An ode to the weirder side of Florida history, Crab Devil’s Peninsularium has taken its next steps in bringing the unusual to the Tampa Bay art scene.
The fairly new Tampa-based arts collective, comprised of artists and visionaries from several other local collectives including Tempus Projects, Cunsthaus, LiveWork Studios and more, is in the process of launching its Peninsularium, and most recently has sent an open call to artists to fill its Cabinet of Curiosities.
As its website reads, the Peninsularium is “cooler than a museum, smarter than a theme park, weirder than a carnival.” And it will be weird. With an entrance disguised as a typical Florida roadside bait shop, this large-scale collaborative, experiential arts project will act as a love letter to both Florida and Tampa’s “kitsch” history and culture, featuring immersive art spaces housed inside repurposed shipping containers, as an homage to both Tampa’s history in maritime commerce and travelling circuses of the early 1900s.
Housed at 3800 N. Nebraska Ave. in Ybor Heights, alongside the nonprofit art gallery Tempus Project and Tim Ogden’s brewery and tasting room Deviant Libation, the Peninsularium is Crab Devil’s effort to bring Tampa its first and only permanent immersive arts experience.
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Crab Devil Company Officer Devon Brady said the Peninsularium will be a representation of the roadside show scene and mom-and-pop operations of Florida’s past.
“The kind of thematic elements that we're dealing with are kind of the weird side of Florida that you would see in these roadside attractions and cabinets of curiosity and museums of oddities and things like that,” Brady, 46, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “So, it's kind of a mishmash of actual Florida or Tampa history and lore, and then invented imagined histories and taxonomies and flora and fauna and everything in between.”
The Cabinet of Curiosities, which will act as a physical passageway into the Peninsularium, draws upon the idea of the traditional cabinet of curiosities: a display of notable collections of objects of natural history, works of art and antiquities that came before the modern museum. Also referred to as Cabinets of Wonder or Wunderkammer, modern adaptations of these rooms work to spotlight and celebrate all that is unexpected and outlandish, and in this case, all that is Florida.
Submissions for the Cabinet of Curiosities are due July 1 and “should be extraordinary, bizarre, and unsettling 2D and 3D creations to be included in our contemporary Wunderkammer,” the Crab Devil call for submissions reads; commissioned works should be completed and delivered by September 15.
So far, Brady said, Crab Devil is working with several artists and creatives in planning the 40-foot shipping container installations. He describes the Cabinet of Curiosities as an introductory piece to the larger Peninsularium whole, housing smaller-scale works that can be displayed in a more traditional way. He also hopes the open call to artists will help Crab Devil broaden its horizons in terms of artist partnerships, helping to connect Crab Devil with local creatives they have not yet worked with.
Tracy Midulla, Crab Devil’s creative director and Tempus Projects’ founder, director and chairman of the board of directors, told CL she hopes the call for submissions helps Crab Devil create a registry of Tampa artists to work with on both the Peninsula and on future projects. Her job as creative director, she said, is to be a liaison between the artists and the organization.
“Often when you do an open call for submissions, you obviously get so many more submissions than you can accept,” Midulla, 46, explained. “The important thing to me, whenever we do a call for submissions, is that it introduces us to artists that we do often have a relationship with already.”
Wanting to bring together local—and national and international—artists for an immersive and unusual experience, Brady said the first discussions for The Peninsularium began about two years ago.
“I'd say, in the last probably five years or so, there's been an uptick in these large scale immersive art experiences,” he said.
Citing Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf, New York City’s Sleep No more and the Museum of Ice Cream, Brady said much of the Inspiration for the Peninsularium came from existing experiential groups.
“Some of these other immersive events are more Instagram-oriented, social media-driven, kind of things, where there's a heavier component of advertising and branding,” he said. “So, we kind of position ourselves a little bit more on the fine art side of things, although it is immersive and it's family oriented.”
Initially hoping for an early 2021 opening of the Peninsularium to the public, Crab Devil has seen some complications and changes arise from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I would say that mostly the only thing that has changed for us really has been the timeline,” Midulla said. “We had a couple of small events that we obviously had to postpone, but it hasn't stopped us, it hasn't changed us, it's just changed our timeline.”
Midulla said that while the timeline has been altered, the situation has given Crab Devil an opportunity to work with local and regional artists under the confines of self-isolation on smaller-scale projects, like sending out old cigar boxes to be made into dioramas.
“I know that there are plenty of people that have been set back financially, they’ve been set back emotionally because it's very hard for some people to spend that much time alone,” she said. “We're trying to keep everyone engaged creatively, so that they can work positively through this time.”
Although current happenings are leaving some things up in the air, Brady said he’s hoping to open the Peninsularium some time next year. His long-term goal for the project is to set Tampa as a place of support and community for artists.
“I think that we’ve always had a really strong crop of artists in Tampa,” he said. “But there's always been a disconnect between that scene, and the things that it takes to make that scene perpetuate itself. So, this kind of concept of the for-profit immersive venture opened my eyes to another way of doing business that could possibly help to support a large number of artists and a community.”
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This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2020.