USF – Bay Art Files

@tampabaebae art files

@tampabaebae art files

by James Cartwright

*jenal*, 2019. Acrylic, oil, coffee grounds, enamel, on board, foamular frame, 50 x 50 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jenal Dolson is a nervous flyer even under normal circumstances. Add scrambling to get out of the country during a global pandemic before international borders close and anyone’s stress levels will ascend to new heights. It is Tuesday, March 31^st, and she is leaving the United States and returning home to Canada to shelter with her family as the severity of COVID-19 slowly dawns on U.S. citizens. She sits alone in Tampa International Airport, waiting to board a flight that she never expected to be on and saying goodbye to a place she is not ready to leave behind.

To call the last few weeks of Dolson’s time in Tampa a whirlwind would be an understatement. At this point in March, she is a MFA candidate at the University of South Florida, in the thick of her final semester when the coronavirus hits America. Between transitioning her in-person classes to an online platform (no easy feat for studio art courses), finishing her thesis work, writing about said work, preparing for install, and making travel arrangements, change is the constant. Her graduating class’s MFA exhibition Battin’ A Hundred is canceled, their reception is canceled, their panel discussion moderated by artist Kalup Linzy is canceled. It feels like everything is canceled. However, the artists are undeterred, and they still exhibit their work in the USF Contemporary Art Museum. There is almost a defiant pride in displaying their art knowing that it will not be seen in person.

Dolson spends her precious final hours in Tampa packing for her flight and installing her work in the CAM, with the invaluable assistance of museum staff Vincent Kral, Eric Jonas, and Tony Wong Palms. She recalls visiting the museum for the first time on a 2014 trip to Tampa and sensing then that she would one day show work in this space, a premonition fulfilled these six years later.

*Bump Dream*, 2020. Acrylic, latex, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches.
From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.

*Soother*, 2020. Acrylic, oil, fabric, foamular, on MDF, 50 x 50 inches.
From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.

*Whale*, 2020. Acrylic, oil, foamular, on panel, 50 x 50 inches.
From the MFA thesis exhibition. Image taken by Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez.

Her arrival in Toronto is not met with a warm embrace from Dolson’s parents, who are relieved to see their daughter home safe but still respecting the social distancing rules that now measure our lives. Everyone dons their face masks and Dolson sits in her parents’ backseat on the car ride from the Toronto airport to their family home outside of Cambridge, Ontario, taking these moments to let a wave of quiet calm wash over her and finally exhale. She is deeply grateful to her parents for hosting her, knowing that in doing so they have committed to the country’s mandatory 14 day returning traveler quarantine alongside her.

Dolson uses the next few days to reacclimate to these surroundings, the familiarity of place comforting her during an unfamiliar time. She self-isolates in a section of her family’s basement, with her beloved chihuahua Bam Bam to keep her company and a mini-fridge stocked with snacks to keep her fed, courtesy of mom. That Friday she joins a Zoom reception hosted by CAM for the MFA exhibition, which has a great turnout as many people are eager to see the artists’ work and congratulate them. Dolson later passes the two-week quarantine mark on the same day that she passes her thesis defense, and her reward for this tremendous accomplishment is finally being able to hug her parents.

*Into the Belly*, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 8.75 x 8.75 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

A welcome focus for Dolson’s energy comes in the form of creating a solo exhibition entitled Into the Belly for Tempus Projects, highlighted on the non-profit gallery’s Instagram account. The show, which ran from May 30^th-June 12^th, neatly aligns with the Tampa-based gallery’s approach to the pandemic’s unique challenges. Tempus is utilizing social media to showcase a series of mini-virtual exhibits that feature works on a small, intimate scale. As Tempus Founder and Programming Director Tracy Midulla explains, “We have taken the approach of offering small, short virtual exhibitions. This allows us to keep the quality of the work featured at a high standard, but the format and delivery of the works to a manageable level for everyone as we are distanced from one another.”

Installation view of *Into the Belly* in a section of Dolson’s converted basement space. Image courtesy of the artist.

Into the Belly consists of eight coloured pencil drawings on gessoed board, with each work’s dimensions around 5×6 or 7×8 inches. Dolson’s process is reliant on found materials, so she seamlessly adapts to her new circumstances by repurposing leftovers in her old studio in her parents’ house. Her use of coloured pencils on board allows for textures to come out of the surface itself, some areas pulling through the grain of the wood or underlaying brushwork; paired with a uniform attention to colour blocking and gradient fades. These underlaying patterns resemble countless tiny fissures, which further emphasize the material’s surface while adding layers of complexity to already rich compositions.

*The Days Eye (Edelweiss)*, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 8.75 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

The small scale of each work is in keeping with the gallery’s current theme of miniature exhibitions. Dolson also expresses her interest in scaling down the works to a size that is accessible, where they can be held in your hand and you can take them with you very easily. Although these new images are much smaller than her thesis paintings, she draws several parallels between the two bodies of work. Dolson clarifies that the viewer is still looking at a series of shapes, forms, lines, directions, and pathways, which you can follow around the work finding little areas where something new can be seen.

*Bathhouse*, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 5.8 x 4.8 x 0.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

There is plenty to see in Dolson’s drawings, so much that you might get lost in looking. The artist presents the viewer with a plethora of shapes and motifs to latch onto and alluring pathways through each labyrinth. One might glance at a piece like Bathhouse and seize upon the chain in the lower right of the composition as a good entry point. If you follow this chain directly upwards, it becomes veiled by a light blue rectangular shape that hints of cloth or drapery. If you choose a different approach and start from top to bottom, does the chain then become unveiled? Other areas may suggest something recognizable while leaving you grasping to articulate this familiarity.

Into the Belly is an apt title, as Dolson equates our current COVID-19 reality with entering the belly of the whale or belly of the beast. As levels of infection fluctuate worldwide and we find ourselves months into isolation with no clear end in sight, she muses “it is hard to say if we are on the other side yet, are we still inside of it completely, or can we see the light? There is a lot of emotion in this time that is kind of unpredictable and everyone’s pace of life has changed dramatically. It is not only a metaphor, but it is allegorical of how everyone has been forced into this journey.”

The title also attaches us to the body, to be within a living thing, which she connects to the physical referents that a lot of the shapes and forms take on in her work. The tempest of emotions and anxieties we feel manifest physically in our bodies, and the pandemic makes us hypersensitive to these sensations. We continually self-monitor for the first signs of fever, the slightest cough, and to make sure we have not lost our sense of smell or taste. As Dolson succinctly puts it, “our emotions in our bodies are really in our guts.”

*Insulation (viewfinder)*, 2020. Coloured pencil, watercolour pencil, gesso, on board, 5.8 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Dolson is appreciative of Tempus for giving her a platform to explore new ideas post thesis, amidst the pandemic. She explains that the timing was especially beneficial, as it “really gave me a lot of purpose during the first month and a half that I was back. I was able to come home and put in work drawing 8-10 hours a day and that was absolutely amazing. I think Tempus has a strong sense of what it means to be an art space in that they truly value their artists and look to foster a sense of creativity and programming that makes sense for who they are affiliated with.”

Proceeds from Dolson’s show will go towards helping Tempus fundraise for a paid full-time director position for the gallery. Dolson is also donating a portion of the proceeds from future sales to Black Lives Matter Tampa.

What is next for Jenal Dolson? “Making more work” is her immediate, unflinching answer. Dolson is making a new series of paintings on canvas and she looks forward to waking up each morning and having her studio time. She relishes the daily grind of making work, embodying that true artist-as-hustler mentality, where the balancing act of juggling multiple jobs and projects only energizes her to seek more.

In terms of future exhibitions, Dolson is thrilled to have a solo show this fall at an artist-run space in Benson, Nebraska called The Pet Shop, and she beams when discussing the opportunity. Her close friend Kim Darling, currently a MFA candidate at USF, ran a space at the gallery and helped Dolson make connections in Benson. Dolson also remains in good virtual company through regular studio visits with friends and a gallery in Chicago with which she is enamored. Finally, it has been only days since Dolson moved into an apartment in the port city of Hamilton, Ontario. The industrious city’s “steel town” identity matches her own tenacious work ethic. She is drawn to the city’s strong local arts scene, where she can make her marks on the community. There is also a lovely blend of nature and rich architectural history that she is wasting no time in exploring. Dolson is eager to create her place in this new environment, and everywhere she looks she absorbs new lines, new shapes, new textures, new patterns, and new objects, searching for another source of inspiration around every corner.

Dolson in her Tampa studio with Bam Bam. Image taken by Kim Darling.

Into the Belly ran from May 30-June 12 and it can still be viewed on the Tempus Projects Instagram account. For more information about Jenal Dolson, you can visit her website and Instagram account. You can also learn more about the 2020 MFA exhibition on the USF Contemporary Art Museum website.

James Cartwright earned his M.A. in Art History from USF in 2017. He focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in art production, while occasionally wandering into the realm of contemporary art criticism. He is an adjunct Art History instructor at USF and the University of Tampa, where he uses his liberal arts background to corrupt the impressionable youth of America.

FloodZone – Much is amiss in this paradoxical paradise

By Selina Román

I have a couple versions of a recurring dream. In one, a car I am driving careens off the road into some unknown body of water – sometimes clear, sometimes murky. Sitting in the driver’s seat I become a spectator as water seeps into the car and it slowly sinks away from the world above. In the other version, I’m driving down an old Florida backroad surrounded by swamp. As I turn a corner, the road disappears beneath water that has breached its banks. I recall in this dream that I felt scared but mostly hopeless. In all of my drowning/sinking dreams, I wake up never knowing if I made it or not.

That sinking feeling rushed back as I took in the large-scale photographs in the exhibition FloodZone, by Miami-based artist Anastasia Samoylova on view in the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. The lush images, full of color and water, are akin to walking through a waking dream where the surroundings are familiar but something always feels amiss. Her photographs, just like the intrusive water she depicts, seep into the psyche and linger.

As Samoylova pointed out in a recent artist talk, nowhere in the images will the viewer see the catastrophic. Those fraught scenes are relegated to the news. In her photographs, it’s flooded streets after a typical rainstorm, swollen waterways, construction sites, and mysterious figures navigating a landscape in limbo. However, the most telling images are the ones of details – ones that most people overlook. In these, nature fights back and it just may be winning.

*Courtesy USF Contemporary Art Museum; photo by Don Fuller.*

I lived in Miami for nearly six years in the late 2000s. Cranes punctuated the skyline for projects with names like Quantum, Paramount, Epic and Infinity – names that embodied the human need to go higher, achieve more, get more. I see this quest again in Samoylova’s images of architectural renderings – computer-generated images showing happy couples sharing a romantic moment poolside or the luxe interior of a living room. But look a little longer, past the promise to the reality and see the abandoned construction site, detritus spilling over the sign like weeds. In what seems to be a nod to the developers’ slick signage, these stand-alone images occupy the gallery floor confronting viewers in their own space. It’s here in the intersection of reality and façade, of man versus nature, that Samoylova’s photographs become a poignant harbinger.

Just like the signs for the construction projects, Miami puts on a good face for tourists, especially those that don’t have to leave the beach save for going to and from the airport. I learned this when I was living in Little Haiti in 2005. I had just moved to Miami and was welcomed that year by hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Wilma. That year, the Atlantic was the hottest on record and spawned more than a dozen named storms. While Dennis and Katrina caused damage and power outages in South Florida, Wilma delivered a staggering blow to an already storm-fatigued area. My roommate and I rode out the storm as winds howled. From my apartment window, I watched an electrical transformer explode, in awe of the green flashes of light.

Little Haiti was without power for four weeks, while just across the railroad tracks that line Dixie Highway, lights flickered back on and air conditioners were humming in a matter of days. A coworker bemoaned that she was without power for about 45 minutes – she lived in an area of the beach, near hotels, where the power lines were buried. That year of storms awakened me to the social implications of climate change.

*Installation view; photo by Selina Roman.*

As a Miami Beach resident, Samoylova sees beyond that touristy façade. Some of her most successful images are those of the details that only someone living there would notice. On the side of a concrete overpass pylon, a green plant fights its way out of a crevice while brilliant violet mold flourishes beneath it. Severe lines and geometry dominate the visual plane but the plant and mold triumphantly stand out from the stark environment. It’s repulsive and beautiful in the same breath. In one of her few black and white photographs, a small, proud plant grows near the roof of a building, its roots clinging to the surface like veins and capillaries. Air plants are common in Miami, but there’s something different about this one: the plant’s roots have been painted the same white as the building. In these moments, I find myself hopeful and terrified as nature asserts herself.

Samoylova does not shake her finger at you. She’s not passing judgment. If anything, she collectively takes our heads and turns them, telling us to look closely at these pieces of a puzzle she’s assembled. As singles, they are strong images but together, they become this dull pang in the pit of my stomach – the knowledge of what’s at stake.

In one particular photograph, fourteen eggs occupy a nest tucked between concrete and steel adjacent to an unidentifiable body of water. The carefully composed image of the nest and water is a perfect inverse of each. But this ying-yang, however perfectly arranged in the frame, belies the precarious balance of the natural world against the man-made. The eggs appear protected, but from above they are not. Will they hatch? Or maybe the larger question is will they survive once they hatch? Will we make it? It’s this false sense of security that plagues South Florida.

When looking at her work, I am struck and reminded of Robert Frank’s The Americans. In the 1950s the Swiss-born Frank traversed the country making documentary photos of post-war America. With a keen outsider’s perspective, Frank’s images revealed not a prosperous super power, but a country marred by racism, poverty and injustice. Samoylova, born and raised in Russia and living in Miami since 2016, also has that eye for detail and incongruity. Just like Frank’s, her images show us that there is more to learn if we just look a little longer and a little harder.

In an homage to Miami’s color, Samoylova designed the eye-catching presentation of the exhibition that underscores the thin line we Floridians tread. Angled swathes of bright colors on the wall – sky blue, canary yellow, magenta – serve as a backdrop for the works. The colors are painted on a diagonal and border a deep gray. Standing in the gallery, the sloped lines create a sense of uneasiness and symbolically represent the downhill direction in which we find ourselves. Yet look again and those same lines could be the uptick of hope.

From the Everglades to South Beach, humans have invaded this place, not only altering the landscape but upsetting its delicate ecological balance. Her compositions show the constant battle between man and nature. The brilliance of so many of the images is they’re composed in a way in which it’s difficult to determine who is dominating who. In an image of Miami’s famed Vizcaya mansion, water covers the intricate inlaid marble floor of its elaborate latticed gazebo with Biscayne Bay ominously visible through its arches. The horizon all but disappears under the overcast day, and the bay and the floor are one in the same. The breach is not catastrophic in the moment the photograph was made, but the potential for disaster is made clear.

Several years ago, I sat in Miami’s Legion Park which overlooks Biscayne Bay. The breeze rustled the palms, which stood majestically and stoically against the sparkling blue water. It was nothing special in particular – just Miami on a good day. I snapped a photo, but it’s what I wrote under the image later that still haunts me: “I belong here.” But now I’m not so sure any of us do.

Just the other night that recurring water dream came rushing back. This time I was visiting friends in their beachside condo. As I walked to the balcony, I could see the waves of the rising ocean swirling outside. When I looked down, however, I realized there was no beach below and that the ocean was lapping at the building not far from where I stood. That hopeless feeling also resurfaced. I woke up and my thoughts volleyed to Samoylova who offers us a slice of hope wrapped up in a wake-up call – a black and white photograph of her son, standing in ankle-deep water, surveying flooding in a parking garage. Will we let him and his generation inherit this flooded world?

This quiet, yet powerful and important show reminds us that Florida’s future is at stake as climate change and continued unchecked development wreck havoc. I am also reminded of what sadly could become Miami’s unofficial theme song, “Dear Miami” by Irish singer Róisín Murphy: “With a little style fool ‘em for a while, but you can’t turn back time,” she sings. “Dear Miami, You’re the first to go, disappearing under melting snow…”

Selina Román is a Tampa-based artist and photography professor. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Florida.

FloodZone is on view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa through March 7th. The exhibit was curated by Sarah Howard, organized by USFCAM, and supported in part by an Oolite Arts grant, a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Dr. Allen Root.

Sponge Exchange, in the adjacent Lee and Victor Leavengood Gallery presents artist Hope Ginsburg’s new collaboratively-produced video and sculpture installations reflecting on historic sponge diving and contemporary coral restoration and inspired by explorations of climate crisis impact on coastal ecosystems. The exhibition, also on view through March 7th, was curated by Sarah Howard, organized by USFCAM, and supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Art Works grant, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Dr. Allen Root, and the USFCAM ACE Fund.

Related event:

Gallery Talk with Anastasia Samoylova and Ksenia Nouril, Ph.D. Thursday, February 13, 6 pm, USF Contemporary Art Museum (CAM)

Art Thursday’s gallery talk and reception with artist Anastasia Samoylova and Ksenia Nouril, Ph.D., Jensen Bryan Curator, The Print Center, will contextualize Samoylova’s work within the historical and contemporary role of photography in society. Light refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.

Time+Space+Place

A Look at Tempus Projects’ Residency Program

by Caitlin Albritton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decisions, decisions: the difficult selection process

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

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

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

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

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

The artist’s residency experience: creating lasting bonds

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

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

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

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

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

Community ties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Interview with Christian Viveros-Fauné

Image courtesy of Christian Viveros-Fauné

“My engagement with art has something to do with [its] mystery, a continuous exploration of how it is put together.” Christian Viveros-Fauné

Christian Viveros-Fauné is an internationally respected independent art critic and curator. His appointment as Curator-at-Large to the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) in August of 2018 launched a series of politically and socially engaged exhibitions that have further linked Tampa Bay to current trends in the global art world.

Interview conducted and transcribed by Amanda Poss in May of 2019.

Amanda Poss: I was reading your new book Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, and in the introduction you cite a trip to the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. when you were twelve where you saw four Rothko paintings. You said this experience was something that “energized” you, and that the paintings “lodged themselves deep into [your] memory.” With this as your catalyst into art appreciation as a child, would you also describe your initial steps into the art world as a professional?

Christian Viveros-Fauné: Those were my initial steps as recounted in the introduction, which reads in part as a portrait of the critic as a young man. At some point I figured out that there was this thing that was mysterious to me–and that actually remains mysterious to me, simply because I can’t make [art], I can’t do it. You know there are people who can’t dance and you say “they have two left feet,” well, I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t do either because I have two left hands so to speak, so I write. My engagement with art has something to do with [its] mystery; it’s a continuous exploration of how art is materially put together, how pigment is pushed around cloth, for instance, to make a picture. That has always seemed to be, to me, kind of miraculous.

I had another experience in my early twenties, when I went to live in Europe. I was always a writer, or a writer wannabe…(laughs)…this was definitely during the writer wannabe period… and I figured out that hanging out with artists was a lot more interesting than hanging out with writers. Writers tend to be shut-ins, they spend a lot of time alone. Being a professional writer is a lonely experience, whereas artists have to get out into the world and show their work at least once or twice a year, so art making has always been far more public. Writers, on the other hand, could spend two years, five years, ten years, basically working on the same project…. So, like I said, I found that artists were a lot more interesting to hang out with. Eventually I entered an artist studio, an actual professional artist, someone who got paid for making paintings and exhibiting them, and I remember being floored by the idea that people could push pigment around to make meaning in ways parallel to how I wanted to make meaning with words. That was a real revelation, it has stayed with me, and is a gift that keeps on giving. I find myself continually inspired, surprised, and amazed by individuals who have made a life from making this kind of meaning consistently.

Bosco Sodi, Muro, 2017-2019. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch. — Bosco Sodi, *Muro*, 2017-2019. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.

AP: That brings me nicely to my next point: you have a tremendous CV, with a wide array of experiences and accolades. As someone who has done quite a lot of independent writing and curating, what sort of opportunities/possibilities excite you most about working within USFCAM, which is an institutional but also academic setting?

CVF: That’s a really good question. I’ve long had a career as a writer who moonlights as a curator… meaning, I arrive at an institution and put together a show, but I rarely get to do a second exhibition at the same institution. And that independence comes with significant freedoms, but it also has some drawbacks, right? Not only is working independently unsteady work, but being at an institution longer than single exhibition can mean that you make a bigger impact than just one good show…

AP: One moment, as opposed to a successive series of them.

CVF: Exactly! And that’s really the sort of thing that attracted me to the idea of working at USFCAM. Margaret Miller is largely at fault-slash-deserves the credit for bringing me here. The way she proposed the position was very liberating. For me, ultimately, it was largely about being able to do something at an institution that offered significant freedoms conceptually and curatorially, but that also allows for the opportunity to be able to do a series of exhibitions, with the added bonus that the university is the enveloping organization That is, USFCAM operates in an environment geared towards education, rather than making museum trustees happy.

AP: Which is really different.

CVF: Yes, very different! So, yeah, I think it’s turned out to be a really good fit. There’s also the value of doing things on this campus and in Tampa as opposed to in New York. New York is arguably the center of the art world, it has long been the center of money in the art world. A lot of important art is seen in cities like London and New York, and that is obviously significant on its face… [but] there a lot of cultural phenomena that fail to register in New York because there’s not enough money attached to them, and that’s very unfortunate. Ideas that run contrary to the art market tend to do better elsewhere, they tend to take root in places other than New York. In my book I talk about groundbreaking artists like Rick Lowe. He has given plenty of talks in New York but he has never had a show there, he has never participated in the Whitney Biennial, which is insane, seeing as he’s one of the most influential artists living today. Same thing with Theaster Gates. Social practice in general, which is more than a decade old, has gotten very little play in New York and I think that tells you a lot.

Jorge Tacla, *Señal de abandono 34 (Homs)*, 2018.
USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.

AP: That brings me to my next point. In an interview you did back in 2016 with Brett Wallace for Conversation Project NYC, you were asked: “What should a great show seek to accomplish?” In your response, you mentioned that art should “illustrate [critically] where art/culture is today,” and that you see this happening more in secondary and tertiary cities around the world, as opposed to New York. Do you still feel that way (it sounds like you do), and do you feel that Tampa could be one of these cities?

CVF: I hope so! Let me answer the second part of your question first: I sincerely hope so, and I know my colleagues at USFCAM hope so. We have made inroads and will continue to make inroads in that direction. I’m not sure Tampa has become a secondary or tertiary cultural hub yet, but I do see green shoots suggesting, given a number of crucial synergies, that such a thing could happen. What I like about Tampa currently is that it presents an environment in which ideas can be profiled anew and redefined, which I personally find to be very appealing.

Miki Kratsman, Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016).
USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo by Will Lytch.

AP: Now let’s talk about something a bit broader. What does it mean to you to be a curator?

CVF: I don’t really subscribe to the idea of a curator as an author. That is, I don’t like the situation where the curator supplants the artist as an author. I like to think of the role of the curator as a chief collaborator, someone who helps articulate, who helps put discrete works together, like in a group exhibition. Or, if we’re talking about mounting a solo exhibition, [the curator] helps create the context for the work. Curatorial work is, in part, a function of getting art out of the studio. Many artists work long hours with the doors closed to the outside world. Then the work comes out for exhibitions. In a gallery situation, the dealer, the gallerist, hopefully helps the artist articulate his or her vision. In a museum, it’s the curator who helps in making the symbolic meaning circulate. In those circumstances, the curator functions like an an interlocutor–a chief believer in the work–whom the artist can also talk to and figure out the best cultural angle in which to position his or her art.

(Laughs) That was kind of a wordy and non-specific definition….

AP: That’s perfectly fine! I was curious what it meant to you (specifically), because anyone could cite sort of a textbook definition or current theories but everyone has their own approach.

CVF: Possibly because I am very much a generalist as a writer and curator, I really do think there’s an important aspect of editing and interpreting in curating. At their best, curators act like editors for artists. That’s not to say that the curator is necessarily cutting anything from an artist’s production, but, to continue with the editing metaphor, if you’re putting together a collection of ‘essays’–that is, a collection of artworks–then it’s on the editor/curator to make sure that those artworks play as well together as they possibly can. Whether the ‘editor’ is working with a single artist or a group of artists, it’s his or her obligation to establish a relationship of trust and collaboration wherein the best work comes forward and is represented in the best light possible.

Miki Kratsman, People I Met, 2010–2018 (installation view), USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch. — Miki Kratsman, *People I Met*, 2010–2018 (installation view).
USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.

AP: Now I want to go back to something more specific: since you’ve come to Tampa, you started with curating Miki Craftsman: People I met (August – December 2018) and then The Visible Turn: Contemporary Artists Confront Political Invisibility (January – March 2019). What sort of overall trajectory or goal are you setting for yourself as Curator-at-Large at USFCAM?

CVF: Let’s see. Both of those exhibitions you just mentioned can be described, in broad strokes, as highly political, to nod definitively towards issues of social engagement. But what we have on tap for the future, well, some exhibitions are more political than others. Work with a social or political bent has always been my interest, but I don’t want to present those kind of shows exclusively. I think that would make for far too uniform an exhibition program, both for the museum and myself as a curator, so there are other things on tap, [which] I’d rather not discuss right this minute… (Laughs)

AP: No hints? (Laughs)

CVF: I don’t necessarily want to give away the the shows that are coming in 2020 or 2021, but what I can tell you is that it will involve an eclectic group of exhibitions. There are going to be several that are a lot more about eye candy [as opposed to] the two shows I’ve done to-date, and even the exhibitions that are heavy on the eye candy will have a significant social component to them. I can say [something] about the next exhibition, which is called The Return of the Real. It’s a two-person show that riffs, or cheekily appropriates, the title from Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real. We’re definitely not using the title in a way that he’d like. (Laughs)

[The exhibition includes] the work of Robert Lazzarini, he makes amazing sculptures that are distorted anamorphically, and another artist who is a generation younger, Rodrigo Valenzuela. Rodrigo is a faculty member at UCLA, [and] a photographer… he’s had about five shows in West Coast museums in the last three years, so he’s well-known out there but not so much on the East Coast. We’re interested in bringing in him [to Tampa] and in being the first institution on the East Coast to showcase his work. Both of these artists are differently committed to amazing acts of re-representation. In both cases, their artworks involve visually stunning, conceptually complex work.

Tavares Strachan, *130,000 Years*, 2018. USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.

AP: Let’s talk more about your book, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art. What were you looking for when selecting 50 exemplar works of political art from last 200 years?

CVF: To be honest with you, and I say this every time I present the book, the selection is pseudo-authoritative and very subjective. I write in the introduction to the book that the volume contains 50 essays on what I consider to be the 50 greatest works of political art. Those 50 artworks will invariably be different from another critic’s 50 great works. We might overlap on 10 or 20 artworks, or at least I would hope so.

What these artworks have in common is that they’re all important in the sense that they have all transformed the notion of what people think about when they think about political art. They’ve all put down a marker, they’ve all expanded the definition of both art and politics. Some of these artworks have done so closer to their date of creation, others have not. I start with [Francisco] Goya’s Disasters of War, which was published posthumously, 35 years after his death. He was way too smart to publish those prints in his lifetime because he would have been nailed to the wall by the Spanish monarchy, and if not by the monarchy, then by the Inquisition. But he still made them… and it took more than a decade to put the plates together. So, you have to ask yourself: why would an artist of his stature, late in life, labor so long to put together those 82 plates? [Goya] is basically taking it all in, he’s considering the war, the state of things, the application of reason to human events, weighing how humans respond to social and economic pressure, and ultimately, what happens to society when things fall apart. And what he witnessed is in those prints. I mean, he wasn’t sitting there taking photographs of the war… but somehow or other, through his own observations and other people’s accounts, Goya arrived at the first modern visual record of war and its human cost: what the poet Robert Burns referred to as ”man’s inhumanity to man.”

AP: Some would say even that all art is political, and you address that question in your introduction, but of course you also had to narrow it down to 50 artworks for the book. What do you wish you could have added in?

CVF: I wish I could have added in another fifty artworks. The initial idea was that the book would include a hundred works of political art. I was told by my publisher that they loved the idea of the book, but that we had to slim it down because reproduction rights are just too expensive… (Laughs) Even the reproduction rights on this little book are crazy, so a hundred wasn’t happening, but, yeah, I wish there were specific works that I could have gotten in there, some of them by contemporary artists whom I admire very much…

For example, I wanted to include a major work by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. The group ran a free University, BHQFU, for a whole decade. The collective hasn’t disappeared but it has sort of gone underground. That university was very important. It’s only been a year since it was closed, but it was amazing as a social experiment. The Bruces helped shape an entire generation of artists in what is otherwise a very jaded city. There are many others artworks–contemporary, modern, precursors to the modern–that I would have loved to include and simply could not. Richard Mosse, for example: I would have loved to have included images from his Heat Maps series, which are recent photographs that document the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East using a military-grade infrared camera that is so sophisticated, it is actually considered a weapon of war.

AP: So what excites or intrigues you most about art right now?

CVF: Its possibilities. The fact that [art], today and in every age, actually gets to reimagine what’s possible. I think that’s really what always amazes me [most] about art. It’s got nothing to do with the actual politics of it, whether I might agree with them or not. It has everything to do with the power of the artist to make something amazing from somebody else’s idea of garbage, to turn the seemingly useless into something that has a renewed purpose…. I mean, that basic gesture is just revolutionary, it’s super radical. I find that kind of surprise, that kind of retooling, to be something that only art can do. There’s something special about art’s lack of use value, its seeming uselessness. At its best and most ambitious that uselessness harbors the potential to create laboratory-like insight… the fact that artists can reimagine worlds is immensely powerful.

Karolina Sobecka, *A memory, an ideal, a proposition*, 2017.
USF Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Will Lytch.

AP: One last question. Can art change the world?

CVF: I think that it can, in small and big ways… it’s not [literally] liberty leading the people, and likely never will be, but art does provide, like [the painting] Liberty Leading the People [by Eugène Delacroix], a rallying point for ideas, and we are a very image driven species. Art can change the world, it has done so in the past–I can count at least 50 instances in which it has–and will continue to do so in the future.

The Return of the Real: Robert Lazzarini and Rodrigo Valenzuela
opens at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa on August 26th and runs through December 7, 2019. The exhibition is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, and organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum.

Artist’s Conversation and Exhibition Reception
Friday, September 6, 6-9 pm
Conversation in the galleries with artists Robert Lazzarini and Robert Valenzuela, and USFCAM Curator-at-lare Christian Viveros-Fauné.
The exhibit reception follows from 7-9pm.
Free and open to the public.

For additional information about a symposium, curator’s talk, spoken word and open mic events, and concerts in the gallery throughout the run of the exhibit, visit the USF Contemporary Art Museum’s website.

Amanda Poss received her MA in Art History from the University of South Florida in 2015 specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art, and a BA from the University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, Indiana in 2011. Poss currently holds the position of Gallery Director at Gallery221@Hillsborough Community College, Dale Mabry campus, where she also oversees a growing permanent art collection. She is the former Gallery Director at Blake High School, where she organized and curated exhibits from 2015–2017. Poss also has also held positions at the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa as a Gallery Assistant, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tampa, and Adjunct Professor at Hillsborough Community College.