Arts In

Arts In: Don Gialanella Don Gialanella can make a cow out of children’s toys, that’s the size of a cow. He made the giant twirly moustache in front of The Dalí Museum. Don creates huge and beautiful sculptures that have personality and humor. From a life-sized metal man tenderly opening his chest to reveal his glowing heart, to a diver arcing exuberantly into a dumpster full of plastic bottles, to remind us to recycle. In this conversation with Barbara St. Clair, Don Gialanella shares wild and wonderful stories of working with sculptor Louise Bourgeois, new projects involving sound and how he keeps up with more commissions than ever despite Parkinson’s disease. Don explains how he wound up on the cutting-edge of digital design for television and shares his enthusiastic passion for public art. Explore Don Gialanella’s work at donsculpture.com Arts In is produced by Sheila Cowley. Executive Producer, Barbara St. Clair.

Award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter Victoria Johnson creates both narrative and documentary films. In this conversation with Barbara St. Clair, she tells us surprising and humorous tales of learning the craft of analog filmmaking in the adventurous artistic atmosphere of the University of South Florida in the late 1970s. She explains how her skills evolved through video and digital, and her focus on creating films that change her audience’s views about a subject. Victoria shares the challenges of suddenly needing to run her family business, and how she brought video to her marketing firm - and surprisingly got hired by the 2012 Republican National Convention, something she still chuckles about. She won the Telly Award for Welcome to Tampa. Victoria shares her passion for screenwriting, an art she came to after establishing a career as a filmmaker. She reflects on the thriving world of streaming video, and how to find an audience in a world where everyone can make a film on their cell phone. Victo

Bahia Ramos recently spoke at the Art of Marketing and Branding Summit hosted by Creative Pinellas. She serves as Director of Arts at New York City’s Wallace Foundation, and leads the team responsible for the foundation’s work funding research by arts organizations around the country, as they explore a larger question that affects the entire arts community. Bahia explains the five-year relationship she has with grantees, as they help create a body of knowledge that can be shared to help arts organizations nationwide. She shares her thoughts on the crucial business of philanthropy, on growing new audiences and how to change your art as the world around you changes. Find out more about the Wallace Foundation at https://www.wallacefoundation.org/pages/default.aspx. Explore their five-year project, Building Audiences for Sustainability - https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/building-audiences-for-the-arts/pages/default.aspx   Their research is available for anyone to read. Here’s a select

Mark Feinman is the drummer for the eclectic jazz trio, La Lucha - and an inventive composer. Mark tells La Lucha’s origin story of how he and pianist John O’Leary and bassist Alejandro Arenas began their long-term collaboration. And he shares his own journey in jazz, with stops at St Pete’s Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School and the University of South Florida’s cutting-edge School of Music. He talks with Barbara St. Clair about constantly listening and creating music, and even shares a sneak peek at a future song, recorded on his phone during a dog walk. Find out more about La Lucha’s music and performance schedule at https://www.laluchamusic.com/. You can read about Mark Feinman’s work during his tenure as a Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Fellow at https://creativepinellas.org/mark-feinman/.

Carrie Jadus made a name for herself as a professional artist, after giving up a career as a skilled radio frequency engineer. Her distinctive, soft and subtly subversive style is seen in paintings, on murals, posters and notecards around St. Petersburg. Working at Soft Water Studios, she’s a mainstay of the Warehouse Arts District and longtime illustrator for St. Pete Preservation. Carrie shares the turning point that made her decide to choose art over engineering - and how as a working mother, she carefully planned a sustainable artistic career, using the business plan of a Toymaker as a model. She explains how working in several different styles helped her earn a living and fulfill her urges for personal expression. She tells the story behind her well-known mural of pioneering electrical engineer, Nikola Tesla - and Little Miss Sisyphus, the mural people often miss just around the corner. Carrie shares her passion for ‘grand portraits,’ monumental paintings of figures from Einstein to Nina Simone, an

Jason Hackenwerth is an adventurous abstract sculptor who’s medium is thousands of latex balloons. His enormous sculptural inventions can fill a towering museum atrium, or mall. His sculptures are enormous, and the vivid pictures on his website are only an echo of the overwhelming power of experiencing them up close. Jason Hackenwerth teaches at St. Pete’s Eckerd College and works all over the world. To his knowledge, he’s the only artist right now doing serious, curated art with balloons. He talks about the challenges of validating a new kind of art when you don’t have a community of artists working in that style. In this conversation with Barbara St. Clair, Jason shares the moving and “terrifying” story of his early experiments, and how his first big installation went so badly wrong. And how he turned that failure into a new way of working that got him a year-long gig building a sculpture a day on a stage inside FAO Schwarz, and traveling the world creating giant balloon sculptures. Jason explains

Erin Blankenship is the Curator of Exhibitions & Collections at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg. The Museum is more special than most people realize - it’s a historical museum that maintains a vital collection of contemporary art. Erin’s seen first-hand how visual art offers another path to understanding the challenging reality of genocide. The Museum’s permanent collection includes work in a range of mediums, created by artists in concentration camps and Holocaust survivors - along with work by “empathizers,” artists who may or may not be Jewish, but are moved to respond to acts of genocide. She explains the powerful role artists shoulder, telling stories that need to be told. And she shares memories of beloved artist William Pachner, an internationally-known Abstract Expressionist and a longtime, vivid presence in Tampa Bay. In one of the highlights of her curatorial career to date, Erin organized an exhibition where collectors of Pachner’s beautiful and colorful abstractions discovered th

Katherine Pill is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in downtown St. Petersburg. In this conversation with Barbara St. Clair, Katherine shares her duties as curator of the growing collection of contemporary art at this classic museum - from exploring cutting-edge new digital works to collaborating with public artists Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse on community engagement with their work. Find out more about the Museum of Fine Arts at mfastpete.org. . . . Images 1-2 are from Mickett-Stackhouse’s Irma Reflections at the MFA. Find out more about this participatory installation at mfastpete.org/event/mickett-stackhouse-irma-reflections/all. Image 3 is by Christian Marclay, a still from Telephones, 1995, video, running time 7:30 minutes. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Find out more about this pioneering artist at tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-marclay.

Desiree Moore is a multidisciplinary artist working in video and film, art installations and a unique take on interactive public art. She shares her creative process, with plenty of action in the editing room, in this conversation with Barbara St. Clair. Along with her engaging collaborative effort, The Barter Boat, traveling the country to trade people’s special objects and stories. Find out more about Desiree Moore’s work at https://www.desireenicholemoore.com/. Explore the online journal she posted during her Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Fellowship - https://creativepinellas.org/desiree-moore/. Find out more about the Barter Boat at https://www.facebook.com/BarterBoat/.

Carrie Boucher’s artistic practice is driving a traveling art classroom, providing opportunities for children and adults to create art. The much-beloved Nomad Art Bus visits art festivals and foster homes, domestic abuse shelters, juvenile detention centers and parks, recreation centers and youth programs in areas of poverty throughout Tampa Bay. Carrie talks with Barbara St. Clair about her journey from a solo studio practice to this vibrant community art project. She tells the story of the Bus they drove and coaxed and sometimes towed to events - and how their first participants invented what is now the Nomad trademark, that everybody gets to paint the bus. Carrie explains the joys and challenges of working as an artist with a social practice - and how she uses her training in critiquing art to constantly question her own work, and keep making it better. You can find out more about the Nomad Art Bus at http://www.nomadartbus.org/.

Susana Weymouth is the Executive Director - and sole employee - of Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture and the Arts. The TBBCA is one of 11 national Business Committees for the Arts, connecting business people with artists and art. Their work brings business folk to galleries and theatres, and connects artists with offices looking for art. The relationships the TBBCA build help artists and arts organizations find patrons, and help businesses shape creative workplaces as they engage with the arts around them. Susana talks about the arts as a vital economic force, and how businesses and artists can work together. She explains the TBBCA’s advocacy role in funding for the arts. And for nonprofits struggling to find and develop board members, she shares her tips for building a strong and active board of directors. The scholarship program the TBBCA provides has helped many young Tampa Bay artists build professional careers. And the annual Impact Awards, honoring artists, arts leaders and arts supporters, shines

Painter Nathan Beard found his way to both realistic and abstract new work in the only time he had - when his newborn daughter was napping. Nathan talks with Barbara St. Clair about creating visual artwork that’s inspired by his other passion, environmental science and endangered species. Nathan shares his path and ongoing goals as a professional artist, and the things art school does not prepare you for. The work of Nathan Beard, Akiko Kotani and Rob Tarbell is featured in Unexpected: Art By Alternative Means, on display at the Leepa-Rattner Museum in Tarpon Springs through May 19 - leeparattner.org/explore/exhibitions-on-view/unexpected-art-by-alternative-means-featuring-nathan-beard-akiko-kotani-and-rob-tarbell. Find out more about Nathan’s work at nathanbeardfineart.com. Follow the online journal he kept during his tenure as a Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Fellow at creativepinellas.org/nathan-beard. - Arts In is produced by Matt and Sheila Cowley. Executive Producer, Barbara St. Clair.

As Keep St Pete Lit brings this year’s Writer in Residence to town, we share a conversation with last year’s award-winning author, Ladee Hubbard. Ladee talks with Barbara St. Clair about her rollicking, imaginative novel, The Talented Ribkins, about a family of African Americans living in the South who have odd and unique superpowers. . . like drawing maps and seeing colors no one else can see. The inspiration for the book is an essay by W.E.B. DuBois, a story of a strangely-shaped potato and her grandfather defying odds to earn a PhD in chemistry and teach at St Pete College, at a time when that was a rare thing for an African American to do. Ladee Hubbard talks about deciding to earn an MFA while raising three young children, and how Toni Morrison encouraged all her wild experiments with language as a student. You can find out more about her work at https://ladeehubbard.com/. Check out the events around this year’s Keep St Pete Lit Writer in Residence and the annual SunLit Festival, celebrating re

You might think that Sheryl Oring’s work is about old-fashioned manual typewriters. But her compelling style of public art is about memory, and stories. Sheryl Oring’s powerful body of work gives voice to writers who were silenced, and helps people share stories and make their voices heard. In this vibrant conversation, she explains how she developed Writer’s Block to honor the writers, dancers and musicians whose work was banned in Nazi Germany. From the first manual typewriter she bought in Berlin, to the construction crew charmed by her bold request for rebar, to the night she debuted the work where Nazis burned books in the rain in 1933 - and hundreds of people under umbrellas watched dancers and musicians performing in the rain on her monumental sculpture installation, of typewriters trapped in cages. Dressed like a secretary in the 1950s, Sheryl has created vibrant public art projects that invite people to dictate a postcard to politicians. She asked New Yorkers what they’d like people to remember

You’ve seen Herb Snitzer’s photographs - on album covers, CD covers and almost every major magazine and newspaper. His images of Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Nina Simone are legendary, a few of the many classic jazz musicians he knew well and loved. His photographs are striking, and they always tell a story. Herb Snitzer’s candid photos of the Civil Rights Movement capture moments of electric change. Though he still regrets being backstage with Martin Luther King Jr., Ossie Davis and James Baldwin - without his camera. In his 80s now, Herb is still creating - and he still chooses black and white film over digital. Herb shares the stories behind many of his best-known images - revealing where and when, and what’s happening outside the frame. And he shares the story of the late-lamented Salt Creek Artworks, a vibrant group of artists who broke new ground for St. Petersburg’s now thriving arts community. Find out more about Herb Snitzer at http://herbsnitzer.com/statement.htm. E

Dancer, choreographer and USF professor Andee Scott says dance is public art as much as performance art. In her work on Our Town, she turned a walking tour of downtown St. Pete into an exploration of site-specific dance performances. For Our Trail, she brought dance to locations along the Pinellas Trail. Andee talks with Barbara St. Clair about her changing role in dance as she grows older, and her passion for exploring our humanity through movement, in this exciting conversation on Arts In. Explore Andee Scott’s work during her time as a 2017 Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Fellow - https://creativepinellas.org/andee-sun-scott/ Find out more about Andee Scott’s work at USF at http://theatreanddance.arts.usf.edu/content/templates/?z=0&a=3132 with links to articles at - http://theatreanddance.arts.usf.edu/content/templates/?z=9&a=4210 A video of Between Here and Now, choreographed by Andee Scott at USF - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zUBo5CeVAc

Jake Troyli is a young artist working with classical oil painting techniques, and making them his own. With humor, and inspiration from both Rubens and Richard Pryor, his work explores race, identity and politics, and invites constant conversation. Jake talks with Barbara St. Clair about his focus on perfecting his technique and why he chooses representational painting. He talks about growing up backstage at St. Pete’s American Stage, and how it’s easier to ask bold questions with art than conversation. Find out more about Jake Troyli’s work at https://www.jaketroyli.com. Read Creative Loafing’s article about his 2018 exhibition at the ArtsXchange - https://www.cltampa.com/arts-entertainment/theater/article/20991797/jake-troyli-at-the-arts-xchange-gallery-race-matters-addressed-with-comic-precision. Explore Jake Troyli’s work during his time as a 2017 Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist at https://creativepinellas.org/jacob-troyli/.

Dolores Coe leads guided drawing sessions with students, caregivers and clinicians - and people who’ve lost language due to strokes or injury. And everyone communicates by making art. Dolores is the Curator of the University of South Florida’s Art in Health Programs, a creative lab aimed at training health care professionals to carefully observe and decode what they’re seeing, hearing and communicating when they’re trying to heal patients. In the Art in Health workshops, artists teach drawing, a composer shares tools for creating and understanding sound, a dancer explores how to see and record movement, and actors teach the listening and responding skills of improvisation. All of this is geared toward making medical and health care students better at their future jobs. The program is part of the Institute for Research in Art that includes the Graphicstudio and USF Contemporary Art Museum. Dolores shares the methods and focus of the Art in Health team - and the surprising offshoots of this program. Her i

Roxanne Fay brings fascinating characters to life onstage. You might see her as Mary Magdalene, or a battered housewife who is suddenly set free. She’s played a wounded grandmother, a young girl hiding in a tree, Coco Chanel - and even wielded stormclouds in The Tempest. As an actor and a playwright, Roxanne Fay crafted a life in professional theatre, working steadily in classic plays, new plays and her own projects. In this conversation with Barbara St. Clair, Roxanne shares insights into vivid characters she’s played, and the love of research that drives her work. She talks about becoming a playwright to create compelling roles to play as she’s grown older, and the passion for live theatre that leads her from one project to the next. Find out more about Roxanne Fay at http://www.roxannefay.com. Check out her work as a 2017 Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Fellow at https://creativepinellas.org/roxanne-fay/.

Gloria Muñoz thinks about the details she observes in life. Details, feelings, shades of meaning that she observes as closely as a scientist. Gloria explores the environment and nature in her work, the prospect of extinction, the complexities of family and the compression of sound. Gloria Muñoz is a poet - examining the world and investigating humans through her work. Gloria shares her passion for eco-poetics and the art of observation, and beautiful poetic structures from around the world. She’s also a filmmaker and advocate for women in the arts. Gloria talks with Barbara St. Clair about the complicated energies of growing up as a first-generation American, and how she trains her students at Eckerd College to truly see the world. Find out more about Gloria Muñoz’s work at http://www.gloria-munoz.com Check out Gloria’s film production company, Pitch Her Productions at https://www.pitchherproductions.org. (Photo by Devon Moore Curtin)