mr. Noble, via his  cinematic connections, secured the services of a private investigator who traveled to Rome and tracked down the partner who was then actively manufacturing fake, bronze Etruscan statuettes for the tourist trade. Maneuvering like a chess master  because of the partner’s steadfast reluctance to discuss the matter, Mr. Noble then successfully arranged for Dr. von Bothmer, primed in advance on  how to conduct the conversation,  to travel to Rome for a face-to-face, during which the partner admitted that he had indeed used bioxide of manganese in  his manufacturing of the warrior. Bingo!  The museum went public in February 1961 with its announcement on Valentine’s Day that the warrior was indeed counterfeit. 

WITH SOME HELP FROM TUTANKHAMUN
Among the objects which were included in the acquisition of the Noble collection is a wooden box, across the lid of which in black ink was scrawled the warning, CAUTION! NATRON. Handle & Unpack with Care. The contents of that box together with other items including linen, pottery vases, and floral wreaths, were part of a find which was excavated by Theodore M. Davis in the Valley of the Kings. The entire find was subsequently associated with the funeral of Tutankhamun, the contents of which were collected by the mortuary priests and purposefully buried in a pit dug expressly for their interment in keeping with religious requirements which prohibited their disposal as trash. In compliance with all existing laws, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was permitted to acquire as acquisitions a selection of objects from that find.

Other hand-written notations on that same lid indicate that the box contained a bag of natron,  a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate (or soda ash) and sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda), along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. (Figure 7) Natron was the primary material employed to desiccate, or dry out, the body, during the mummification process.

Figure 7
The box containing two bags of natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda), along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate from the so-called Embalmers’ Cache of Tutankhamun. Mr. Noble used that material in his use of experimental archaeology which help him to document the technological processes by which ancient Egyptian faience was manufactures. That box and its contents are on view in this exhibition together with examples of the results of Mr. Noble’s experimentation.

(Bag of natron (linen bag; Valley of the Kings, West Thebes, Egypt; New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, ca. 1323 bce) and Noble’s experiments (faience figurines and steatite; undated, ca. late 1960s), on view in the exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection. Photography: Paige Bosca)

But Mr. Noble understood that natron was also used as a principal ingredient in the manufacture of ancient Egyptian faience, anciently termed tekhenit, a glazed material, generally turquoise-blue in color, which was used to create a wide variety of  shining, glistening objects from beads for jewelry to deluxe vases. (Figure 8) His exploration of the technique by which faience was manufactured went hand-in-glove with his work on the black glaze used in the creation of Greek pottery. In 1969 Mr. Noble published the results of his research about the processes by which ancient Egyptian faience was manufactured.

Figure 8
An original, faience aryballos, or ointment flask, from the collection of Mr. Noble, which he used in conjunction with his experimental archaeology to document the technical processes by which faience, an ancient glazed material, was manufactured. The diamond pattern on the walls of this flask were intentionally created so that the vase would not slip from the grasp of the fingers of its owner while applying its slippery contents.

(Diamond-patterned oil flask (faience aryballos; Rhodes, Greece; Archaic period, ca. 600-550 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.006)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

Mr. Noble resigned his position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970 in order to assume the role of director of the Museum of the City of New York.  Despite that change in his employment status, Mr. Noble’s reputation as a scholar and consummate connoisseur and collector of classical vases continued unabated and was universally recognized. And as a collector and museum official, he was accustomed to the common practice of lending objects to institutions for temporary exhibitions. So, it was only a matter of course that he was asked and consented to loan three of his vases to the very first exhibition of antiquities ever mounted by the Tampa Museum of Art. That show, Styles and Lifestyles of the Ancient World, premiered here on March 1, 1983.  Ms. Genevieve Linnehan, the Curator of Collections (1979-1992) at the Tampa Museum of Art whose speciality was modern art, organized the exhibition, enlisting the assistance of Mr. William Knight Zewadski (“Bill’) and  Dr. Suzanne Murray, who had earned her doctorate in ancient art from the University of Minnesota and was affiliated with the University of South Florida.

THE ART OF NETWORKING

PAUL JENNEWEIN AND JOSEPH NOBLE
Paul Jennewein of Philadelphia was a noted American sculptor whose oeuvre included the massive sculptural pediment adorning the façade of the south east entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (figure 9)  Jim Jennewein, his son, and Joseph Noble both fellow Philadelphians, were friends who also shared their mutual service on the board of Brookgreen Gardens. It was Joseph Noble who had suggested to Paul Jennewein that he leave his lifework of sculpture to Tampa. That suggestion turned into a bequest in 1978, when approximately 2,500 sculptures, models, drawings, medals, and related ephemera from his estate were bequeathed to the Tampa Bay Art. Part of that collection is now on exhibition C.Paul Jennewein (April 16, 2023–2025) at the Museum through 2025. 

Figure 9
These models for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the Philadelphia-based artist C. Paul Jennewein are part of his estate bequeathed to the Tampa Museum of Art. His friendship with Mr. Noble enabled members of his family to network with the team from Tampa Bay in the initial discussions with Mr. Noble which led to the eventual acquisition of the Noble collection by the Tampa Museum of Art.

(C. Paul Jennewein (German-American, 1890-1978), models for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view in Sketches and Sculptures: A Study of C. Paul Jennewein at the Tampa Museum of Art, June 13, 2020 – February 28, 2021. Photography: Philip LaDeau)

Jim Jennewein’s wife, Joan, would later recall a conversation in which her father-in-law stated that Mr. Noble was reluctant to donate  his collection to a large, established institution where it would get lost. If on the other hand, it was given to a smaller museum it would really be seen. Armed with such a position, Jim Jennewein then suggested to Mr. Noble on May 12, 1984 that he give the collection to the Tampa Museum of Art. Mr. Noble countered  by stating that he would be willing to sell the collection to the Tampa Museum of Art for one million dollars.

Mr. Zewadski then picked up the ball and continued to run with it. On November 26, 1984 Mr. Noble sent Mr. Zewadski the card catalogue together with seven volumes of photographs of his collection. Mr. Andy Maass then  wrote to Mr. Noble, who incidentally was Mr. Maass’s first employer,  on February 13, 1985, explaining that although he was only two months into his tenure as director of the Tampa Museum of Art he would be interested in the loan of the collection for a temporary exhibition which would run from December 1985 through February 1986. 

AN UNFORESEEN PROBLEM
The planning for such an exhibition ran into a snag because Ms. Genevieve Linnehan was scheduled to take maternity leave. She was of the opinion, which was widely-shared by others, that any effort to acquire the Noble collection would be enhanced by the presence of an individual with an advanced degree in ancient art. The issue was satisfactorily resolved when Dr. Murray, who had already collaborated with Ms. Genevieve Linnehan and Mr. Zewadski on the first exhibition of antiquities at the museum, agreed to serve as the guest curator for the Noble collection.

THE ON-SITE PERSONAL INSPECTION
Mr. Zewadski mobilized Mr. Maass and Dr. Murray on May 22, 1985, for a road trip that brought them to New York and New Jersey where they visited the offices of Mr. Noble in the city and his home in Maplewood.  Dr. Murray recalls that the visit was great fun. She saw the Maplewood Krater (Figure 3) sitting on a TV console and the Neptune statue (Figure 10)  standing on the stair landing.

It was such a unique combination of the mundane and modern with the precious and antique. He then produced the gold necklace and earrings to show us—so delicate—which his wife had never seen, and seemed a little \reluctant to include in the deal!

The visit concluded with trip to Drew University where some of Mr. Noble’s vases were featured in a loan exhibition. Days later Mr. Zewadski sent the seven volumes of photographs of the Noble collection together with numerous copies of articles which had been published about that collection to Mr. Maass.

Figure 10
The statue of Poseidon/Neptune, the Graeco-Roman god of the sea, which Dr. Murray described as seeing for the first time on a landing of the staircase in the Maplewood home of the Nobles. This statue was one of the sources of inspiration for the special loan exhibition, Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life, mounted by former curator, Dr. Seth D. Pevnik, which ran at Tampa from June-November 2014 before moving on to its second venue at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

(Neptune with Dolphin (marble sculpture; Rome, Italy; Roman Imperial period, ca. 50-100 ce), on view in the exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.135. Photography: Paige Bosca)

A STRATEGY FOR THE FINANCIAL PACKAGE
Moving quickly within a month, Mr. Maass then formally requested the museum’s board to consider the acquisition of the collection which lead to the immediate formation of a subcommittee of the museum’s Acquisitions Committee whose members were so tasked.  The City of Tampa then pledged a contribution of $250,000.00, representing  25% of the asking price.

On July 29, 1985 Mr. Maass wrote to Mr. Norman Hickey, the [Hillsborough] County Administrator, seeking a contribution from the county. He pointed out that the one million dollar price tag was a good deal because the collection had been appraised at $1,737,250.00.  Furthermore, if the $250,000.00 were to be used as a downpayment, the collection could be on view as early as December. On September 3, after a very convincing presentation by Messrs. Zewadski and Maass, who aggressively advocated for the purchase, the County voted to commit a quarter of a million dollars, payable over four years, to be applied to the purchase price.

There were still some loose ends to tie up, but the acquisition of the Noble collection for the Tampa Museum of Art was now a done deal, which was celebrated on October 26, at Pavillion V, the gala benefit of the Tampa Museum of Art which foregrounded Mr. Noble as the honoree. (Figure 11)

Figure 11
The principles at Pavillion V (October 26, 1985 ) the gala benefit of the Tampa Museum of Art which foregrounded Mr. Noble as the honoree. From left to right, Mr. Willian Knight Zedwadski, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Veach Noble, Dr. Richard E. and Mary Perry, whose endowment funds the Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art, currently held by Dr. Branko van Oppen de Ruiter.

(Courtesy of M.r. William Knight Zewadski)

MORE WORK IS NEEDED
The Noble Collection Committee, whose members  initially convened in  Mr. Zewadski’s offices at Trenam Law in Tampa,  realized that fundraising required persistent dedication by many people. Lead editorial support by the Tampa Tribune promoted the cause. Donations  came from many individuals, the community, and every member of the Museum staff.  Noble Collection Committee also addressed a host of related issues including the logistics involved in creating an exhibition.

BEHIND THE SCENES 
As one who has been personally involved in over thirty international loan exhibitions over the course of my career, I can only concur with Dr. Murray’s recollections

When the collection arrived at TMA, I was able to help unpack the vases, which was an incredible experience. For an art historian to handle these objects was a gift, although some of the vases, like the very wide, shallow kylix with Herakles and the Nemean lion, seemed so impossibly designed that you wondered at their longevity. (Figure 12)

Figure 12
The kylix, a cup for drinking wine, which, as Dr. Murray recalled, as she unpacked it for the exhibition, was so delicately and fragilely designed that she wondered how it survived the millennia still intact. The shape of this vessel recalls the original appearance of the misfired kylix (Figure 4) that Mr. Noble intentionally collected as one of his potter’s “mistakes.” The view taken depicts the Greek hero Heracles wrestling the Nemean lion, the very first of his legendary Twelve Labors and the one that established the lion skin as his trademark attribute.

(Heracles wrestling the Nemean Lion (ceramic kylix; Attica, Greece; Archaic period, ca. 510-500 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.085)

Dr. Murray then collaborated with Mr. Bob Hellier, the long-serving, very talented Chief Preparator of the Tampa Museum of Art, whose responsibilities included the  handling of objects and physically placing them in exhibition cases. Both were confronted with the challenges of displaying the antiquities. Dr. Murray discussed the matter with Mr. Hellier. She  recommended that the vases be displayed in a way that would maximize their visibility because some  were decorated on both sides whereas others were decorated on both their exteriors and interiors. These then had to be arranged into comprehensible groupings with similar themes and subject matter, such as portrayals of myths, sport, warfare, and daily life. Dr. Murray was also responsible for generating copy for labels and other didactic materials such as wall panels which provided the visitor with valuable information about the exhibition. The accompanying, exhibition catalogue was also on her to-do-list. She observed

The catalogue came out beautifully, a joint effort between Bob Hellier and myself. It contained a complete listing of  JVN’s collection, as well as a selection of focus pieces for which I wrote individual essays (several of these had color plates). 

Visitors to Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector should also be aware of the fact that the issues which Dr. Murray and Mr. Hellier were obliged to solve were similar to those resolved by  Dr. Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter, Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art, and staff of the Tampa Museum of Art in their collaborative work on this exhibition.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Over the course of the next three years with a Florida State Legislative fund drive in place, and the continuing efforts of individuals such as Messrs. Frank Harvey, Ben Norbaum, with assistance from Mr. Charles W. (“Jack”) Sahlman and State Senator John Grant, and attractive terms from Barnett Bank, the financial obligation for the acquisition of the Noble collection was discharged, the final payment having been made in late September 1988. 

A NEVER ENDING STORY
Dr. Murray recalls that

when I began teaching my Archaeology of Greece course in the History Department at the University of South Florida, the Noble acquisition provided a fantastic teaching collection, as it did for others. Students were amazed that Tampa had such things.

It subsequently generated the specialized position, the Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art with generous contributions from Costas Lemonopoulos and Dr. and Mrs. Richard E. Perry. This position, which is currently held by Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter,  is said to be the most heavily endowed curatorship of any museum in the United States. 

The lessons gained from this survey of the life and career of Joseph Veach Noble are simple:  Collectors in partnership with museum curators enable collectors to hone their aesthetic judgements, create unlimited opportunities for scientific research, and open pathways for financial support. Such partnerships often result in arrangements by which those private collections enter the public domain where the objects themselves serve as vectors enabling visitors to expand their cultural horizons with an enhanced understanding of a shared past. Such collector-curator partnerships are invariably win-win scenarios. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
This article could not have been written if it were  not for the willingness of William Knight Zewadski, a principal mover and shaker of the effort to bring the Noble collection to Tampa, to share unselfishly his vast knowledge, insights, personal experiences, notes, and corporate memory with me.

I also wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Suzanne Murray for her willingness to share her first-hand experiences with me about her involvement with the events associated with the Noble collection in her capacity as guest curator.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM
For more information about the exhibition, Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector, on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through February 19, 2026, visit the Museum’s website. The Museum has partnered with the Hillsborough County Public Schools to provide a unique tour experience to students in grades 3-8. In 2024, this program, facilitated by visits, discussions, and art-making projects, will serve nearly 15,000 students from the HCPS Transformation Network.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya [Tokyo]. During his career “Dr. Bob” has curated exhibitions of both  ancient and contemporary art in the States, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Switzerland. He advises collectors and is also a certified, USPAP-compliant member of the Appraisers Association of America. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files

More is More

EMBELLISH ME: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

One of the most significant imperatives of the exhibition philosophy of the Tampa Museum of Art is to present visually stimulating works of art which are not only possessed of superior aesthetic qualities in their own right but whose subject matter is relevant. That relevance is formulated by asking its visitors to view those works of art within the context of current international discourse about pressing social issues. The permanent exhibition, Identity in the Ancient World, explores such issues as ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as lived experiences resonating with similar issues impacting upon our contemporary society.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is its parallel, temporary loan exhibition, showcasing a panorama of stimulating eye candy reveling in glorious patterns and captivating decorative motifs. But like the themes articulated in the Identity exhibition, Embellish Me engages its visitors in an equally compelling art historical discourse, what is art and who decides what is art.

For about a decade from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s a group of artists on the East and West Coast participated in a movement now known as P&D, the Pattern and Decoration Movement. The participating members, mostly women, understood that artistic discourse was dominated by men who, it seemed, arbitrarily and somewhat disparagingly dumped textiles, basketry, and the like into the pejorative “craft” category, effectively divorcing those creations from the supposedly superior category of “fine art.” That hierarchical categorization had an unfortunate misogynist side effect, because, traditionally, from the dawn of civilization women were the dominant weavers of textiles and baskets. The P&D movement’s imperative, therefore, was to set aside such rigid hierarchies and in so doing, intercalate the contributions of women into the ages-old continuum of visual creations. The movers and shakers of P&D also correctly observed that textiles and baskets were themselves often imbued, as a result of the materials used and the patterns employed, with an intrinsic sensuality effected by their retinal-commanding ornament.

The combined oeuvre of the participants of the P&D Movement offered a viable alternative to what some have termed the general manliness of modernism. It demolished the artificial boundaries traditionally separating fine art from craft. Significantly P&D succeeded in elevating the status of women as artists in their own right. 

Joanna Robotham, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tampa since 2016, collaborated with Dr. Amy Galpin, former Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum (now Executive Director and Chief Curator at MOAD in Miami) on Embellish Me. Robotham reinforces the added significance of this exhibition for our Tampa Bay community because, as she rightly stresses, the works of view are from the collection of Norma Canelas Roth (1943-2022), and her husband, William. Mrs. Roth was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, is an alumna of the University of South Florida, and lived most of her life right here in the Sunshine State. Early on she recognized the marginalization of women artists because they were often ignored, and hence neglected, by mainstream gallerists and collectors. 

Figure 1. Installation view of the exhibition Embellish Me at the Tampa Museum of Art.
Photograph by Paige Boscia. Courtesy of the Museum.

The exhibition space is sumptuously designed (Figure 1) with its aubergine-colored accent walls and strategically-placed benches affording visitors various vantage points from which to contemplate the works of art, each one of which occupies its own environment. Every work stands alone and proud, there is no clutter, there is no crowding.

Figure 2. Betty Woodman (1930-2018). Untitled, 1981.

Among the works of art on view are an exuberant vase (Figure 2) potted by ceramist Betty Woodman, one of the mainstays of P&D. The vase is noteworthy for both its size and consummate polychromatic effects. 

Figure 3. Joyce Scott (born 1948). Necklace (Skeletons), 1994.

The necklace (Figure 3) by Joyce Scott, created from glass beads and semi-precious stones, is a deceptive masterpiece in miniature because it deserves more than a passing glance. This work, informed by Scott’s Afro-American heritage, alludes to current social issues by virtue of the initially inconspicuous skeletons which are subtly intercalated into its overall, seeming ornamental design. 

Figure 4. Jane Kaufman (1938-2021). Screen, 1979.

Equally deceptive and likewise worthy of contemplation is the screen (Figure 4) by Jane Kaufman, a leader of P&D. She transformed the skills of embroidery and sewing, taught to her by her Russian-born grandmother, by introducing bugle beads and metallic threads, often glued together, into her compositions. She also foregrounded feathers into her oeuvre, as seen in this exacting, meticulously designed screen in which each pheasant feather appears to be so identical that one’s first impression is that they had been mechanically reproduced rather than being selectively plucked from nature.

Figure 5. Tony Robbin (born 1943). 1978-21, 1978.

Toby Robbin was a member of an improvisational theater group and a member of a men’s consciousness-raising group before joining the P&D. There his oeuvre concentrated on illusion effective by compositions of polyvalent geometric patterns. The repeated patterns of shape and color in 1978-21 (Figure 5) are a tour de force, oscillating as they do between the linear and the painterly, the static and the kinetic. 

Figure 6. Lucas Samaras (1936-2024). Reconstruction #39, 1978.

Lucas Samaras participated in P&D, particularly in the 1970’s when he began his Reconstruction series, of which Reconstruction #39 (Figure 6) is representative. He composes his geometric motifs from swatches of fabric which he combines into compositions with a sewing machine. The resulting works of art purposefully resonate with the aesthetic concerns of the Russian Suprematist Art Movement in which the traditional distinction between foreground and background are blurred.

Embellish Me, therefore, engages not only the visitor’s eye with its dazzling array of decorative, polychromatic ornamentation but challenges the visitor to reassess the place of ornament within one’s own environment. That mental engagement may force one to rethink the attraction that we have either for patterned bed sheets or for wallpaper. And that rethinking should awaken everyone to the role that pattern and ornament have played in the visual culture of virtually every civilization since the beginning of time.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is organized by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, and presented in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view through July 28, 2024.

Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya in Tokyo. During his career, he has curated exhibitions of contemporary art in New York City, Antibes, and Tokyo. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files. 

Fall in Unordinary Love: Salman Toor in Tampa

Fall in Unordinary Love: Salman Toor in Tampa

by Richard Ellis

This spring, visitors of the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) have the uncommon chance to view a profoundly whimsical exhibition of works by a preeminent contemporary painter. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, features more than forty-five paintings and works on paper completed between 2019 and 2022. The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and is on view at the TMA from February 23rd through June 4th, 2023.

Born in 1983, in Lahore, Pakistan, Salman Toor resides and works in New York City and exhibits internationally. His oeuvre primarily consists of dreamlike scenes, in which cartoonish figures appear suspended like marionettes, caught in the plotlines of ambiguous narratives. The stories are drawn from moments of the urban lives of imagined queer young men, as well as from the artist’s own lived experience and those of his friends. The emotional atmospheres of his canvases fluctuate between intimacy and isolation, contentment and embarrassment, and tenderness and violence.

This exhibition is important and timely as it draws attention to international human rights issues as well as domestic queer politics. In Pakistan, acts of homosexuality are punishable by life imprisonment, or even death in extreme cases.1 In America, LGBTQ+ rights, representation and recreation are coming under fire from lawmakers, politicians, and homophobic and transphobic members of the public who are banning or restricting drag shows throughout the country.

On view in the museum’s newly constructed gallery space, the exhibition consists of oil paintings done on panel and canvas, several drawings done in charcoal, ink, and gouache, and two of the artist’s sketchbooks. This body of works offers conceptual, material, and technical variety while also showcasing Toor’s characteristic style. Despite the surreal quality of many of Toor’s paintings and the specificity of his subject matter, the moments that he constructs are deeply sensitive to the human condition. There is a naivete to his figures, but their innocence is occasionally broken by the salacious scenarios in which they appear entangled.

Toor’s paintings reward the visually literate and those well-versed in Western art history. Drawing from the European painting tradition, he invites us to traverse through centuries of time without ever leaving our contemporary moment behind. Toor brings this legacy into our times to confront colonial structures that still confine us. In postcolonial fashion, Toor turns the canon on its head by replacing the typical subjects of Western easel paintings with queer, brown-skinned boys and men. Toor demonstrates his mastery over the Western tradition in a bold act of subversion that begs the question of who owns whose art history.

Figure 1: Construction Men, Salman Toor, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 121.9 cm), photo by author.
Figure 2: Les Raboteurs de Parquet (The Floor Scrapers), Gustave Caillebotte, 1875, oil on canvas, 40.2 x 57.7 in (102 x 146.5 cm), Google Arts and Culture.

When visitors enter the gallery, they are immediately confronted by Construction Men (Figure 1), a scene that continues the homoerotic celebration of male laborers that can be traced back to Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (Figure 2), of 1875, though with a campy flare evocative of costumes for The Village People. From there, visitors may circulate the room and explore the three thematic categories that the works are separated into, including desire, tradition, and family. Many of the paintings are neatly spaced along the horizon line of the gallery walls, with carefully adjusted spotlights illuminating each one. His smaller works, though, are clustered together on the south wall, in a way that evokes the salon-style displays of public galleries in the nineteenth century. This strategy slows down the viewing experience and aligns with Toor’s connection to artistic conventions of the past, but it also makes it difficult to see the details in each of them closely, especially for viewers whose vantage point is lower than others.

Not all the works in the catalog make an appearance at this venue. Two notable exclusions include The Latecomer, 2021, and the monumental Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe and Flag, 2022, which is featured on the cover of the catalog edited by Asma Naeem and available for purchase at the Museum’s store. The painting is a self-referential triumph that blends symbols from Toor’s lexicon, including phalluses, shoes, used condoms, and tombstones. It is perhaps the standout of the show, but it is not on view at the TMA because it was swiftly purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Congratulations are in order for the artist as this painting is the first of his to be acquired by the prestigious institution, but I lament the missed opportunity for a Floridian audience to view this painting.

While the compositions that underly many of Toor’s canvases are taken from monuments of Early Modern European art, these works find themselves quite at home at the TMA, even though such a collection is conspicuously absent. The TMA has historically been known for its collection of classical art from Greece and Southern Italy, but its exhibition programming and the development of its permanent collection have also been centered around outlier art of the modern and postmodern eras. The humor, irony, postcolonial angst, and queer grunge, that we find on the surface of Toor’s paintings bear an uncanny affinity with the irreverent and kitschy contemporary art scene of the greater Tampa Bay area.

Figure 3: Cakes, Wayne Thiebaud, 1963, oil on canvas, (152.4 x 182.9 cm), Wikiart.

Several of the works made for this exhibition pull directly from works in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s collection of European paintings from the 17th– to the 19th-centuries. Attention to Toor’s references to early modern art is well-established but has perhaps overshadowed his visual connections to later painters. Toor typically uses oil paints over a surface primed with dark brown acrylic paint. His style is painterly, with thick, visible brushstrokes. The built-up textures of his paintings have been described as frosting on a cake, not unlike Wayne Thiebaud, whose paintings of seemingly mundane desserts and pastries, such as Cakes (Figure 3), 1963, were imbued with a postmodern sensibility and likewise question notions of desire, consumption, class, and privilege.2

Figure 4: Night Capture, Salman Toor, 2021, oil on panel, 14 x 18 in. (35.6 x 45.7 cm), photo by author.

The Western canon is not the only power structure that Toor seeks to upend. Toor also takes issue with the endemic homophobia that plagues his home country of Pakistan, as well as most other Muslim-majority nations. The perils that LGBTQ+ people face within these communities is a topic brought forth by several of Toor’s paintings, such as Stone Throwers, Night Capture (Figure 4), and The Vigil. The threat of violence compels us to hide beneath the protective cover of night and within the fickle safety of wooden areas, where individuals may cruise at their own risk. In Shadow Park, Toor provides us a glimpse into the underworld of queer desire that echoes the sexually charged nightmare-fantasies of Robert Gober’s The Heart is Not a Metaphor.

Figure 5: Cemetery with Dog, Salman Toor, 2022, oil on canvas, 43 x 36 in. (109.2 x 91.4 cm), photo by author.

In some of Toor’s paintings such as Thunderstorm and Back Lawn, we see domestic gardens as a space for freedom and unbridled affection. In Cemetery with Dog (Figure 5), Toor explores a different setting entirely, in which the homoerotic paradise of Sa’di’s garden is now a graveyard.3 The scene has the isometric perspective of Persianate manuscript paintings, through which we peer down at above-ground graves and tombstones. Unlike most of his paintings, this one is conspicuously absent of any visible human figures, though it hardly feels like an empty landscape. By searching for a person, we come to the grim realization that a graveyard is never an empty landscape, as the ground literally contains invisible bodies. In the background, there are trees entwined, an established motif in painting, prose, and poetry from the Islamic world for lovers yearning to embrace one another.4 By conflating the garden with the cemetery, and life and death, this painting serves as a dark reminder of the risk of pursuing forbidden love.

Toor is known for his proclivity for green, a color that has, perhaps coincidentally, also enjoyed an emblematic role in Islamic culture. Green is the color of the Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have privileged the color above all others, as well as the color of paradise, which is envisioned as a garden.5 For modern artists in the West, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso, green indicates a sickness manifests on multiple levels. Toor says that he is aware of the poisonous associations with green, but for him, the color is “velvety, nocturnal, and comforting.”6 The conflicting potentialities for the symbolic significance of green in Toor’s paintings, in a way, queer the color itself.

At the heart of his work, Toor celebrates the common love found in causal romances of the sex-positive queer world by elevating it by giving it the treatment of one that is found beyond the realm of the ordinary. He celebrates these because they are valuable, and we take them for granted, forgetting that these small acts of seemingly meaningless affection are a luxury not afforded to all.

Glowing like the green light from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, these gleaming, verdant paintings shine into the night, beckoning us into a world of uninhibited frivolity, misplaced desire, and dangerous trysts. Like Nick Carraway, the narrating protagonist of the hazy tale, Toor seems to find dissatisfaction with the world in which he has entered, where love is free, and therefore made worthless. Lovers are had and then disposed. Forbidden love is no longer forbidden, and therefore has become ordinary. Toor gifts us a fresh perspective by showing the value that remains in public displays of affection and to show us that there is nothing at all ordinary about such love.

Salmon Toor: No Ordinary Love is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through June 4, 2023. The exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art.

About the author

Richard Ellis is an adjunct professor at the University of Tampa, in the Department of Art & Design, and at the University of South Florida, in the School of Art & Art History. He holds a B.A. and M.A., both in art history and from the University of South Florida. His areas of interest include Islamic art and architecture, modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the diasporas, as well as Orientalism.

Footnotes

  1. “Pakistan,” Human Dignity Trust, accessed May 8, 2023, https://www.humandignitytrust.org/country-profile/pakistan/.
  2. Asma Naeem, “Salman Toor’s Brown Boys,” in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, ed. Asma Naeem (New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art), 10.
  3. Mika Natif, “The generative garden: Sensuality, male intimacy, and eternity in Govardhan’s illustration of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān,” in Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 3.
  4. Michael Barry, “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat,” in ‘Attār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 148.
  5. Mohammad Gharipour, Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts (London and New York, I.B. Taurus, 2013), 24.
  6. Evan Moffitt, “Green as the Night” in Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, ed. Asma Naeem (New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art), 49.

Bibliography

Barry, Michael. “Illustrating ‘Attār: A Pictorial Meditation by Master Habīballāh of Mashhad in the Tradition of Master Bihzād of Herat.” In ‘Attār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle, 135-64. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006.

Gharipour, Mohammad. Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry, and the Arts. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Human Dignity Trust. “Pakistan.” Accessed May 8, 2023. www.humandignitarytrust.org/country-profile/pakistan/.

Naeem, Asma, ed. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love. ed. New York and Baltimore: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2022.

Natif, Mika. “The generative garden: Sensuality, male intimacy, and eternity in Govardhan’s illustration of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān.” In Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif, 43-64. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.

Immersing Tampa Bay

Immersing Tampa Bay

By Jessica Todd

Over the past decade, immersive art has grown from a niche market to mainstream popularity, much to the delight or disgust of many in the art world. From rotating projections of Starry Night to Meow Wolf’s growing repertoire, an increasing number of mainstream audiences are engaging with this medium. As it grows, we are challenged to define it, evaluate it, and integrate it into our own arts communities. Tampa Bay is eager to join the conversation—and has a lot to offer to it—with an array of examples from our own past, present, and future.

Immersive Art and its Origins

To discuss immersive art, we first need a definition: Generally, immersive art is an embodied, 360-degree experience where the boundary between “viewer” and “art” is dissolved through active participation and multi-sensory engagement. Primarily rooted in the visual arts, other disciplines including theatre, music, story-telling, film/video, dance, fashion, and culinary arts may play a role. Many definitions out there cite virtual reality, video projection, and laser light shows, but that only represents one approach; immersive art may also be created from more tactile, traditional processes.

“Immersive art…has a simple definition—it’s the creation of a world around the person in a way that makes them feel part of and inside of it. In practice, the label of immersive art touches on everything from illusory world-building to simply including a piece of interactivity within a larger, traditional art show. The true meaning of immersive art is somewhere between those two things…[it] must create something that moves beyond the fourth wall…bringing viewers into the art and augmenting their reality.”1

Immersive art seeks to demolish the division between capital-A “Art” and life, and between art object and viewer, but the concept behind this 21st-century trend is nothing new. Throughout history and around the globe, more often than not, art and life have been deeply integrated. For example, among the thousands of cultural groups across the vast continent of Africa—such as the Yoruba, Igbo, and Dogon people—visual, performance, and literary arts are inseparable from each other and from the participatory ceremonies they accompany. (For this reason, it is absurd to display them as stand-alone “art” objects in Western museums.) 

Such ceremonial markers of holidays and life’s milestones are—in Western terms—interdisciplinary, embodied art experiences. These events incorporate community members to such a degree that there is no distinguishing lexicon for “art” as a stand-alone concept in many global languages. Hand-crafted objects, costuming, music, food and drink, spoken word, dance, and theater are combined together and imbued with symbolism to create authentic, transformative experiences for participants. There is no line between “art” and “audience” because the participation of all parties is a fundamental element.2 We must acknowledge the deep history and global presence of this approach to the “arts,” lest we support the false narrative that it is a contemporary, Western invention.

Art, That’s Immersive

The canon of Eurocentric Art History includes early examples of immersive or experiential art occurring in more traditional museum and gallery settings:

  • Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds, first exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1966, lives on in contemporary iterations. The gallery is filled with rectangular metallic silver balloons that reflect the environment around them and belie their hefty appearance to float whimsically from floor to ceiling. Viewers are invited to walk amongst them and touch them, their movements becoming an integral element of the artwork.3
  • In 1971, Robert Morris filled the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) sculpture hall with “interactive sculptures that would experiment with conceptions about sculptural space and human physicality by having museum-goers put their own bodies to the test.” Minimalist sculptural objects such as ramps, cylinders, and beams were transformed into useful objects, emphasizing the viewers’ interactions with them as the “art,” and the sculptures as a tool to achieve an embodied aesthetic experience.4
  • The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, first completed in 1971, is an octagonal brick building with a skylight, containing 14 murals by Mark Rothko in varying shades of black. It is “a spiritual space, a forum for world leaders, a place for solitude and gathering. It’s an epicenter for civil rights activists, a quiet disruption, a stillness that moves.”5 Its somber interior is designed to engulf the viewer and foster deeper contemplation. In the words of Tampa-based artist and educator Noelle Mason, Rothko Chapel is “immersive but not entertaining.”6
  • Yayoi Kusama has become a global sensation for her polka-dotted infinity rooms, including the 2018 exhibition Love is Calling at the Tampa Museum of Art (heralded by Tampa Bay Times as “incredibly Instagram-able.”7) But the 93-year-old artist has been making viewer-interactive artwork since 1966, when she was banned from performing with her controversial work Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale: Kusama, dressed in a kimono, sold the mirrored vinyl balls that comprised the installation to passersby for 2 dollars each, a critique of the commercialization of art.8
  • James Turrell’s “skyspaces,” a series initiated in 1973, feature an “aperture cut into the roof of a building that causes the visible plane of the sky to appear flat at the level of the opening.” They encourage experiential interaction by the viewer and a suspension of time and space.9 One of these—Joseph’s Coat—is installed at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.
  • Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010) consists of a pile of millions of unique handcrafted porcelain sunflower seed replicas on which the public is encouraged to walk. This interaction symbolizes the “complex exchanges between the one and the many.”10
  • A recent example is Ernesto Neto’s SunForceOceanLife (2021), a “hand-crocheted, walkable maze of yellow, orange, and green threads that stretch 79 feet across the gallery and spiral 12 feet in the air.”11 This joyful piece turns museum-goers from passive observers into active playmates, all inside of the austere white box of the gallery.

Self-Identified “Immersive Art Experiences”

The name most likely to draw recognition of the immersive-art-experience world is Meow Wolf. The group started as a grassroots team of outcasts from the Santa Fe, NM arts scene who turned a rented warehouse into a punk art space in 2008. They opened their first permanent immersive art installation, House of Eternal Return, in 2016, drawing 400,000 visitors—almost six times the population of Santa Fe—that year alone.12 Their rapid success drew the attention of investors and they’ve been growing since, with installations Omega Mart (Las Vegas, NV) and Convergence Station (Denver, CO) opening in 2021, and plans to expand to Grapevine, TX in 2023 and Houston, TX in 2024.13

Meow Wolf pioneered a new kind of attraction somewhere in the gray area between art and entertainment. Visitors create their own non-linear journey through a space where everything can be touched and the narrative is unclear. I have yet to visit any of Meow Wolf’s installations myself, so I can’t speak directly to them, but what seems to set them apart from a mainstream attraction like Disney World is their subversive edge, layered conceptual foundation, and eccentric aesthetic. Some in the art world have rejected their work as art, but cofounder Sean Di Ianni says, “We consider what we do to be art—very much. But if the art world doesn’t like that, that’s fine.”14

Since Meow Wolf’s meteoric rise, a number of permanent immersive arts attractions have cropped up around the country and globally, including AREA15 in Las Vegas, NV (which houses Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, and will open another location in Orlando, FL in 2024); Superblue and Artechouse in Miami, FL; Seismique in Houston, TX; Otherworld in Colombus, OH; Wisdome LA in Los Angeles, CA; teamLab experiences in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Macau, Japan; and Atelier des Lumières in Paris, France.15 It’s fair to say we are well past “trend” territory and well into an art/entertainment hybrid discipline to be reckoned with. Tampa Bay is in on it, too, with Fairgrounds St. Pete opening in December 2021, and Crab Devil’s The Peninsularium slated for 2022. (More on them, soon.)

Fairgrounds St. Pete, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete

Recent History of Immersive Art in Tampa Bay

I reached out to leaders in Tampa Bay’s art community to hear their thoughts on immersive art in general and the medium’s history and presence in the region. Though the first “true” permanent immersive art attraction opened in 2021 (Fairgrounds St. Pete), there is a long precedent of immersive, interactive, and experiential art in Tampa Bay worth noting. 

One of the first names that came to mind for many was the Vinik Family Foundation, which brought the above-mentioned Yayoi Kusama installation to the Tampa Museum of Art in 2018. They also presented the popular installation The Beach Tampa by Snarkitecture at Amelie Arena in 2016. The massive venue featured a “15,000-square-foot immersive environment featuring an “ocean” of 1.2 million recyclable and antimicrobial white balls” and was open to the public free of cost. This whimsical installation inspired joy for visitors of all ages and backgrounds.16

Earlier this year, the Vinik Family Foundation brought Lucy Sparrow’s Tampa Fresh Foods to Water Street. Sparrow’s “grocery store” was filled with over 50,000 handmade felt replicas of common consumable products. Gallery attendants became supermarket associates and Sparrow herself manned the register. Outfitted with shopping baskets, visitors could buy reasonably priced artwork/products, the proceeds of which benefitted the local nonprofits Feeding Tampa Bay and Tampa Arts Alliance.17

Walking into Tampa Fresh Foods, I instantly had a smile on my face—it was pure delight. Coke, ketchup, tampons, and shrimp smiled back at you from the shelves. I must have walked down each aisle ten times, each time seeing something new and remarking to a stranger, “Did you see the green onions?!” For me, the installation was successful beyond pure entertainment because, on closer inspection, it subversively critiqued advertising, excess, over-consumption, waste, and the paradox of choice. Even if you didn’t read into it on that level, it brought a bunch of strangers into a space to smile and laugh together, and that’s something.

One of my favorite examples of Tampa’s immersive-art past is The Music Box: Tampa Bay, created in 2016 in Mann-Wagnon Park in Sulphur Springs along the Hillsborough River. Commissioned by the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) in partnership with Community Stepping Stones and curated by Sarah Howard (Curator of Public Art and Social Practice, USF), The Music Box: Tampa Bay followed in the footsteps of the first installation of The Music Box in New Orleans in 2011, a concept for musical architecture developed by New Orleans Airlift (NOA) and artist Swoon. National and local artists and students used reclaimed materials from the site to build sound-producing structures that grew into a musical village. For a month in 2016, the site was programmed with free cultural events, including musical performances, artist talks, historical talks about the history of Sulphur Springs, jam sessions, open mic nights, and yoga. Visitors were invited to open play days where they could make their own sounds and interact with the site.18

When I spoke with Sarah Howard about immersive art and what makes a work successful, she identified qualities that I believe The Music Box: Tampa Bay achieved: It sparked joy and a sense of wonder, created a common space for all to access and play, built common ground that spans all identities, and spurred action on otherwise difficult-to-tackle issues.19 I also appreciate that this project integrated the existing community where it was sited, brought together national and local artists, and worked across disciplines and generations to create a space where everyone felt included and welcomed.

My interviewees cited a number of less-well-documented examples, as well:

  • Devon Brady, CEO of Crab Devil, cited Mac Wellman’s play Bad Penny, performed on the banks of the Hillsborough River; the annual Gala Corina art fair in the early 2000s; and exhibitions in the 90s and 2000s by Experimental Skeleton, in which Brady took part.20
  • Howard mentioned curator Dave Hickey’s Ultralounge: The Return of Social Space at USFCAM in 2000, where the gallery was transformed into a nightclub lounge.19 
  • Tracy Midulla, Founder and Director of Tempus Projects, included in this list the gallery’s 2014 film and projection exhibition The Room is Empty; Benjamin Zellmer Bellas’ self-explanatory A 1993 Mercedes-Benz Is Filled with Sequins and Flipped Over onto Its Roof by Millennials, curated by Parallelogram for Coco Hunday; and Meg Leary’s Ride of the Valkyries, curated by Cunsthaus, featuring flying hairdryers and live opera singing.21

Surely, the eclectic list could go on, but I include these examples here to illustrate the historic swell that has developed into the recent wave of immersive art spaces in Tampa Bay.  

Permanent Immersive Art Attractions in Tampa Bay

The first permanent self-identified “immersive art attraction” in Tampa Bay is Fairgrounds St. Pete, which opened in December 2021 and is located in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District. They’ve commissioned over 60 artists to collaborate in creating a “choose-your-own experience destination” integrating artwork with “layers of experiential innovation, using technology creatively to drive interactivity and immersive gaming.”22  Fairgrounds St. Pete emphasizes play as an entry point to the underlying narrative of their Florida-centric installation, which may be investigated as deeply as each guest desires.

Fairgrounds St. Pete, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete

I was quick to become a Fairgrounds St. Pete Immersive member in 2021 and was among the first groups of guests to visit, and have been back since. The adventure begins in a throwback Florida motel lobby with no clear roadmap on where to head next (intentionally!). I took the route of focusing on the artistic aspects, wandering through each room, appreciating the aesthetics of it all and dissecting concepts behind the artwork. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but I watched those around me enthusiastically search for clues and discover hidden codes to trigger actions, such as an epic Everglades thunderstorm on the 50-foot projection screen (collaboration with Olivia Sebeskey). Fairgrounds St. Pete’s creative approach to gamifying the space is likely a strong entry point for many, though, for me, I was happy to explore it more like an art gallery. 

A few installations, in particular, stand out to me: First, Mike Hicks’ A Mysterious Portal to the Bay. I almost walked past the small, dark niche toward the back of the building, but when I noticed it and walked up, I couldn’t pull myself away. It’s a quiet and unassuming installation depicting a bridge underpass that appears to extend miles into the distance over a body of water toward a city skyline. The gently ebbing water glints with blue light and creates a soft splashing sound over muffled cars passing above. It transports you, and that makes for a great piece of art. 

Strawberry Room by Macy Eats Paint and Emiliano Settecasi, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete

I also love the Strawberry Room by Macy Eats Paint and Emiliano Settecasi, for very different reasons. It’s sweet and delightful and hits a “critical mass” (as we say in the art world) of charming strawberry cuteness. It’s adorable, but also seductive and a bit hedonistic. It’s that little bit of edge that pushes it to another level, enticing you to plunder a decadent strawberry cupcake off the neat little dessert cart and scarf it down in three indulgent bites. (But don’t, it’s sculpture.)

Electric Sky Lounge by Neil Mendoza, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete

Electric Sky Lounge, which opened in March 2022 and features work by Neil Mendoza, is another stand-out for me. Hand-turned cranks control 3D-printed hands that exist seamlessly both as physical objects and digital images on the screens in front of them. You have full control over the hands’ simple movements, which impact cute and irreverently funny animations of animals: You can pet a shedding dog, smash a chicken, or upend a floating duck. Mendoza’s work awakened the gamer in me.

Cultural Currency by Illsol and New Roots Art Collective, mural installed on the exterior of one of Crab Devil’s shipping container installations at The Peninsularium, Tampa, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Crab Devil

Tampa Bay’s next permanent immersive art attraction will be Crab Devil’s The Peninsularium, expected to open in 2022 in the Ybor Heights neighborhood of Tampa.* The Peninsularium starts in a reimagined Florida Bait Shop and continues on to a maze of 25+ shipping containers, each holding an artist-made, Florida-inspired installation; a subtle but discoverable overarching narrative lies below the surface. Crab Devil CEO Devon Brady writes:

“We want our viewers to be surprised by what they see, but we want the mechanisms by which that sense of surprise is achieved to be discoverable to the engaged viewer, and for that knowledge to give them a greater insight and appreciation for the real-world magic that surrounds us all the time. We like to bring the viewer in on the secret—to show them what we like to call “the artifacts of artifice.” We want our experiences to have depth—for them to reveal their secrets on both micro and macro levels.”20

Munchausen Waves by Devon Brady, Tampa, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Crab Devil

This intention is evident in the “preview” installations that Crab Devil has presented at Tampa events in the past couple years—Munchausen Waves at the 2021 Gasparilla Music Festival and The Bait Ball at Gasparilla Festival of the Arts earlier this year, both created by Devon Brady. Munchausen Waves is a kinetic sculpture and overhead shade structure inspired by a “Renaissance-era theatrical illusion developed by Italian stage illusionist Nicola Sabbatini.” It uses basic mechanics and mathematical synchronization to produce an optical illusion of an undulating wave-like surface.23 On one side, the discs are painted shades of red, orange, and yellow, evoking fire or the sun. On the other side, the discs are shades of blue and green, referencing water or the sky. The billowing colors are both calming and menacing, but you can also focus your eye—the way you would on a single blade of a fan—to see the simple composition behind the magical visual effect.

The Bait Ball is housed in a 40-foot shipping container, like many of the installations at The Peninsularium will be. Guests enter to find themselves inside a cage-like steel structure lined with illuminated kelp. On one end, a tiny peephole invites a look inside a miniature diorama depicting an underwater scene (by artist Phil Roach). On the other end, a round steel ball holding a grid of white fish begins to spin. The fish start to blur just as a strobe light turns on, transforming their blurred movement into a 3D zoetrope—out of nowhere, the fish appear to be swimming in a continuous circulating motion. Before you can pull your jaw off the floor, the strobe light turns off and the mechanics of the illusion are again revealed.24  As with Munchausen Waves, the curtain is pulled back, and what you see there only makes the work that much more compelling. Crab Devil approaches immersive art with tactile materials and analog technologies blended with media arts and modern technologies. I look forward to experiencing the completed attraction.

Recreating Historical Art as Immersive

I’ve encountered a range of skepticism on the subject of immersive art, but one common enemy seems to emerge: Immersive Van Gogh, and its contemporaries (immersive Monet, Kahlo, Klimt, etc.). Their primary offenses include: 1. The artist whose work is featured did not intend it to be presented that way (i.e. they’re all dead), 2. The physical medium in which the artist originally created their work is central to its significance (i.e. the fact that it’s a painting is fundamental), and 3. They are geared toward consumptive entertainment rather than thoughtful contemplation or meaningful experience. But, they are also a part of the region’s immersive art experience “scene” and demand inclusion.

Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida. Photo credit: Jessica Todd

The art world’s palpable disdain for these kinds of attractions meant only one thing: I had to go and see for myself. So, I mustered all of my judgment-withholding strength and set off to see Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition. At a ticket price of $55.99, Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota (produced by Paquin Entertainment Group and Normal Studio), is located in a massive white tent in an empty field adjacent to the University Town Center Mall parking lot. Inside, the self-guided tour begins with an illuminated biographical timeline and information about Van Gogh’s work. A small room of colorful lights is the precursor to the main event: A 30,000-square-foot room with a 35-minute loop of wall and floor projections of Van Gogh’s work, sprinkled with historical quotes and photographs set to instrumental music and the occasional voiceover. Visitors seemed conscientious in reading about Van Gogh’s life and work, and gazed attentively—necks craned—at the kinetic animations of his famous paintings. 

Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida. Photo credit: Jessica Todd
Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida. Photo credit: Jessica Todd
Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida Photo credit: Jessica Todd

It was pretty, I’ll give them that—a fantastic choice for a Tinder profile picture background. But the wobbling projections and bold aesthetic choices on behalf of the creators were distracting for me. The animators made the sky swirl—an obvious choice—but also cut-and-pasted flowers from one painting over another, created an odd patchwork-quilt grid of Van Gogh’s signature, flew birds across skies, walked figures across city blocks, and superimposed slowly disintegrating paintings on top of each other as a transition effect. As Noelle Mason pointed out in our conversation back in April, the whole point of Van Gogh’s paintings is that they were paintings—his brushstrokes defied their static permanence and came to life on their own, without the assistance of an app.6 Beyond Van Gogh didn’t foster a deeper understanding or appreciation for me. In fact, it was a bit sad, having seen his work in person. Sorry, Van Gogh, capitalism did you dirty on this one.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition. Photo credit: Jessica Todd

At Westshore Mall in Tampa, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition (produced by SEE Global Entertainment and Bridgeman Images) is a few storefronts down from Selfie Wrld Tampa (perhaps the perfect Influencer one-stop-shop?). The familiar scent of Auntie Annie’s pretzels wafts through the air as you enter the gutted Sears department store. It’s a vibe. Inside, for a $22.60 ticket, you find larger-than-life prints of Michelangelo’s famed frescoes accompanied by informational text and a self-directed audio guide. Where Beyond Van Gogh focuses on an aesthetic experience, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel seems more focused on education. (To be fair, it isn’t advertised as “immersive,” but the terms “360-degree” and “experience” are used in their advertising.) The prints were a bit pixelated and the stained mall carpeting a bit depressing, but the text and audio information were thorough. The attraction was quite well-attended for noon on a weekday, mostly older folks but some young people, too. It was better than I anticipated, but in a different way.

Perhaps the question here is not, “What is the quality of the experience?” but, “What would the visitors be doing if they weren’t here?” Getting thousands of people to spend an hour or so learning about Art History before heading off to the food court is a major feat, one that museums struggle to accomplish. The popular, commercial aspect of these attractions provides access. As a reviewer of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel says, “We may never make it to Rome so this was a good substitute for us.” Or for others, it can be an inspiration—one Facebook user writes, “The bucket list now contains the yearning to see the real thing.” 

Another gem Noelle Mason shared with me was that the (actual) Sistine Chapel is an immersive space and it was built so that everything around you inspires awe.6 This is absolutely true, and cathedrals, mosques, and other religious spaces may very well be the “OG” permanent immersive art spaces. The Sistine Chapel undoubtedly holds the potential to be an awe-inspiring space. But it’s worth noting that I went to the Sistine Chapel in my early 20s: My neck bent up toward the ceiling, shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowd of sweaty tourists while guards screamed, “Foto NO,” every three seconds when someone snapped an unauthorized picture—I don’t think this was Michelangelo’s vision either. 

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition. Photo credit: Jessica Todd

The lesson here, and perhaps the lesson for all contemporary immersive art spaces, is that you can’t force an “experience” on anyone. You can facilitate it, but experiences have to happen to you. A few weeks after that visit to the Sistine Chapel, I remember wandering into a little-known, mostly empty cathedral in Spain on an arbitrary Thursday evening. The golden-hour sun set the stained-glass windows ablaze and the gilded alter aglow, and the rehearsing choir echoed in the nave. Out of nowhere, I had an immersive arts experience, one I can remember far more vividly than many of the famous landmarks I visited. Perhaps one of the people I walked past in Westshore Mall, with its chipped tile and faint mildew scent, plastic audio guide pressed to their ear, staring on at Adam’s pixelated finger, had an experience. Who am I to judge? 

Evaluating Immersive Art

Perhaps due to our global histories of these kinds of experiences, a major strength of immersive art is its accessibility. For many, an art museum is simply not welcoming: A chilly white room with signs reading “Do Not Touch,” a uniformed guard shushing, plaques with big words and old dates, accessed through an epic stone façade. It screams, “Not for everyone.” Immersive art asks you to touch, encourages photos, induces laughter, and speaks through entertainment instead of academics. It is familiar and democratized, providing more inclusive access to the arts, at least on a psychological level. (Ticket prices are sometimes quite high and can become a barrier to access.)

Larger audiences bring more money—and we all know funding to be the Achilles heel of the art world. What’s not to like about that? It’s worth noting here that immersive art experiences seem to be most popular in the heavily commercialized parts of the world: the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. They can be money-makers, and that brings with it a focus on marketing, social media, and entertainment. The work may become too palatable, shifting the role of the artist from culture-maker to content creator.

I have yet to find an article written about immersive art that does not include the mention of Instagram or selfies. Is this a symptom of the immersive art-beast, or simply a sign of the times? We’ve all seen the Darwin Awards-esque news stories about people being gored by wild animals or plummeting from cliffs while trying to snap envy-inducing photos; we’ve read about natural wonders destroyed by hordes of selfie-takers. Perhaps in the 2020s any awe-inspiring visual scene will be reduced to influencer content to some degree. 

Should immersive art welcome the free publicity? On the positive side, it increases revenue to the often-underfunded creative sector, and it bolsters access to art for those who feel excluded by high-brow galleries and museums. Or, should we admonish the dumbing down and corporatization of one of humanity’s greatest intellectual and cultural pursuits? Rather than conclude in strict “yes” or “no” answers, these questions can instead prompt thoughtful exploration into the intentions and outcomes of immersive art projects. 

“True immersive art experiences ask us to use something called narrative transport. This is the idea of losing yourself in a story or getting caught up in one. When narrative transport is used properly, one of the values of the immersive experience is that it imparts a more profound meaning to the participant through use of kinetic sympathy, or accessing emotions by interacting with something. When narrative transport is used for something else—like advertising—it cheapens the whole label of immersive.”1

When it comes to art in any form, I’m a believer that all of it is valuable in its own way. Whether it’s a paint-by-numbers kit or an elaborate full-length opera, it’s all good for something. However, I also believe in applying a critical eye to the arts for the sake of education and advancement. As we develop the canon of 21st-century immersive art, we must also develop a rubric and language for evaluating it. What makes a high-quality immersive art experience? How does it move beyond superficial awe and photo backdrops to become transformative, profound, and intellectually challenging? 

“We cannot resurrect the old system of art. Nor can we simply wish away the break that split apart the old system of art, arrogating intellect, imagination, and grace to fine art and disparaging craft and popular culture as the realm of mere technique, utility, entertainment, and profit. Like other dualisms that have plagued our culture, the divisions of the fine art system can only be transcended through a continuing struggle.”25

Just as in other art disciplines, evaluation investigates form and function: High-quality craftsmanship and technique, appealing aesthetics achieved through principles of design, compelling storylines, and a cohesive concept that is legible to the viewer are fundamental components of a successful work of art. Work should build upon historical references in innovative ways while contributing to contemporary conversations. Great artwork suspends time, stirs emotion, makes you view the world differently, and stays with you for years to come. Evaluating art of any kind is, of course, highly subjective, but the exercise is nonetheless important.

Conclusion

As much as immersive art experiences are enjoying a rise in popularity, they are also subject to a great deal of skepticism—from the general public due to their unconventionality, and from the art world due to their popular appeal. As Sarah Howard pointed out to me, this is not unlike any other medium of art experiencing a new rise in popularity: It took photographers decades to be considered artists; digital art wasn’t taken seriously until the 2010s; and today, we raise an eyebrow at NFTs. The immersive art field has a long road ahead to prove its chops and lower eyebrows, but I believe Tampa Bay has the talent and grit to take it on.

Thank you to the arts and culture leaders in the Tampa Bay community who took the time to speak with me on this topic: Janine Awai, Crab Reckoner at Crab Devil; Devon Brady, CEO of Crab Devil; the team at Fairgrounds St. Pete; Sarah Howard, Curator of Public Art and Social Practice for the Institute for Research in Art at the University of South Florida (USF); Noelle Mason, artist and professor at USF; and Tracy Midulla, Director of Tempus Projects. Learn more about Fairgrounds St. Pete at https://fairgrounds.art and Crab Devil at https://crabdevil.com.

*Note from the author: In full disclosure, I have been a part-time staff member of Crab Devil since January 2022. This article was written from my personal perspective—sparked by the cropping up of immersive experiences in the Tampa Bay region—and does not represent the viewpoints of any of my employers, past or present.

Jessica Todd is a writer, curator, artist, and arts administrator based in Tampa, FL. She is the Development Coordinator for Tempus Projects and the Administrative Coordinator for Crab Devil. Jess is passionate about building the creative infrastructures that support artists and arts organizations, as well as studying and addressing issues of equity, access, and inclusion in the arts. Prior to moving to Tampa in 2020, she was the Residency Manager at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL for six years. She holds a BA in Metal Art & Technology from Penn State University and an MFA in Jewelry/Metals from Kent State University.

Endnotes

  1. Corinne Anderson, “How and Why Immersive Experiences Are Taking Over the Denver Art Scene,” 303 Magazine, January 8, 2020, https://303magazine.com/2020/01/immersive-art-denver-colorado/.
  2. Jacqueline Chanda. “A Theoretical Basis for Non-Western Art History Instruction.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 27, no. 3 (1993): 73–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333249.
  3. “Silver Clouds – Season of Warhol,” Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, accessed July 8, 2022, https://mag.rochester.edu/exhibitions/silver-clouds/.
  4. Jonah Westerman, “Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern 2009,” Tate, accessed July 8, 2022, https://Www.Tate.Org.Uk/Research/Publications/Performance-At-Tate/Perspectives/Robert-Morris.
  5. “About,” Rothko Chapel, accessed July 8, 2022, http://rothkochapel.org/learn/about/.
  6. Noelle Mason, interview by author, virtual, April 13, 2022.
  7. James Borchuck, Maggie Duffy, and Tailyr Irvine, Tampa Bay Times, September 26, 2018, https://www.tampabay.com/photos/2018/09/26/yayoi-kusama-love-is-calling-exhibit-at-tampa-museum-of-art-wvideo/.
  8. David Pendered, “Yayoi Kusama barred in 1966 from performing with ‘Narcissus Garden,’ now at Atlanta Botanical Garden,” Saporta Report, January 24, 2019, https://saportareport.com/yayoi-kusama-barred-in-1966-from-performing-with-narcissus-garden-now-at-atlanta-botanical-garden/sections/reports/david/.
  9. “James Turrell,” Guggenheim, accessed July 8, 2022, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/james-turrell.
  10. “Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds, 2010,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ai-sunflower-seeds-t13408.
  11. Grace Ebert, “A 79-Foot Labyrinth Crocheted by Ernesto Neto Hangs from the Ceiling of a Houston Museum,” Colossal, June 15, 2021, https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/06/ernesto-neto-sun-force-ocean-life/.
  12. Dylan Owens, “Meow Wolf: The Insane Art Collective Taking Over the World,” Rolling Stone, January 16, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/meow-wolf-expansion-psych-art-728202/.
  13. Meow Wolf, “Beyond, Beyond, and Beyond: Meow Wolf is Expanding into Texas,” Meow Wolf, May 11, 2022, https://meowwolf.com/articles/meow-wolf-new-texas-locations.
  14. Sarah Cascone, “‘The Whole Thing Is an Art Project’: Meow Wolf Cofounders Explain the Grand Plan Behind Their Wildly Popular Immersive Art Universe,” ArtNet News, October 20, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/meow-wolf-interview-2011837.
  15. Bea Mitchell, “The World’s Top 12 Immersive Art Experiences,” Blooloop, June 1, 2022, https://blooloop.com/technology/in-depth/immersive-art-experiences/.
  16. “Release – The Vinik Family Foundation presents The Beach Tampa by Snarkitecture,” Amelie Arena, July 18, 2016, https://www.amaliearena.com/news/detail/release-the-vinik-family-foundation-presents-the-beach-tampa-by-snarkitecture.
  17. Chloe Greenberg, “UK artist Lucy Sparrow’s ‘Tampa Fresh Foods’ felt grocery store is now open in Water Street,” Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, January 21, 2022, https://www.cltampa.com/arts/uk-artist-lucy-sparrows-tampa-fresh-foods-felt-grocery-store-is-now-open-in-water-street-12740616.
  18. “The Music Box: Tampa Bay,” USFCAM, August 9, 2016, https://usfcam.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/the-music-box-tampa-bay/.
  19. Sarah Howard, interview by author, Tampa, April 13, 2022.
  20. Devon Brady, email message, April 11, 2022.
  21. Tracy Midulla, interview by author, Tampa, April 5, 2022.
  22. Fairgrounds St. Pete Marketing team, email message, April 16, 2022.
  23. “Crab Devil Offers Exclusive Teaser of Immersive Art Installation to 2021 Gasparilla Music Festival Attendees,” Crab Devil, September 16, 2021, https://www.crabdevil.com/2021/09/16/crab-devil-offers-exclusive-teaser-of-immersive-art-installation-to-2021-gasparilla-music-festival-attendees/.
  24. “Crab Devil Celebrates Florida’s Exquisite Aquatic Ecosystem with Newest Installation at Gasparilla Festival of the Arts,” Crab Devil, March 3, 2022, https://www.crabdevil.com/2022/03/03/crab-devil-celebrates-floridas-exquisite-aquatic-ecosystem-with-newest-installation-at-gasparilla-festival-of-the-arts/.
  25. David Clowney, “A Third System of the Arts? An Exploration of Some Ideas from Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art: A Cultural History,” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 6 (2008), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.0006.004.

Mise-en-Scène: Two Exhibitions of Photography

Two photography exhibitions currently on view, Tableau and Transformation, and Contemporary Performance, at the Tampa Museum of Art and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts respectively, explore themes of artifice and theatricality in photography since the mid-20th century. Viewed together they harmonize visual trends that came after modernism and that have persisted through the first decades of the 21st century. 

Both exhibitions feature photographs that explicitly or implicitly reference cinema, a perfect art-world counterpoint to summer blockbuster movie season. The term “directorial mode,” coined by photo critic A. D. Coleman in 1977, is the relevant visual framework for many of the works in both exhibitions. Photographs in the directorial mode disrupt the tendency to read a photo as an unmediated truth or a slice of life, injecting instead theatricality and obvious created-ness. 

Photos in the directorial mode are, quite simply, staged (though I cringe at that term because in photography it seems to carry a pejorative note–again because the expectation is that photographs are supposed to be “natural”). In Coleman’s words, “[Photographers] have simply substituted the credence with which photographs are normally approached for the suspension of disbelief which effective theater wins from its audience.”

Tableau and Transformation is a selection of photographs in the Museum’s permanent collection, with several loans from the collection of Tampa’s Trenam Law throughout. The corporate photography collection of Trenam Law is a sister collection of sorts to the TMA thanks to the cross-institutional efforts of William K. Zewadski at Trenam and Julie Saul of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York throughout the 1980s. It reads like a who’s who of photographic and conceptual artists from the 1960s forward, including important artists like Andres Serrano, William Wegman, John Baldessari, and Sandy Skoglund. 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943), Waiting for Dinner, 1988. Dye Diffusion – Polaroid Polacolor II. 34 x 27 ½ inches. Tampa Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W. Lowman by Exchange, 1989.040. © William Wegman 2019

A staged photograph can take many varied forms, which accounts for the visual diversity in Tableau and Transformation. It may literally reference the proscenium stage as Eileen Cowin’s Untitled (The Bathers) (1987) does, with its freeze-frame dramatically posed figures and deep green velvet curtains at stage right and left. Still lives, composites, and portraits can all be staged. There are narratives and nudes, altered polaroids (Lucas Samaras), and straightforward photos of Weimaraners (William Wegman).  Even landscapes that are simply reporting on the scene before the camera, such as the trio of photos by Joel Sternfeld, feel staged, like scouted locations, sets that are awaiting their actors. The sheer diversity of possibility of staged photos, or unstaged photos that feel constructed, leads to an almost infinitely open theme. The TMA has strong holdings in 20th century photography and this is an opportunity to see some of its most important objects in that part of the collection. 

Contemporary Performance at FMoPA features works from world-renowned photographers like Cindy Sherman (also represented in Tableau and Transformation) and Deborah Willis as well as emerging artists who matriculated locally, Becky Flanders and Selina Romàn among them. It is a tactile, sensory exhibition. The photographs within share vibrant color palettes and an insistent focus on the human figure. It, too, is comprised of photographs that are created in the directorial mode, though unlike Tableau and Transformation, it is more narrowly focused on narrative suggested by the actions of the people in the frame. 

The title, Contemporary Performance, will clue some viewers in to what they may expect in the exhibition, though it is a reference that may resonate only with art-world insiders. Guest curator Kalup Linzy is himself an internationally significant multidisciplinary artist (most notably performance, music, and video) who took his MFA at USF in 2003.

Performance in art is different than performance of a play or of a role in a film. In art, the term is laden with decades of layered, often self-referential context and criticism. “Performance” can mean any and all of: a scripted video work; an ephemeral action designed to be experienced once with no connection to the art market (i.e., without an artifact to be later sold); or the photographic or video documentation of an ephemeral action that is intended to be sold. One-time performances from the 1960s and 70s are now commonly being reenacted by a new generation of artists, adding more layers of signification to the work in a new context. It is not uncommon to hear the term used in the context of performing gender, or to perform other aspects of one’s identity, often to open a space for critique of established social norms. In other words, it is a big term with many potential (and potentially conflicting) interpretations.

The type of performance that the work in the exhibition seems to relate to is the materiality of the human body as a mode of expression or recognizable structure for other variables. Based on the images alone, it seems that the presence of the figure is the connective thread. Locating the site of performance in each image, however, is challenging. 

The exhibition provides no contextualization or didactic text beyond the very broad subtitle or description “explores gender, sexuality, class, race, and social identities, and will feature lens based works that convey, elude [sic] to, or concern itself with ideas encompassing performance and role playing.” This has the potential to leave viewers grasping for interpretive threads and possibly not finding them. 

Questions I had as an informed art viewer were: How does each photo relate to the theme? What is the contribution of each artist to the curator’s vision? Maybe most importantly, which images show the artist participating in role play? It is not always obvious, especially if one doesn’t know what the artists look like. The professor in me wanted these terms to be defined as they relate to individual photographs within. Which images were dealing with role-playing and which were dealing with social identities? Or more broadly, which, if any, are tongue-in-cheek and which are meant to provoke serious discussion? It is not always easy to locate these important differences with visual information only. This exhibition, including most of the works at an individual level, would benefit from more contextualization for the viewer. 

The most striking example of the need for context is in relation to the photograph CREMASTER 3: I Die Daily (2002) by Bjork’s ex-husband, Matthew Barney. When a viewer is confronted with the challenging image, they should have some guidance to help them through the ordeal of looking. Barney is a notorious artist who punishes his body in his performances. He is best known for The Cremaster Cycle, a suite of five big-budget feature-length films (a highly unusual format for video/performance art) in which he performs any number of athletic stunts as metaphors for initiation rites. All students of contemporary art know his name and may recognize some of his iconic imagery, such as the red mouthed Apprentice in his pink kilt and headdress, yet far fewer have ever viewed the Cremaster films because they sell for $100,000 per set, are unreleased individually, and are screened rarely, all by the artist’s decree. 

The photograph is disturbing: Barney is in a surgical suite, surrounded by a group of authoritative men wearing aprons that reference those of Freemasons–they all look directly out of the frame at the viewer. His body is partially wrapped in white sheets, his head is covered by a hood with runnels of red coming from the hole cut into the hood, filled by what appears to be a metallic object that must be in his mouth. Barney’s testicles are fitted with an inscrutable white plastic device–is it a surgical tool? The artist’s perineum is at the viewer’s eye-level (possibly referencing the cremaster muscle for which his work is named), and something soft and pink seems to be slithering off the gynecological exam chair and toward the viewer (is it meant to evoke a severed penis, or prolapsed intestines?). I think there are also teeth. 

This image is presented without any didactic text to help situate the viewer in relation to what they are seeing. The decision to forego interpretive didactic text is common in commercial art galleries, where viewers are invited to experience the work and bring their own interpretation. Possibly this was a deliberate choice by Linzy to emulate that experience–it is, however, highly unorthodox in museum practice. 

Those of us versed in contemporary art are hard to shock, but we would all do well to remember that our familiarity with images like this is rarified and reified, as access to Barney’s videos make clear. To introduce an image like this to an unsuspecting public without any interpretive guidance, in my opinion, has the potential to further alienate viewers who already find contemporary art inscrutable.

Selina Romàn, Drowning in a Desert from the “Please Disturb” series, 2016. Archival Inkjet print. 36 x 24 inches. On loan from the artist.

Barney’s work in the exhibition is exceptional both in its difficulty and its obscurity. The majority of the images, even if the relationship to an aspect of performance is not clearly defined, are engrossing in the narratives they suggest. Selina Romàn’s Drowning in a Desert (2016) feels like a still from a much larger story that leaves the viewer wanting to know more. 

Video still from Paula Wilson’s “Salty and Fresh” (2014), Video.

Salty and Fresh (2014) by Paula Wilson is a delightful video that makes the role of artist as performer for her public very clear. In the video Wilson is in a structural dress that elevates her about 10 feet above the sea that she’s standing in. She holds a giant palette and is painting her models’ bodies with a paintbrush several yards long while onlookers picnic on the shore and document the spectacle with their phones. The dress structure renders her unable to move and must continually face the audience and paint her models. If Barney’s Cremaster references the endurance model of being an artist in the public eye, this is a more lighthearted and accessible way to communicate the public persona that artists must perform, tolerate, and embrace.

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.

Tableau and Transformation: Photography from the Permanent Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through Sunday, October 20, 2019. Julie Saul, of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York, was instrumental in developing the Museum’s interest in collecting contemporary photography and will be speaking at a Tampa Collects evening event at the Museum on Tuesday, October 1st.  For information about attending and joining Tampa Collects, please contact Kate Douglass at the Tampa Museum of Art. 

Contemporary Performance remains on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through Saturday, August 31, 2019. There will be a special closing reception on Friday, August 23, 2019 starting at 5:00 pm, with a lecture featuring the exhibition’s curator Kalup Linzy following at 6:00 pm. For additional information about attending the public event, please contact the Museum.

Light Through Her Hands: Patricia Cronin at the Tampa Museum of Art

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
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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.

The Tampa Museum of Art’s Educating Collections

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.