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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

PARADISE | PARADISE – Layered

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Blackfish, Fisheye, Blackened, 2024.

PARADISE | PARADISE – Layered

St. Petersburg Month of Photography and the inaugural Photo Laureate Thomas Sayers Ellis

By Clara ten Berge

Thinking about living in Florida, the lyrics “this could be heaven or this could be hell” comes to mind. The white sandy beaches, the refreshing springs with their captivating flora and fauna, and the rich cultural landscape (as evidenced by this very website), along with the agreeably mild winters, make it a paradise you wouldn’t want to leave.

Yet, when mid-May arrives, the heat slaps you in the face and hurricane season begins, a layer is peeled back to reveal one of Florida’s many other sides. Peel back another layer, and you uncover complicated politics, homelessness, a terrible housing market, raging late-stage capitalism, and more. Florida is a many-headed beast; while it can be paradise for some, it could be hell for others.

Thomas Sayers Ellis, the inaugural Photo Laureate of the Saint Petersburg Month of Photography (SPMOP), has spent a year walking the streets and unveiling the many stories of Tampa Bay, capturing everything from the blissful and joyful to the mundane, the painful, and the terrible.

Thomas Sayers Ellis, *The Critical And Response of Woke Maintenance*, 2024

Thomas Sayers Ellis, *The Coke Bomber*, 2024.

With his images, he creates narratives that go beyond street photography. They are seductive, they will lure you into paradise. They are confrontational, they will show you the fringes that make up your paradise. His images are layered, both in the literal as in figurative sense. They show a different dimension in paradise, a dimension that is made up of advertising, marketing and image building of what paradise should be. But at the same time, this paradise is a construct that is only available for the happy few.
— Marieke van der Krabben, Executive Director, SPMOP
(excerpt from “‘In the Hall of Mirrors, Nothing Is as It Seems,”
foreword to Paradise ǀ Paradise -Layered)

Saint Petersburg Month of Photography

SPMOP, a non-profit founded by photography historian and curator Marieke van der Krabben and photographer Águeda Sanfiz, celebrates local Tampa Bay photography in every way possible. During the month of May, SPMOP organizes exhibitions and events, collaborating with local artists and venues such as the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, and the Morean Arts Center, Five Deuces Galleria, and the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg.

Every year the organization will choose a Photo Laureate, who will have the honor of documenting life in Tampa Bay for a year. In May of 2023, SPMOP announced its first Photo Laureate: Thomas Sayers Ellis. From over 35 artists, SPMOP selected five nominees whose work was exhibited at the Morean Arts Center in Saint Petersburg in May of that year. The jury was captivated by Thomas’s poignant photos that immediately grabbed the viewer’s attention. Each photograph told a unique story and invited dialogue. The panel was convinced Thomas would be able to highlight the many stories of Tampa Bay in new and exciting ways.

It is inspiring to see an artist like Thomas in action. His dedication and enthusiasm are infectious. He is open, polite and friendly when photographing people on the streets. Since he moved to Saint Petersburg in 2016, he is not yet used to the Florida heat, but his urge to document the streets and the people overcomes this obstacle.

Now, at the end of his tenure, Thomas Sayers Ellis receives a solo exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA). Opening on June 18th, the exhibition will showcase this year-long project. Using a mixture of black-and-white and color photography, digital as well as film, and accidental double exposures, Thomas has assembled an eclectic collection of images that constructs a multi-layered account of his year as SPMOP’s first Photo Laureate. An accompanying photo book with an extended collection of Thomas’s photographs and poems is currently in the making by SPMOP Executive Director Marieke van der Krabben.

Florida Museum of Photographic Arts

FMoPA’s move to Ybor City has been a game changer. The beloved Photography Museum struggled at its previous downtown Tampa location, surrounded by corporate offices and at an inconveniently high level to attract foot traffic. Since relocating to 7th Avenue, the museum enjoys the warm embrace of the vibrant arts community around it. Residing on the first floor of the historic 1928 Kress Building, the museum is part of Kress Contemporary. Kress Contemporary is the home of many art galleries, art studios and visual and performing arts organizations such as GRATUS, Tempus Projects, Screen Door Microcinema and the Tampa City Ballet. Often on Thursdays, the museum hosts events coinciding with the art initiatives above it, feasting art lovers with double the celebrations.

What sets FMoPA apart is its combination of internationally and nationally renowned artist exhibitions, its celebration of emerging local artists, and its many community programs. This Spring they organized the phenomenal exhibition Joel Meyerowitz: Confluence, 1964-1984 and in July they will open Photo Ybor, about the history of Ybor City. Programs such as Prodigy: Storytelling through Photography and the annual Member’s Show, demonstrate FMoPA’s commitment to their community. Not all museums offer their members and community a venue to exhibit their art, which makes stepping into a place like a gallery or museum more accessible. This layered approach in exhibitions and offerings is evidently working well; they have seen an influx of visitors since they officially reopened at the new location in September 2023. All in all, FMoPA is a worthy exhibition venue for SPMOP’s Photo Laureate.

Thomas Sayers Ellis, *Our Lady of Lines and Lanes*, 2023

Poetry and Photography

Ellis is not only a photographer but also a published poet and a bandleader. Since the beginning of his Photo Laureate journey, he has treated the community to bi-weekly photographic updates accompanied by his free-flowing poetry. Even more powerful when spoken out loud, they highlight Thomas´ creativity and provide a glimpse into his intriguing musings.

Combining two art forms can make it greater than the sum of its parts. For this reason, poetry and photography are a match made in heaven! This past May, Keep St. Pete Lit! held a Poetry Open Mic at St. Petersburg’s Studio@620, featuring a special photography edition of their poetry open mic to celebrate the month of photography. Local talent from all stages of life brought photographs that are dear to them and shared their poems, prose and spoken word. It was beautiful to see and experience people at their most vulnerable, sharing their most inner thoughts, all cheered on by a very respectful and supportive audience. Keep St. Pete Lit! plans to invite Thomas Sayers Ellis as a featured speaker in the near future.

Thomas Sayers Ellis, *The All-Star Cage Jump Wrestler*, 2023

Also this past May, SPMOP presented an exhibition titled Photo Laureate 2024: the Nominees at the Morean Arts center which featured the work of the following five local artists: Christa Joyner Moody, David Moreno, Jose Ramirez, Marian Tagliarino and Ric Savid. From this impressive grouping, the torch of Photo Laureate was passed on to Ric Savid, an amazingly skilled artist who shoots mostly in film and specializes in portrait photography.

We can all look forward to next year’s St. Petersburg Month of Photography celebration and a future public exhibition of Photo Laureate Ric Savid’s unique and exciting exploration.

About the author

Originally from the Netherlands, author Clara ten Berge has been living in Tampa for 2.5 years with her husband. In the Netherlands (Amsterdam), she worked at several museums. She has volunteered at FMoPA for a year, and is currently volunteering for SPMOP as Creative Director.

A special thank you goes out to the Gobioff Foundation for sponsoring the exhibition and to St. Petersburg Month of Photography’s entire team.

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.

In Good Company

In Good Company: Strength of Character at Creative Pinellas
by Jessica Todd

In her latest exhibition, Strength of Character at Creative Pinellas, curator Katherine Gibson welcomes the viewer into the gallery with warm familiarity. Oak seats and fruit chandeliers allude to home. Rich colors, natural materials, and hints of domesticity soften the formality of the impressively grand galleries of Creative Pinellas. There’s even a scent of cedar in the air.

The Art world is still shedding the restrictive boundaries between “Fine Art” and Crafts and Design. The Western Art canon has long excluded work due to medium, process, functionality, and proximity to the domestic. While oil painting and marble sculpture dominate the collections of major institutions and the pages of Art History books, a wealth of works in traditional Crafts media such as ceramics, wood, glass, fine metal, fibers, and paper have been largely ignored.

This exclusion is not due to a lack of artistic merit. Rather, it is deeply rooted in classism, racism, and sexism. Availability of materials, differing cultural applications of art objects, and restricted access to education and patronage led to different kinds of artmaking throughout history. To assert the dominance of the upper-class Western European male, the materials and functionality associated with the art of socially repressed groups were deemed inferior. And the tradition lives on.

Today, we see artists and curators challenging this bias. Audiences’ enthusiasm for Crafts media, Design, and functional work continues to push it into the mainstream. We see materials, processes, and forms we’re accustomed to living with in our homes now in gallery and museum spaces. This familiarity offers an entry point to the viewer. It democratizes Western art in a revolutionary way.

Gibson’s curatorial work is, in this sense, revolutionary. She integrates Crafts media with painting and sculpture, functional with conceptual work, and self-trained with academically trained artists. She integrates these works into the gallery seamlessly. Most importantly, her exhibitions are not “about” Art hierarchies. They’re about placing thoughtfully made artworks in a space and allowing them to converse with each other and with the viewer.

Strength of Character beautifully iterates this concept. We see the abstract paintings of Edgar Sanchez Cumbas next to the carved wooden furniture of David and Kathleen Bly alongside the sculptural installations of Kendra Frorup, which integrate printmaking, casting, and metalwork. Chandeliers converse with stretched canvas. Stools talk to framed paintings.

The harmony of the work in the gallery is a reflection of the collaborative installation process. The curator, artists, and Creative Pinellas staff came together to design an exhibition that is both cohesive and unexpected. Gibson isn’t afraid to ask the viewer to look upward or downward – “gallery height” is merely a suggestion. She’s a master of balancing scale in improbable ways: the Blys’ four petit Live Oak sculptures hold their own resting on the ground catty-cornered to Frorup’s wall-sized installation and substantial Sugar Apple Chandelier.

Each artist also contributed their unique perspective to the installation process: Frorup’s talent for collaging objects, Sanchez Cumbas’s eye for color and form, and the Blys’ engagement with architecture. Freddie Hughes (Gallery and Facilities Engagement Manager for Creative Pinellas) was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to life with his extensive installation knowledge and technical support. Serendipitous moments, like finding an old fence post outside to anchor Sanchez Cumbas’s Brush, or Frorup upending a utility cart from her studio to hold Banana Chandelier, reflect an openness to experimentation and play.

Though diverse in their media, the works in Strength of Character are united visually. Warm, rich earthy tones dominate the palette with intermittent pops of teal and quiet moments of textured white. Voluminous abstract shapes uncovered in the natural wood patterns of the Blys’ Live Oak series mirror Sanchez Cumbas’s explorations of human form in his Skinless series. Frenetic feather-like shapes in Sanchez Cumbas’s Compression Series and Reduction in Volumes are reflected in the crisscrossing screen- printed palm fronds of Frorup’s untitled installation. After seeing the symmetrical wood-turned bumps of the Blys’ work, Frorup responded with similarly shaped spun metal hardware to hang her Sugar Apple Chandelier.

Conceptually, all of the artists in the exhibition start with process. Frorup’s practice begins with collecting objects. She then problem solves through active making. Frorup engages in a range of art-making processes – from casting to papermaking to screenprinting – to arrive at her installations and sculptures. Her high regard for process is evident in her untitled installation featuring used screen-printing screens. The fruits that appear in Frorup’s work are an homage to her Bahamian roots and her mother’s farm that she grew up working on. Much like the artwork, the fruits are the sweet end result of a long cultivation process.

The Blys’ work is similarly driven by collected materials – reclaimed trees from Tampa’s urban neighborhoods. Their sculptures are a collaboration with the tree that bore the wood, which evolves throughout the making process. The tree tells them where to carve and when to stop. They work the wood while it’s still green, rather than fully dried, so that after their intervention the wood continues to bend, move, and crack. The resulting sculptures, many of which function as furniture, act as monuments to the downed tree from which they were sourced.

Sanchez Cumbas responds to the world around him through the cathartic process of painting. His kinetic brushstrokes in Compression Series and Reduction in Volumes reflect the turbulent war in Afghanistan and politics of 2010, when they were made (he notes, still relevant today). These works mark a turn from his figurative paintings, the last of which is Brush, also in the exhibition, a nod to the Buddha and his own Buddhist practice, a piece that is notably calmer and more grounded. The much more restrained works in the Skinless series sensitively explore bodies and skin, and issues around skin tone in the Latinx community. Each piece is a visual reflection of the emotion with which it was created.

It’s evident when speaking with Gibson and the artists of Strength of Character that they all share an immense respect for each other’s practices. The joyful spirit with which they engaged in this collaborative project is palpable in the gallery, and reflected in the enthusiasm of Creative Pinellas’s passionate staff. Head to Largo and make yourself at home in this beautiful exhibition, up through April 28, 2024.

A special thanks to the Gobioff Foundation for supporting this exhibition through their Microgrant program.

Creative Pinellas is Pinellas County’s non-profit local arts agency providing funding and support to artists while connecting businesses, tourism and the public with the arts community.

Jessica Todd is a curator, writer, and artist based in Tampa, Florida. She is passionate about building the creative infrastructures that support artists, and studying and addressing issues of equity, access, and inclusion in the arts. In October 2022, Jessica opened Parachute Gallery in Ybor City, first serving as an exhibition space for national artists and later a retail gallery representing local artists. Parachute Gallery currently operates remotely through online resources and off-site programming. Jessica has worked with a number of arts organizations since moving to Tampa in 2020, including Tempus Projects, Artspace Tampa Initiative, Crab Devil, and the Morean Arts Center. For six years, prior to moving to Tampa, she was the Residency Manager for the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. Jessica holds an MFA in Jewelry/Metals/Enameling from Kent State University, a BA in Art from Penn State University, and a Diploma of Hispanic Studies from the University of Barcelona.

Photography credit: Jessica Todd

Fee-Fi-Faux-Pfaff

Fee-Fi-Faux-Pfaff by Jonathan Talit

Any museum exhibition that even hints at celebrating debauchery is welcome in my book. At the time of this writing, American culture has sustained a “No-Fun Zone” mentality for at least a decade. I’m not naïve enough to expect outright fun in any museum, but there’s no reason exhibitions can’t be titillating, even sleazy. Museums themselves, however, seem dead set on convincing the public of how fun and carefree they are through a glut of programming like Teens’ Night, yoga classes, dance performances, and concerts. These programs are often hosted directly inside, and thus interrupt, the galleries. Designed to give the impression of “accessibility,” these programs can’t disguise the reality that museums are perpetually stern institutions. Museums are largely about propriety. I accept that – I’m an adult.

There is no horror quite like organized fun. Admittedly, my thirst for anything remotely stimulating has sometimes led me to initially qualify things as good in the negative: this TV show wasn’t as preachy as it could’ve been, that movie wasn’t as predictable as most movies lately, etc. When I heard that Judy Pfaff had an exhibition in Florida, about Florida, I had every reason to be primed to enjoy it.

It turns out Pfaff has a history with Florida; in particular: Sarasota. Known primarily for her engulfing multimedia installations, Judy Pfaff has worked as a prominent visual artist for over fifty years. In 1981, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art. Just over a decade ago, she was invited back to Sarasota by the educational program ARTmuse. This program was created by the Sarasota Art Museum’s founders as an embryonic platform for what would ultimately become the brick-and-mortar museum itself. Things have come full circle as Pfaff has an exhibition up at the Sarasota Art Museum titled Picking Up the Pieces.

The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains the most vibrant work and the least like installation. While they have oblong shapes, flex in multiple directions, and even reach out towards the viewer, each artwork is discernably contained. It isn’t that hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. “My mind is wired as a painter,” Pfaff admits, and that primary sensibility is on display here.

Multiple panels line the wall of various shapes and sizes. They all appear to be made of acrylic. Some are intrinsically pigmented, others superficially by staining the surface with resin. Most of these panels have “limbs” that extend outward, complicating their initial flatness. These extensions are mostly welded steel lines that blossom into other forms: more panels, crescent shapes for leaves, tubes of neon twisting jaggedly. The long arm of Alexander Calder can’t be ignored. Flashes of Frank Stella blink within these works, too. Specifically, Stella’s wall sculptures that seem equally inspired by fluorescent lighting, the Art Deco revival of the 1980s, and cocaine.

Regardless of how saturated and active these panels are, they all maintain a degree of translucency. Some light can pass through, some sections disguise themselves against the supporting wall, some areas let you see yourself looking at them. Moments like these are reminders that the materials here aren’t actually moving, aren’t really fluid, aren’t truly alive, but are entirely fake.

In fact, Pfaff’s work relishes in all things fake. This is a key point that isn’t directly addressed in the supporting text. There’s no question that, “Pfaff’s impressions of Florida’s sun-soaked, life-affirming landscape, fecund nature, and leisurely rhythm of life,” are presented. There are “…a plethora of readymade faux flowers, fruits, and vegetables…and three-dimensional elements that resemble flora and foliage,” all over these galleries. However, that’s only half right. There should be more emphasis on the word “faux,” as I see Pfaff’s work as a celebration of Florida’s evident natural life and obvious affinity for the artificial. That is Florida’s power: the cheap but seamless harmony of the natural and the synthetic worlds; a shotgun wedding between the Jurassic and the plastic.

This unorthodox synthesis is evident in this room’s only free-standing sculptures. In the center, a long table extends diagonally across the gallery next to a lawn chair. Or, it used to be a lawn chair. The tight network of warp and weft has become just the slightest bit molten, the littlest bit loose. Now, the plastic strings are frozen in limbo: a permanent refractory period. The table itself is smeared with detritus. Before the viewer lies an opulent spread of fake deserts, plastic bags, half-drunk cocktails, fabric flowers, and neon lights, all entombed in goo. Neon is a sharp analogy to Florida, as neon is a natural element but registers as otherworldly and disposable: hypnotic garbage.

As fun as these works are, they are often too literal. Fake fruits and fake flowers are used to represent…Florida’s real fruits and real flowers? That’s a bit too on the nose for me. Other works, like the two-panel pieces on the righthand wall, entertain more subtlety. The first, measuring at about 3’ x 3’, is an orange panel erupting into circular steel shapes. Lacing those shapes are small lights that blink in a gentle rhythm akin to Christmas lights. This all reads like flowers and bees without literally being those things. It’s also one of the pieces with the darkest color palettes: could those lights be little stars? The piece is backlit with surreal blue and green lights that recall a gas station at night. The panel piece to its right is a larger rug with a multicolored neon light zipping through it like a waterslide.

With all this activity, one almost misses the rug-turned-tablecloth that flows off the table at almost completely ninety- degrees. Itself covered in resin, it looks like roadkill in the final stages of rigor mortis, or a stray sock in a teenage boy’s room. One can hear the sound it would make if it fell on the floor. Across the gallery, another rug undulates like a tongue as it belches a small meal of plastic margarita glasses.

All these are richer strategies than “cocktail glasses to represent cocktail glasses.” Still, the work encapsulates Pfaff’s acute sense of the fun, futureless frivolity of Florida. This state is the perpetual butt of cheap jokes and single-minded analyses: heralded as a bastion of freedom and family values, derided from afar as “America’s dick,” or grimly presented as the canary in the coal mine of right-wing fascism and censorship that’s ready at a moment’s notice to leap onto the country writ large.

Florida is much richer and dumber than all that. It’s a place of off-season carnivals, dinosaurs past their prime, strip malls, strip clubs, loose morals, endless lawsuits, lush landscape, low taxes, low education, violent storms, finger foods, and the brisk exchange of fluids. The weather is nice, and the people are mean. It values transience and expedience: cheap thrills year-round. Obviously, this means no community, no history and no future, and absolutely no real obligations. That’s not exactly a role model. But what history matters in a place so relentlessly present? What future could ever happen in a state that is designed with no attention span? That has one season? Whose main business is tourism: strangers leaving just as quickly as they came? Pfaff astutely and lovingly distills Florida’s Multiple Personality Disorder into more digestible forms without reducing its amusement and frustration.

One gleans quite a different reading from the exhibition documents and the title itself, Picking Up the Pieces. Both the title of the exhibit and the title of a large-scale installation in the second room, refer to Hurricane Ian. According to the museum text, Picking Up the Pieces is inspired by, “Hurricane Ian’s devastating impact on southwestern Florida in September 2022.” The text continues to correctly describe Hurricane Ian’s “bewildering chaos and tumult” and the “indelible mark” it left in its “aftermath.” Some of this aftermath is presented in a video projection that accompanies the installation. Pfaff herself bore witness to Ian’s “destructive power” at Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island.

Words like these are apt descriptions of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian. What’s less apt is the implied equivalence between the somber memories of Hurricane Ian and the experience of Pfaff’s work here. Yes, twisted metal, pools of plastic, flying panels, and shorn fabric abound. Random objects from drinking glasses, neon lights, seashells, and honeycomb cardboard stock are married by the stirring forces of wind and flood. Natural disasters make their own mixed media installations out of our lives. Pfaff communicates that point well enough.

The issue is that Pfaff’s work just isn’t that sad. She may have felt sadness seeing what Hurricane Ian left behind – who wouldn’t? – but that’s her business. Sorrow is not evident in these galleries. But the supporting text and the dismal documentary-style of the video imply a mournful experience that just isn’t there, and a degree of chaos when the work is usually quite prim, for better or worse.

That said, the second room is notably more muted in color. Starburst candy colors are out, and the paler shades of taupe, beige, and grey are in. Largely, this is the result of a material swap: cardboard, polyurethane foam, concrete slabs, aged wood, and a monochromatic video dominate this room. There are still colored acrylic panels and neon lights, but they’re accents against a quieter backdrop. Speaking of backdrops, the room’s architecture lends to this new atmosphere. Instead of having the titanium white gallery walls of the first room, the second room exposes the weathered bricks of the original building, a former high school. These bricks, in their smeared glory, contribute heavily to the industrial, nautical feeling of the gallery. Dimmed lights allow viewers to see the video projection, obviously, but also induce a hush.

The centerpiece is a large installation of steel pipes, stone, colored panels, LED light strips, and sailboats suspended mid-air. They don’t move, but you can. Viewers can walk through this space, around these objects and their various harnessing apparatuses, to get the simulated, safer, lower-resolution experience that they’re in the eye of the hurricane. A single skylight window beams down soft, natural light roughly in the installation’s center. The power cords of the LED strips, the unnatural light in the room, are disguised, hilariously, by flooring tape with a “wood floor” image on their backside. Some large strips of that same tape are slapped against the gallery walls where their camouflage does them less good.

Again, where’s the doom and gloom? Viewers are impressed by this installation, not depressed. “How did they get these pieces in here?” “How do they all stay still?” “Who could think of this?” “Why is this so fun?” These are a few of the questions I overheard other visitors compelled to ask out loud. Some visitors preoccupied themselves with the logistics of how it was assembled, a common and distracting Achielle’s heel of most installation art. Many people, however, easily let go of those questions and drifted off into the museum VR-experience of matter swirling around them. My personal favorite of these Twister floating objects are the sunflowers and their towering stalks sealed in intergalactic platinum paint.

Well, if you don’t find sadness in this exhibit yourself, it’ll be handed to you. Opposite the installation is a large wall with a projected video. This video documents various sites of the destruction of Hurricane Ian from the vantage point of a car window. Collapsed buildings, enormous boats slammed into one another, long stretches of land filled with scrap: all presented in black and white, in case you didn’t register how solemn this is supposed to be. This is a flimsy juxtaposition to the vibrance and Fantasia-style animation of dead objects in the rest of the gallery. It’s a needless bummer. Presumably, the viewer is supposed to interpret this pairing as evidence of the exhibition’s sophisticated duality: holding the vividness and pleasure of the natural world with its hazardous potential for carnage. How mature.

This just belies Pfaff’s organic interests and the obvious effects of her work. It’s just as useless to insist on even a shred of this exhibit being mournful as it is to insist on Goya being happy-go-lucky. Quieter, yes. In fact, the artwork lining the walls surrounding the installation are some of the best works by Judy Pfaff that I’ve ever seen. On the left, two enormous wall pieces comingle cardboard, foam, and metal until they look like mutated hornet’s nests. When you get closer, the layering of colors, adjustments from gloss to matte, and degrees of opacity are so rich that they deserve the same reverent vocabulary used to describe oil painting. The porous cardboard stock rhymes nicely with the aforementioned sunflowers.

On the back wall, a horizontal steel frame acts as the skeleton for a billowing mass of plastic. It reads almost like a color spectrum, beginning on the left with some green and deep blues, transforming into violet and red, and then evaporating into translucency. A select amount of LED and neon lights breathe the most tender amount of life into this rubble. Beneath the circulating web of plastic neurons is the cortex: a multicolored disco ball. Despite the mass of material blocking out much of its already faint light, it spins faithfully: beaming out whatever signal it can.

The wall closest to the video projection holds a similar sculpture. This time, there’s no color: just steel, a white LED light, and translucent plastic. No disco ball, either. Unlike its sister sculpture, this one appears devoid of life. Backlit by the sterile white LED light, it suspends like a ghost waiting to cross over. Or maybe that’s pessimistic: what if its blankness isn’t the end of life, but the beginning, like a stem cell?

Underneath that is a large display of objects not dissimilar from the sordid table in the first room. This piece is more securely (i.e. more conservatively) positioned near a wall against which a large LED light projects. It appears to be a slab of concrete coated with foam tinted in various shades of blue, resin, seashells, plants, and dilapidated pottery. Both the seashells and the plastic twinkle as one walks by. Small orifices gape while masses of urethane foam crest and rock, all giving the appearance of a seafloor caught in the moment where the current stops just before shifting directions.

In my mind, these artworks display the most technical acumen and emotional resonance of the work on view. That said, their resonance is not that potent. If there’s any sadness in this exhibition, it’s the realization that the work isn’t as loose or audacious as their initial jolt suggests. After the sugar rush comes the crash. Granted, it’s not a major crash, there’s interesting and fun artwork here, but there is a noticeable dip in enthusiasm once one takes a second lap through the galleries.

While Pfaff’s piquant visual interests are obvious, so is her ultimate conventionalism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the brashness of the work ques the viewer up for an experience that is, frankly, rather innocuous. Just as exotic sea life and reptiles flaunt vibrant colors and dizzying patterns to signal danger, I wish these works had more of the venom I felt they promised me. Alas, I left the gallery not sucking out the symbolic poison or asking a loved one to urinate on my metaphorical jellyfish sting.

Picking Up the Pieces has the distinct feeling of butterflies in one’s stomach as they get ready for a party – the imagined possibilities of laughter, music, dancing, getting buzzed, getting laid, blowing off steam. Then, they get to the party and it’s just a little smaller, just a little quieter, the lights a little too bright, the decor a little too neat, the conversations a little stiff, the people a little more sober than one had hoped, the specter of etiquette hiding just behind the door.

The exhibition Judy Pfaff: Picking Up the Pieces is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, through Sunday, March 24, 2024.

Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in Orlando. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.

Let’s all go to the movies

Tampa Bay’s microcinema scene

By Keven Renken

For many of us, going to the movies has become an inherent part of our DNA.

Mason City’s 500-seat Art Deco-era theater, The Arlee, opened on S. Main Street in 1936.

I know for me personally, my experiences with attending motion pictures has pretty much gone hand in hand with the evolution of how, and where, we watch them. I may have been four when I first experienced going to a movie theater to see a film. At least this was the first one I could remember. It was the Arlee Theater in my tiny little town of Mason City, Illinois (current population: 2,343), and on its single screen it showed movies on Friday and Saturday nights and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The run would be extended a second week and sometimes also play on Thursdays if they were showing something more popular. My young self was there with my brother and sisters and mother to see “Babes in Toyland” with Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands, and as I remember it, I screamed like a banshee when the trees surrounded the children in the cast (and no, I’m not getting it mixed up with similar talking trees in “The Wizard of Oz”).

And yet I went back. There was magic and mystery to be had in a space like this – this was decades before Nicole Kidman talked about similar feelings in her ad for AMC – and each iteration of the movie-going experience was more thrilling than the next. Going to a space where there were THREE movie theaters was to experience something beyond bliss – imagine, if you will, waiting in the hallway and hearing the ending of “Close Encounters” and knowing you’re about to see it yourself – so that when something akin to a multiplex opened up, it was well worth the half-hour (or more) drive for the seemingly endless choices of entertainment viewing. And the food! Soon you could get an entire meal, to be consumed at the same time as the viewing!

And assigned seats.

That reclined.

And Dolby.

And IMAX.

And many other viewing choices that made the whole encounter something that audiences actively sought out for amusement as humanity moseyed their way through the 21st century.

Of course, the double whammy of streaming content and the pandemic changed that forever.

At first, people started staying home because they had so much choice there. And then they stayed home because they had no choice. And multiplexes became vast ghost towns, a slightly sad extension of the malls where they were often located.

It took a hot second, but cinemas are in the process of bouncing back (not all, though – the movie theaters at Citrus Park Town Center, for instance, recently closed). The options for the average moviegoer, in the midst of said bounceback, are varied. You still have your more traditional choices, like AMC, that nonetheless give you seat selection, reclining comfort and a range of snack foods (and even alcohol) that will make your head spin. They also have a membership program that promises a number of amenities, including discounted movie tickets. Then there are your meal-and-a-movie places, such as Cinebistro in Hyde Park. For a slightly higher price, you can buy a (mostly) adults-only experience that involves having an entire meal (and alcohol) delivered to your seat.

And then there is the microcinema experience.

Over the past three years, a couple of scrappy little additions to the movie-going experience have started making their presence felt in the Tampa/St. Pete landscape of movie-going. And whether their bill of fare is either current indie/foreign films (currently the sole domain of the Tampa Theater) or older cult classics, the microcinema as an alternative to mainstream multiplexes has developed a certain appeal to local moviegoers.

Green Light Cinema, on Second Ave. N. in downtown St. Petersburg, opened in October of 2020. Photo credit: Zachery Howard

Green Light Cinema in St. Petersburg has led the way in this mini-movement. Michael Hazlett, the owner and general manager, started the space at the height of the pandemic (October 2020) because he had recently moved to the area and was somewhat surprised that there was no local alternative to the mainstream movie experience (besides the Tampa Theater, in Tampa, there was nothing on the Pinellas side since the Beach Theater closed years before). Opening in the midst of a world crisis may not have been ideal, but as we have come out the other side of COVID, this intimate space on 2nd Avenue (in St. Petersburg’s bustling downtown) has apparently developed a loyal following. On the night we attended to see the film “Passages” it certainly seemed to have a decent amount of traffic, especially since Hurricane Idalia had just threatened the coast the day before.

As a matter of fact, almost everything about going to Green Light felt a little bit like going to other cinemas – except that there was both a charming intimacy and an agreeably nostalgic quality about the encounter that almost guaranteed a return visit. It was almost as if I was returning to the Arlee Theater of my youth. One person (Zachery Howard, in charge of operations and marketing for Green Light) sold us both the tickets and concessions before you traversed the visually interesting lobby to sit in the comfy chairs of the 80-seat theater. The space seemed to be populated with folks who understood the “voluntary surrender” (Zachery Howard’s words) involved in going to the theater and all seemed to be there to actually watch the film. The film itself, the latest by the acclaimed independent filmmaker Ira Sachs has been adored by critics (94% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) and received a certain degree of notoriety online for having some of the most explicit sex scenes in any film in recent years. There is some issue with a protagonist that is so deeply flawed that one can neither sympathize or empathize with him. However, the focus on queer romance is certainly one that is rarely the subject matter of many films, even in the third decade of the 21st century, and Green Light is to certainly be applauded for giving screening time to one of the few that do.

Screen Door: an Ybor City microcinema, located on the second floor of the historic Kress building on Seventh Avenue, can seat up to 38 film enthusiasts. Interior photo credit: Sean O’Brien/Screen Door

Meanwhile, on the Tampa side of the bay, the microcinema experience has begun to be a thing with the opening last Fall of Screen Door Cinema in Ybor City. Like Green Light, Screen Door has a pretty high-profile location that can certainly promise them a potential built-in audience. Everything else about Screen Door, however, has the feel of a guerilla movie-going adventure. First, unlike Green Light, which curates mostly current films that mostly fall under the category of independent or foreign, Screen Door’s film selection is mostly older films, with a heavy emphasis on what could be considered cult films (though they also showed “Passages” in October and scheduled a screening of the re-release of the Talking Heads documentary “Stop Making Sense”). There is enough similarity in programming, however, that Green Light and Screen Door participate in a joint program called Second Screen Cult Cinema, where the two micro-cinemas take turns screening a film (once a month) followed by a discussion of said film.

And then there is the actual experience of going to Screen Door, which adds to the slightly covert quality of the whole thing. Even though the physical address is on much-traversed Seventh Avenue, there is no actual signage telling you where the cinema is. And you have to be buzzed in. Then you go up a flight of stairs, in a building that is apparently closed for the day. You enter the second floor in a wide open space – and you follow the voices before you actually arrive at where the tickets (and concessions) are sold, and the screening takes place. Once you finally sit down (there is a move afoot to get something with a little more cushion installed), your sense of adventure is already so heightened that you are more than prepared for what the evening has to offer. The space was about two-thirds full (this cinema seats 38) the night I attended, and the film was “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” Another film that was adored by the critics upon its release earlier this year (also, interestingly, 94% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes), the film has a cast of rather softly-written and fairly unlikeable characters, though it also manages to deftly ask about the role of anarchy in today’s society.

Ann-Eliza Taylor, who along with Warren Cockerham and Sean O’Brien curates the film program for Screen Door (and keeps it running with an army of volunteers), references that there is “almost something religious about being in a space with strangers” when referencing going to the movies. She also saw both Screen Door and Green Light as filling a niche, especially if/when the Tampa Theatre (the granddaddy of film screenings and especially of alternate cinematic choices) leans more towards more live events at their gorgeous historic space. Jill Witecki, Vice President and Director of Marketing at Tampa Theatre, acknowledges that “Over the past few years, touring musicians, comedians, and the number of live shows we present is growing every year.”

And the theater has a plan for that.

Coming late next spring. . .

A smaller, more intimate movie theater, affectionately known to the Tampa Theatre staff as T2 (science fiction fans everywhere, rejoice)!

Tampa Theatre, on Franklin Street in downtown Tampa, expects to open their long-anticipated
43-seat second screen theatre sometime in 2024. Photo credit: Jeff Fay / Tampa Theatre

Situated right next to the original historic space, T2, which will seat 43, will serve as an even more “warm and inviting” (Jill again) alternative to the regal grandeur of the 1926 location we have all come to know and love, but with enough of the same DNA that it will still feel like attending the Tampa Theatre to see a film. At a recent member event, President and CEO John Bell introduced the new space and described how both the Tampa Theatre and T2 will give audience members “a sense of occasion and a unique experience.” Jill also explained to me later that having the smaller space will often allow them to book a film for the uninterrupted run that many distributors require by moving the screenings into the smaller space while playing live events in the larger space. While standing in the midst of T2, even as it was being transformed, one already felt, from the brick walls and high ceiling, the thrill that so appealed to the young self all those years ago.

It was thrilling.

And it was exciting.

This going-to-the-movies thing. I can’t get enough of it. How amazing it is that we have these new options for viewing films in front of us.

Let the magic and mystery continue.

Keven Renken is an American author of literary, queer, and genre fiction. His debut novel, “Welcome to the Day,” was published in 2019 and was a finalist for five independent book awards. His sophomore novel, “Graphic: The Novel,” was published by St. Petersburg Press in 2022. His film and theatrical criticism have appeared in Creative Loafing and Creative Pinellas, among other publications. He was the chairman of the theatre department at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School and taught there for 30 years. Keven is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Tampa. A native of Illinois, he now lives in Tampa with his husband Bill.

For additional information about each theater and upcoming film features and events, go to their websites. Several offer membership and opportunities, which is a terrific way to support their efforts in keeping the screens bright for years to come.

Green Light Cinema

Tampa Theatre

Screen Door: an ybor city microcinema

For enthusiastic readers of Bay Art File’s previous posts about the Georgia-based self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982), please note that ArtHouse3 and Bay Art Files are pleased to be bringing the award-winning dramatized documentary This World is not My Own about her life and work to Green Light Cinema in St. Petersburg, FL, on Thursday, January 18, 2024. There will be a 4 pm and 7 pm screening. Booklyn-based Co-director Petter Ringbom will be available after each screening for an audience Q&A. Advanced tickets may be purchased online. Please join us!

The Nellie Mae Rowe story via Cincinnati

The Nellie Mae Rowe story via Cincinnati
By Katherine Gibson

Ever since I saw the meticulous model of Nellie Mae Rowe’s Playhouse, which was created for the 2023 documentary about her life, titled This World Is Not My Own: The Limitless Story of Nellie Mae Rowe (TWINMO), I have wanted to see the film.

The Playhouse model as seen in the exhibition *Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe*.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta (September 3, 2021 – January 9, 2022) Photo: K. Gibson

I wrote about the model in a previous 2021 Bay Art Files article when I reviewed Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The film is now out and a screening was scheduled in late August at the Cincinnati Art Museum. There happened to be a 21c Museum Hotel not far, so my decision was made. I would see the film, stay at the 21c, take in Cincinnati and write about all of it! I snapped out of my summer slump, rejuvenated to have plans and an assignment. (In case you didn’t know, I am the official roving correspondent for Bay Art Files – Atlanta, Miami, Nashville, and now Cincinnati.)

The screening of This World Is Not My Own was part of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s programming during Creating Connections, Self-taught artists in the Rosenthal Collection, which included a Nellie Mae Rowe crayon-on-paper drawing, titled Pink Pig. The accompanying wall text read: “Her whimsical compositions feature animals and other motifs drawn in saturated, jewel-like colors. Here, the calm simplicity of the pig enclosed in a heart is in contrast to the rest of the drawing crowded with animals, a human figure, and a large flowering tree.” I think of Rowe’s actual Playhouse as like the image in Pink Pig, a centered, creative calm in the midst of encircling influences. (To understand the context of The Playhouse, see the previous Bay Art Files article The Important Work of Nellie Mae Rowe.)

The World Is Not My Own was screened at several film festivals in the Spring and recognized for Best Cinematography at the 2023 Atlanta Film Festival and the film has received 100% on Rotten Tomato’s tomatometer (an amalgamation of film and television critics recommendations). Festival programming promoted TWINMO as “a documentary film that traces the lifespan of artist Nellie Mae Rowe through motion capture technology to replicate human expressions and movement, performed by actor Uzo Aduba.”

As a result, there are some well-written reviews, excerpts of which I will share.

Sheri Linden, of The Hollywood Reporter: “…Rowe took her independence seriously, as the captivating film portrait This World Is Not My Own makes vibrantly clear. After years of farm work and many more years as a domestic servant, the twice-widowed Georgian decided, in the powerful words of one of her great-great-nieces, ‘to design my life the way that I want it while I’m on this journey passing through.’ Linden goes on to describe the Playhouse: “Rowe turned her house — alas, no longer standing — into the Playhouse, filling it with her art, hanging the trees in the yard with her creations as well as found-object adornments, and inviting friends, neighbors and strangers to explore. There were drive-by harassers lobbing rocks and firecrackers at the ‘hoodoo witch,’ but there was also Judith Alexander, scion of a prominent Atlanta family who would become Rowe’s friend, gallerist and champion.”

Golden Globe entertainment journalist Brent Simon writes: “Stylistically, This World Is Not My Own challenges documentary conventions in its mixture of forms and, most especially, its editorial construction. Working with editor Princess Hairston, co-directors Petter Ringbom and Marquise Stillwell execute a narrative vision attached more to feeling than strictly linear storytelling.“

The way the creatures of the film swirled in stories linking personal interviews with historical footage was masterful, magical really. Never moving too far away from Rowe’s artistic interpretations, fragments of her dream-like drawings would start to fill the screen as though Rowe was drawing in real-time. Because the film is not linear, it’s so much more “Nellie.” Rather than a consecutive storyline, the film is more a collection of stories woven together by elements of Rowe’s drawings, serving as a whimsical narrator, a colorful through-line, transitioning from one story to the next.

The many entertaining and insightful interviews with leaders of the time, museum curators, friends and family provided glimpses of Rowe’s personality and her generosity in sharing her Playhouse environment. One family member said – with a big smile and a chuckle, “She was a fun-going lady.” I especially enjoyed learning more about the unique and beautiful friendship between Rowe and her gallerist, Judith Alexander which is an important and relevant focus of the film.

At a gathering honoring Alexander’s life (shared on JA Foundation site), the artist’s great-grandnieces, Cheryl Mashack and Cathi Perry, described the unique relationship between Judith and Nellie Mae, using a quilt analogy: “The focal point consisted of two people Judith Alexander and Nellie Mae Rowe, although two different textures they were cut from the same cloth. Their business acquaintance grew into a relationship and from that into a wonderful friendship and from friendship into family that has spanned over two decades. Judith had a passion for art — especially Nellie Mae’s art — and together with their eccentric and often quirky ways they started to stitch the fabric of all our lives together. Judith with her big heart extended herself not only to Nellie but to Nellie’s family as well.….Judith had an unassuming manner but a very forthright way in getting her point across and letting you know exactly how she felt, and with this came her unyielding zeal to expose Nellie’s work to the world because of the joy it brought to her heart. She wanted this joy to become contagious to all those around her; however it was very difficult for her to part with any of her “Nellie’s” as she so affectionately called them.”

Marquise Stillwell, one of the film’s creators and directors, was present at the Cincinnati Art Museum and entertained questions after the screening. He described the making of the film taking 6 years and went on to say (paraphrasing), the film mixes traditional documentary techniques with 3-D animations and scripted scenes shot using the Playhouse models and created sets.

Following the film, I returned to 21c moments after the dining room closed, however, room service was available – score! The bartender made me a Basil Hayden Old Fashioned (big grin) to keep me company while waiting for a room delivery of seared sea scallops served with corn grits, rainbow chard and honshimeji mushrooms. It was damn good.

Morning coffee was set up in the restaurant hosted by one of the life-sized golden yellow penguins which is the 21c Museum Hotel designated color for Cincinnati. The penguins turn up around the property and play various roles in greeting, guarding and generally marking their territories. 21c Museum Hotel Cincinnati is a boutique hotel, contemporary art museum, and restaurant housed in downtown Cincinnati’s former Metropole Hotel, a 100-year-old landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Among one of the largest private art museums in the United States, it is North America’s only collection dedicated solely to art of the 21st century.

There’s something about historic buildings that don’t always translate into welcoming, spacious lobbies – depending on previous configurations. I love a pronounced main entrance or a snappy foyer that properly greets you and peaks your curiosity at the same time. I found this particular 21c entrance confusing and oddly configured — wasn’t actually sure I had walked through the intended door. But then, my eye caught sight of a strange scultpural figure in the lobby, also a huge vivid purple photographic landscape, both part of 21c’s current exhibit, “The SuperNatural”. Short attention spans are not always a negative. Something I do love about 21c environments is their clever use of common areas and unexpected niches as exhibition space — often to my surprise and always to my delight. Given my short stay, I wasn’t able to take in the full exhibition like at other 21c locations I’ve visited (Durham and Nashville). The remaining five Museum Hotels are in my future. A colorful penguin punch card is underway.

Before hitting the road, I made a beeline for a recommended place to get a good Reuben – just a few blocks away. Downtown Cincinnati was bustling and I walked through an active town square — it was a perfect day — coolish and clear. Most of the people I saw or encountered were young — or at least younger than me — and I wondered if that was a city trait or just me feeling older. Later, I learned the diner I visited was an authentic old-school Cincinnati diner, Hathaways, there since 1957. One of those things you “stumble on” if you ask the right local. The Reuben sandwich was perfect, complete with ridged and broken Lay’s potato chips.

A final serendipitous treat occurred en route to the airport. From the backseat of my taxi, I saw a spaceship — yes, a spaceship — midway up a distant hillside, across Kentucky’s border. An all too familiar tie to the Tampa Bay area.

The Cincinnati Art Museum, 21c Cincinnati Museum Hotel, This World Is Not My Own, downtown Cincinnati — a complete sensory overload — any one of these experiences begs for more time to properly absorb and enjoy. I’ll be back!

Note from the author: Arthouse3 and Bay Art Files are currently working on bringing the film to St. Petersburg, Florida. To do this, we will need movie ticket buyers, a few volunteers and sponsorship dollars to bring in one of the directors to speak about the film. If you have an interest in any of these roles, please let me know soon. The number of committed individuals could sway the schedule! (kg@arthouse3.com)

Katherine Gibson, creator of ArtHouse3, works with clients to find and place regional art, objects and furniture. Gibson is an independent curator, art consultant and creative design maker-upper living in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Tom Jones: Here We Stand

An exhibition review of Tom Jones: Here We Stand

by Sabrina Hughes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the artist

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

About the author

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

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 23^rd through June 4^th, 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 17^th– to the 19^th-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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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.

Location, Location, Location

Location, Location, Location
Anthony Record and the Museum of Florida Art and Culture

by Jonathan Talit

Driving to Avon Park is just that: driving to Avon Park. The 50-mile stretch of US-27, between the southbound exit on I-4 and the northwest border of Highlands County, begins packed with strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food chains: the trademark scenery of any highway exit. The deeper one drives, the less frequently these landmarks appear until there is nothing to look at but grass, sky, and asphalt. Yet, I couldn’t help but look out even more; to open my eyes wider as the flat land pulled itself closer to the horizon and the sky bent around my windows so dramatically that it appeared to dig at the edges of the earth. It was difficult to imagine people living anywhere near here. Not out of snobbery: it just, quite literally, looked so empty of people.

Of course, that’s not true. People do live in Highlands County and many have for generations. Even more visit to celebrate acute passions: the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring car race, sold-out concerts by Rumours, a renowned Fleetwood Mac tribute band, the charming trompe l’oeil murals of Lake Placid, and Toby’s Clown School and Museum. The latter has graduated more than 1,500 clowns since its founding in 1993. Despite appearing sparse, or perhaps because of it, Highlands County is sprinkled with various sites of assembly.

The Museum of Florida Art and Culture, or MOFAC, is one such site. Part of South Florida State College, MOFAC hired Anthony Record as its new curator in March of 2022. Since then, Record has been busy organizing contemporary art exhibitions and managing MOFAC’s permanent collection of historic art and artifacts pertaining to the region. I met with Anthony on a Saturday afternoon, at the pristine campus of SFSC, just two weeks shy of Hurricane Ian pummeling the state, to discuss his new role.

Anthony Record, Curator of the Museum of Florida Art and Culture. Photo: J. Talit

“I’ll show you the concourse, first,” he said as he ushered me inside. The main exhibition space is divided into quadrants (quintets if you include the lobby of the Board Room). The main gallery has two sections: one for contemporary art exhibitions and one for the permanent collection. The third section is the lobby of the music hall.

The fourth is the concourse, which is within the building but outside of the main gallery. It consists of a large, curved wall that follows a hallway between the main gallery and classrooms. Several long canvases line the wall. Technically, they’re canvas prints: reproductions of oil paintings by the artist Christopher Still. The originals are on display at the Florida House of Representatives. Each print depicts some aspect of Florida in a style akin to history painting. The commanding gaze of Seminole Indian Osceola aims at the viewer in Patriot and Warrior (2001). Each hand gestures with conviction: one towards the sunset and an approaching Spanish vessel, the other gripped around a knife that pierces into a written document. This document “hangs” over the edge of the painting in a trompe l’oeil effect like the aforementioned murals at Lake Placid. An enormous alligator’s claws dangle over the borders of The Okeehumkee on the Oklawaha (2000). Each painting is concerned with narrative, landscape, and perspective: visual and historical.

Christoper Still. *Patriot and Warrior*, 2001. Canvas print.
The original is on display at the Florida House of Representatives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Anthony Record’s curatorial interests are similar. “I don’t organize exhibits with a strict, pre-existing philosophy or ideology, like ‘I’m interested in shows about identity’ or ‘I only focus on work by abstract artists,” he explains. “However, many of the exhibitions I organize seem to involve place. Location matters a lot to me and to many of the artists I exhibit.”

Location has mattered to Record personally, too. Originally from Tampa, Record received his bachelor’s from the University of South Florida. After earning his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008, he returned to Tampa and has maintained proactive roles in the arts since. Most notably, Record is Co-founder and Director of the artist collective QUAID, which recently moved to Ybor City after almost a decade in Seminole Heights. Along with exhibition spaces like Tempus Projects and Parallelogram Gallery, QUAID was part of a community of enthusiastic, DIY artists and educators who promoted contemporary art in a city that was otherwise lacking.

Record complemented his executive role at QUAID with educational positions, adjuncting at the University of South Florida as well as various community colleges from 2010 to 2018. “I love teaching, but I definitely prefer teaching at community colleges,” he confesses. “The students tend to be more diverse in every way: age, socioeconomics, political affiliation, level of background. All the students are interested in art but tend to be less interested in credentials. They also tend to push back a little more, which often makes for a richer classroom experience.”

In 2018, Record stopped adjuncting to assume a full-time role at the Tampa Museum of Art. While no longer a professor in a college classroom, Record worked in the education department as the Studio Programs Coordinator, where he organized after-hours classes hosted by local artists. Children and adults alike would attend these classes to participate in a wide range of making. “The classes were only a few hours long, so they had to be engaging but concise. The topics depended on whichever artist hosted the event. They could range from self-portraits in acrylic to large-scale collage to simply paper sculpture.”

Record left his position at the TMA earlier this year to become the curator at MOFAC. “The job at MOFAC has several moving parts, which I enjoy,” he says. “The most obvious are the contemporary artist exhibitions. Artwork that involves Florida, whether the artist is a homegrown Floridian or not, doesn’t have much institutional presence. The same is true of general Florida history and archaeology. I know a lot of great artists whose work deals with this state and deserves the kind of authority and attention that an institutional solo show can offer. To pair those works side by side with objects of Floridian craft and archaeology, which have very different cultural and intellectual histories than art with a capital “A,” makes MOFAC an exciting exhibition space.”

Considering Record’s noted contributions to the Tampa Bay art scene, contributions about which several people have expressed their gratitude in casual conversations with me about Record, one wonders: why leave? Avon Park is not as far from Tampa as, say, Las Vegas, but it’s still a hike. Culturally, they’re almost polar opposites. Tampa, specifically the art scene of which Record is a notable architect, is “cool.” Under no circumstances is Avon Park. To my knowledge, Record previously knew no one in Highlands County. “The position at MOFAC popped up and seemed like a good opportunity,” he concludes.

Succinct, polite, evasive. I press, albeit gently, and like any schlocky interviewer, I make it about myself. I mention that I’ve moved around a lot for school and residencies. Within two months of meeting with Anthony, I had left a yearlong residency in Star, North Carolina to pursue a full-time job in Orlando, a city I hate in the lamest way possible. I have some family and acquaintances in Orlando, but not the community I had in Star, Tampa, or Boston. Being an artist grants you the flexibility to hop to new places and meet new groups of people, but it doesn’t make leaving them behind, if only by a few hours, any easier.

He agrees and elaborates on his decision. “I guess that the position at MOFAC seemed like a full-time version of my role at QUAID: providing young, hungry, interesting, local artists with exhibition space for their work. I’ve had mixed feelings about some of the places I’ve shown my work. As an exhibiting artist, I had a lot of disappointments with various galleries and museums; just the things that weren’t provided and the level of engagement with my work that I was hoping to get but didn’t. I hope that I can use those experiences to cultivate an exhibition space that is both more attentive to the needs of artists while also staying out of their way.”

Whatever cocktail of circumstances led to Record’s decision, MOFAC is clearly lucky to have him. In just six months, Record has served himself a full plate: reorganizing the collection, changing the floorplan of the contemporary art galleries, securing future solo shows, writing exhibition didactics, planning gallery events, and developing an online presence via video interviews with exhibiting artists. These videos, crispy produced, are separate interviews with artists Bruce Marsh and Sam Newton, whose respective solo exhibitions A Long Glance and Herd of Thunder opened in early October of 2022 (Both exhibitions have since closed.) Marsh was a longtime professor at the University of South Florida and Newton is a current member of QUAID.

The videos are not just methods by which the museum can advertise online, however. They’re also not just interpretation tools for the viewer to glean deeper insights into the work, though they do that well. Record conducted these interviews and edited the videos, and his signature appetite for “place” is all over them. While Marsh and Newton discuss their interests and aspirations outright, each video underscores the setting in which these artists make art and presents a synopsis of their daily working life.

Granted, Bruce Marsh explicitly discusses how his home of Ruskin, Florida defines his work. What the video presents that isn’t immediately visible upon looking at Marsh’s work or listening to him speak is the kind of life that would produce such work: a contemplative life of teaching, commuting, and now retirement. Marsh moved to Ruskin as a compromise between he and his wife, Dolores Coe. She was teaching at the Ringling College of Art and Design and he was teaching at USF. Thus, the rural town of Ruskin was the middle point of their commutes.

Installation view of the exhibition *Bruce March: A Long Glance* which was on display from October 5 – November 18, 2022.

Marsh’s paintings indicate someone who spends a lot of time looking around at the same things: the outlet malls off I-75, a brewing afternoon storm on the horizon, an intersection at sunset on the way home from work. What most of us would tune out, Marsh isolates and lovingly renders but without hyperbole. Instead, he purposely portrays them as what they are: ordinary, without exaggeration. One’s attention is drawn to these paintings because of their elegant execution of space, not because they depict recognizable people or distort the everyday into a spectacle. But when Record’s camera cuts from Marsh and lingers on an empty bridge or the charmingly dilapidated Ruskin Drive-In, neither of which are the subjects of Marsh’s paintings, the audience is handed more insight than anything Marsh could say out loud.

Installation view of the exhibition *Bruce Marsh: A Long Glance* which was on display from October 5 – November 18, 2022.

Since Sam Newton’s paintings aren’t really about location at all, Record’s focus on place is even more exposed in her video interview. Newton’s paintings have backgrounds, but they’re simplified to emphasize attention on the real subjects: horses, presented in all their buxom glory. Unlike Marsh, Newton isn’t interested in playing with perspectival space and ordinary locations. Newton’s interests, instead, lie in anthropomorphism and a comic sensibility akin to the infamous Foot of Cupid from Monty Python or the flat irony of stick-and-poke tattoos. Newton compresses her horses barely within the edges of the canvas to articulate just how robust, knobby, temperamental, vigorous, and fragile they really are.

Complicated creatures. And that’s just the artwork itself. Like Marsh’s interview, the main subject of Newton’s video is the particular configuration of her working life (I won’t say “work-life balance”). Unlike Marsh, Newton lives in trendy Seminole Heights but has no dedicated studio in her home, at least not one that we see. The generational contrast between the videos is sharp. Within the first minute, the viewer is presented with a domestic environment that is unmistakably Millennial. The living room, which doubles as Newton’s studio, is engulfed in potted plants, mostly palms. A slate gray housecat lounges on a cat scratcher that appears surprisingly manicured. A child’s cozy coupe outside is plastered with a bumper sticker that reads, in block print, “HONK IF YOU LOVE KING STATE.”

Another big difference: Newton has two young children. Julian, the oldest, doesn’t appear. The youngest, Valentine, unabashedly makes his presence known. Newton explains that she began these horse paintings during the COVID lockdowns and her subsequent pregnancy with Valentine. She admits that it’s easy for her to project onto horses because, “…they all have bangs.”

If only a little sarcasm covered our tracks like we hoped it would. Clearly, there are other reasons why vibrant horses in claustrophobic spaces might resonate with Newton: the pent-up isolation of COVID lockdowns? An analogy for pregnancy, where you share limited space with someone else? A representation of the compressed hours in a day of a working artist and mother? “[Acrylic paint] is a plastic so it’s drying faster, and it has a different texture [than oil paint],” she says, explaining her transition from using oils to acrylic. Newton loves how acrylic more readily accepts other media, from colored pencils to crayons to ink. Ostensibly, she’s come to prefer acrylic’s flexibility and expansiveness to oil’s stiffness. “The sky’s the limit,” she claims of acrylic. I object. More likely, it’s precisely the limits of acrylic that attracts Newton. Its swift drying time and uncomplicated working conditions provide a conclusiveness that she’s found compatible in her life. “I’m able to make work that I wouldn’t be able to make, in the speed that I make it, in the situation that I’m in right now,” she says, before glancing warmly over her shoulder at Valentine.

What provides me all this information, and what grants me a sense of access that, in turn, elicits some hubris within me to freely speculate about these artists’ lives, is Anthony Record’s quiet but guiding eye. Editing, directing, curating, producing: all these jobs require clear decision-making with as little trace of the author as possible. At least, that’s been Record’s hope for himself as curator at MOFAC. So far, it appears he’s succeeded. In six months, a set of interests and a graceful sensibility for articulating them has already emerged. The towns we decide to live in, our hours spent on the road or in offices, the slivers we carve out of our days to do the things we really want to do, the people with whom we choose to spend our “off” time: all the pragmatic compromises we make and their effects on creative work are under Record’s nonjudgmental microscope.

The Museum of Florida Art and Culture (MoFAC) is located on the campus of South Florida State College in Avon Park, Florida.

I’m sure Record’s recent move, like mine, feeds these interests even more. Like it or not, tradeoffs between work and life must be made. Like the artists he exhibits, Record has made a tradeoff that works well for him. Avon Park supplies the tranquility for focus and Record supplies the faithful attention to detail. With QUAID, Record is happily one of several making executive decisions. At MOFAC, he’s largely driving solo.

Visit mofac.org for more information about the Museum of Florida Art and Culture and its upcoming exhibitions and programming.

Click here to watch the YouTube archived videos on artists Bruce Marsh and Sam Newton.

Visit anthonyrecord.com for more information about Anthony Record.

Visit quaidgallery.com for more information about the Tampa-based artist collective QUAID.