HCC Ybor – Bay Art Files

HCC Art Galleries’ Now On View brings four hours of interactive art, poetry, theater and dance to three Ybor City venues

By Jennifer Ring with HCC Art Galleries

HCC Art Galleries started Now On View in June 2024 to give Tampa artists the opportunity to tell Tampa’s story in a one-day-only public art festival. Because who better to tell Tampa’s story than Tampa artists?

This year, the story continues with a new crop of Tampa Bay area artists. Each of the six playwrights, poets, designers and dancers thoughtfully considered how to tell Tampa’s story through their preferred medium. On Saturday, February 22, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., they bring those stories to life at Hillsborough Community College’s Ybor Campus, Hotel Haya and Kress Contemporary.

Here’s your guide to what’s happening where during HCC Art Galleries 2nd Annual Now On View.

Walk with us!

Now On View artists will be stationed at three Ybor City locations: HCC Ybor, Hotel Haya and Kress Contemporary. HCC Art Galleries recommends starting at the HCC Ybor Performing Arts Building, where you can pick up an official Now On View Guidebook and experience Emma Quintana and Amanda Gabaldon’s “Legacy Systems.” Then stroll down 14th Street until you hit the HCC Ybor Building, where Jehoshaphat Jacinto hosts a dance battle. Next, stop into Hotel Haya at the corner of 14^th and Street and Seventh Avenue for FAX 727 289 3069’s “everything is built on layers on top of other layers on top of other layers” and Kali Rabaut’s “Cosmos” before continuing down Seventh Avenue to the Kress building to see Erin Lekovic’s “Ybor Interrupted” and Victoria Alvarez’s “Back to Black.” Image courtesy of HCC Art Galleries.

Start at HCC Ybor Performing Arts Building

In the fall of 2024, hurricanes became a much larger part of Tampa’s story than ever before, as did our town’s efforts to recover from those hurricanes. UT digital fabrication coordinator Emma Quintana and choreographer Amanda Gabaldon bring that story to life through sound, video, sculpture and dance.

Begin in Gallery114@HCC Ybor, where a hurricane forms and dissipates in a constant loop, as dancers clad in vintage beachwear take part in both the disaster and its recovery. Join in their dance with disaster and pick up a copy of HCC Art Galleries’ Official Now On View Guidebook while you’re there.

*Emma Quintana plays with the idea of the picture-perfect postcard image in this Now On View freebie.* *Image courtesy of Emma Quintana.*

Follow the music to the HCC Ybor Building Patio

Here, the dance battle begins. Educator Jehoshaphat Jacinto pays tribute to Tampa’s street dance scene with a dance showcase. Learn how to break, vogue, pop and lock in this immersive street dance battle.

FAX 727 289 3069’s Now On View installation was inspired by layers of fliers the group saw on the old Larmon Furniture building across the street from Hotel Haya in Ybor City. Photo by Jennifer Ring.

Treat yourself to poetry and flowers at Hotel Haya

Get ready to see the largest poem you’ve ever seen outside Café Quiquiriqui. FAX 727 289 3069, creators of St. Pete’s Poetry Alley, brings their act to Hotel Haya during Now On View.

The group, which consists of artists and poets Tyler Gillespie, Keifer Calkins and Eleanor Eichenbaum, dove into Tampa’s archives, looking for images to help them tell Tampa’s story. They’ll pair them with words and wit in poetry and layers of handmade fliers. Check the surrounding pillars and peer through the Café window and you’ll see.

Then head inside, where botanical artist Kali Rabaut tells Tampa’s story through its flowers. Inspired by FloridaRAMA’s Lampscape, Rabaut incorporates mirrors into her work for the first time, bringing an infinity mirror garden to Now On View. Step into her floral galaxy and leave with some seeds to plant in your garden.

*Botanical artist Kali Rabaut returns for HCC Art Galleries’ 2nd Annual Now On View*.

Follow the crowds down Seventh Avenue

You’ll find Kress Contemporary right in the middle of all the Fiesta Day action. Here, playwright Erin Lekovic brings a young and thirsty Samuel Kress to life in a new 15-minute play. Lekovic, who grew up in Tampa and moved back from Chicago three years ago, specializes in site-specific theater. Starting in Chicago’s historic buildings, Lekovic’s brought theater to all sorts of unexpected places, from furniture stores to the shores of Lake Michigan. Ybor Interrupted will be her first site-specific play in Tampa.

Also at Kress, graphic designer Victoria Alvarez tells Tampa’s history through an LGBTQIA+ lens. Alvarez spent the past year collecting photographs of LGBTQIA+ individuals living and playing in Tampa. She found several within USF Libraries’ Bobby Smith and Rex Maniscalco collections, but expanded her search for Now On View, putting out a community all-call and collaborating with local newspapers to tell an even greater story. Alvarez will assemble the photos into a timeline of LGBTQIA+ life in Tampa from the 1950s to present day. The final touch is yours to provide. Alvarez is covering the entire poster in temperature-sensitive black ink. You must place your hands upon the artwork to reveal the lives hiding beneath the surface.

*A hand reveals a self-portrait of Bobby Smith hidden under temperature-sensitive ink.*
*Photograph courtesy of Victoria Alvarez*

Before you go: Book an Art & History Tour

Max Herman and Jorge Contreras of Tampa Bay Tours lead three free English-language walking tours, beginning at HCC Ybor’s Performing Arts Building, at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and 12 p.m, during Now on View. A fourth tour, in Spanish, is available at 1 p.m. Tours walk participants through Ybor City, stopping at all three Now On View arts venues and providing fun facts about Ybor’s history along the way. Reserve your spot at eventbrite.com/o/hcc-art-galleries-29623552403.

About the author:

Jennifer Ring began her storytelling journey in 2017, writing and taking photographs for Creative Loafing Tampa. Since then, she’s told the story of art in Tampa Bay through more than 200 art reviews, artist profiles, and art features. She believes that everyone can and should make art, whether they’re good at it or not. Art heals.

Bay Art Files is pleased to partner with the Galleries at HCC in highlighting Hillsborough Community College’s second annual Now on View.

An exhibition of works by Ry McCullough

by Tony Wong Palms

Pausing at the entrance, taking in what is in front of me, many things come to mind when walking into Gallery114@HCC at the School of Visual and Performing Arts on the Ybor City campus and encountering the works of Ry McCullough.

Ry McCullough, Themes for the American Kestrel, installation view.
Image courtesy of Gallery114@HCC Ybor City Campus.

There are three pedestals composed in the middle of the floor, each covered with little objects, some with oddly familiar shapes, like Claes Oldenburg’s monumental sculptures that more or less resemble everyday things, except these are in sizes that can easily fit inside a coat pocket; there’s a video showing the same stuff in a smaller, but ever-changing grouping, the setting like a photographer’s studio; there are framed mixed media works hung on the wall, each depicting a landscape with a scattering of these objects; and finally there’re two small shelves, each with a rectangular box made delicately from Japanese paper, sitting on a greenish felt, like architectural models of some basic structural forms.

The pedestals could be an archipelago, a small group of islands with colored and differently shaped things that washed in from the sea, and the wind blew them around and around to end up where they are now, curios.

And taking a walk on these island shores, kicking around at your feet, these shaped and color things, maybe they are sea shells, or sand smoothed pebbles, perhaps pieces of coral, but most definitely flotsam and jetsam telling tales of their long transformative voyage through the ocean waves, when a glint of something catches your eye and you pick it up, examine it, drop it in your pocket, take it home, place it on a shelf, or window sill, or the end table, alongside all the other odds and ends that have been collected from here and there over the years, and now together they all are, in the same time and space, more or less coexisting, little islands in of themselves.

A friend comes and visits and they might admire your collection, picks one up, studies it, puts it back, but not quite the same spot or orientation; or maybe it’s cleaning day, and the objects are lifted one by one, dusted and put back, and again, not all returned to the exact same position. The arrangement thus shifts slightly, hardly noticeable, and continues shifting one cleaning day after another, one friend’s exploratory hands after another.

This constant picking up and putting back is essentially the 20 minutes long video piece. With the magic of video editing, pieces suddenly pop in and out of existence, creating a slightly different composition with each editing cut. One piece may go poof and reappear in a little while next to something else, or maybe never appear again. The viewer’s brow tense with concentrated anticipation. Did someone just get kidnapped, or is this an example of what physicists call entanglement? Who knew such unassuming objects appearing and disappearing could create such a drama. A suspenseful video performance where the artist is unseen.

The framed works on the wall is non-action action in a flat space. There’s a line, could be a table’s edge or the horizon, plane of the sky meets plane of the earth, but unlike the objects on the pedestals or in the video where they’re visibly grounded, the objects in these mixed media pieces feel suspended, while not as high as the floating bowler hat men in a René Magritte painting, they are not as affected by the gravity that anchors their pedestal counterparts.

Within each frame is a vignette of possibilities. They are very precise and elegant, exuding a calm to the videos’ caprice. Its stillness belies conscious intentions and subtleties of movement, like a person in meditation, where meditation is a deliberate act, as in the long wave of the tsunami, its motion unseen, or unrecognized until it momentously meets the shore.

The exhibition is titled Themes for the American Kestrel. There’s a curious group of objects way up on one of the gallery’s architectural ledges, next to the title wall, with one of the objects resembling a bird, watching all that’s below. This little vignette does not have a title or exhibition label, nor is it acknowledged anywhere else, and being high above eye level, could be easily missed.

Perhaps the zen like statement from the artist in the exhibition brochure may explain this apparition high on the ledge: “I sit and the bird arrives or the bird sits and I arrive, or not.”, or maybe it’s the meaning of the exhibition title, or both, or neither.

The exhibition brochure, designed like one of the framed wall works, is very handsome, includes a meaningful quote from Virginia Woolf, with the opening phrases: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake….”

Following this is a brief artist statement outlining his ideas and intentions. Towards the end of the statement, McCullough references the artist Giorgio Morandi and his still-life paintings as a counterpoint to the evolving compositions in his video piece.

Morandi (1890-1964) lived his whole life in Bologna, Italy, where for the last 40 or so years of his artistic practice he maintained a singular focus on regimented compositions of bottles, vases, and similarly shaped and size objects, painted with subtle hues and tone gradations. It is an ascetic discipline, like a monk repeating a mantra, like Sol LeWitt’s endless iterations of the skeletal cube. The subtlest of details and changes are noticed with potential significance, like when physicists discovering an elemental particle, or that tiny chili pepper altering the flavor makeup of an entire dish.

If Morandi’s 40 years could be compressed into a 20 minutes time-lapse video, the result might be something like McCullough’s own video performance. Of course, a time-lapse video skips over many moments and details. But what is 40 years or 20 minutes, barely a nanosecond within a razor-thin sliver of a rock layer tucked in a stratum of the earth’s crust in the expanse of geologic time.

The exhibition is open to the public by appointment through June 24, 2021. For additional information about the gallery visit the Galleries at HCC website.

Ry McCullough received his MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. He is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa in Tampa, FL.

Tony Wong Palms is the Exhibitions Coordinator/Designer at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, FL.

Tag: HCC Ybor

Art, Poetry, Theater and Dance: A one-day-only Public Art Festival in Ybor City

Themes for the American Kestrel