Regional arts organizations typically enhance their profiles by importing New York-based "big guns" who jury exhibitions and bestow Big Apple wisdom on local arts communities.
Recently, St. Petersburg's Arts Center did just that. They invited Richard Vine, 15-year veteran Art in America managing editor, to jury their 12th Annual All Florida Juried Exhibition and speak at a fundraising luncheon.
Vine was a smart choice. He's an engaging speaker with an unexpected flair for stand-up laced with art-world critique. He called artists "small-scale entrepreneurs making products no one wants," and said they "live like gypsies and want to be compensated like stockbrokers." He characterized the critic as "a wine steward in a fancy restaurant."
Vine's crowd-pleasing remarks touched on artists' sometimes ingenuous assertions that they don't want their work commodified, despite the grim fact that New York gallery rents can reach up to $20,000 a month.
Artists eager for advice savored the Vine strategy, including how to get noticed. In this era of "rampant pluralism," critics are still hungry for new art, which Vine characterized as the "curse of a modernist agenda."
And the art he chose? Considering the highly credentialed juror, expectations soared for an exhibition of 33 artists culled from 500 entries. Vine wisely avoided a regionalist approach, citing the supremacy of a globalist art world. But his prime consideration is whether an image is intriguing. There are some intriguing and/or compelling works in the exhibition, though after a second viewing I was hard-pressed to pin down the lack of collective sparkle.
Two notable photographs, taken on opposite sides of the globe, suggest paradoxical tranquility. University of Miami art professor Kerry Stuart Coppin's handsome giclee print, from his recent series snapped in Senegal, effectively dissolves 21st century reality into imagery seemingly birthed in the 19th. Dramatic clouds (or smoke) hovering over a quiet beach setting invoke the dominance of nature over human vulnerability. Ambiguity plays out in Ric Savid's photo of a young Filipino woman and her child immersed in water. The photographer, with a background in journalism, was lured to the scene by the peaceful, innocent, and meditative presence of several women and children. But for the viewer, dark tones and the young woman's expressive face easily suggest subliminal anxieties, all of which enhance this fine award-winning image.
Another standout is University of Tampa professor Hoang Van Bui's Best of Show mixed-media installation uniting memory with spirituality. A simulated bed frame filled with white feathers surrounds a small video screen showing a Vietnamese beggar woman on a plywood board. After filming the scene, the artist — Weekly Planet's 2002 Best Artist — was disturbed by his inability to help. He then spent years matching the intensity of this moment with other personal life-altering experiences. Hiding a sign held by an actual homeless person (it's under the feathers), Van Bui continues conceptualism at its finest.
Nancy Cervenka's second place Award of Excellence for her sleekly elegant spirals of film sculpture indirectly reflects the continuing place of video in the contemporary art scene.
Identity issues also continue to thrive. Barbara Watler's award-winning textile from her "Fingerprint Series" converts a magnified fingerprint into linear abstraction.
Whether in two-dimensions or three, wall-hung, floor-bound or glass-cased, these images range from signs, symbols and soft-serve, to robots and reality. From a sculptural wooden braid trimmed with hair to the tempered kitsch of woven-plastic cross motifs.
And let's not ignore intriguing, well-cropped voyeuristic photos of female legs and shoes, a perfect contrast to a painted peek-a-boo pose and laced corset which is really not very intriguing at all.
Two other Arts Center exhibitions feature pop art variations.
Here Comes the Sun The biggest surprise is St. Petersburg artist David Williams' exhibit Cyanotypes: A Painterly Approach, a distinct shift in his pop art sensibility. In his current exhibition at the Hough Gallery, the familiar consumer motifs of this accomplished pop painter spring into new life as a result of his studies abroad.
Financed by a 2001-02 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, Williams, represented by Boston's Kidder-Smith Gallery, traveled to Florence, Italy, fully intending to paint. By chance, the former graphic artist sat in on a cyanotype class, one of the first photo processes developed circa 1840, and one he had never experienced. When exposed to ultra-violet solar rays, chemicals applied to a paper's surface result in blue tonalities.
Williams' prints, resembling expressionistic dripped and splashed blueprints with white linear markings, were made in Florence and St. Petersburg. They're shown here for the first time as a nod to his Florida funding. I'm impressed that his subject matter is no longer compressed into the foreground. This imagery, including ads, text, ferns, leaves, Italian stamps, etc., recedes as spontaneous chemical drips in shades of blue unite the picture field. Considering this freeing impulse, Williams' art deserves watching.
Family Matters Innuendo: Kathie Olivas, Brandt Elling Peters, and Michael and Karen Peters, occupies the Everett and Stanley Galleries. It resembles a jam-packed excursion of one family's variants on pop art.
It's hard to believe anyone in the Bay area isn't familiar with this art-making family unit. Tampa's Kathie and Brandt are husband and wife. Brandt's parents, Michael and Karen, recently moved from Tampa to New Mexico. Each is really talented, but it was a mistake to exhibit their work in the confusing groupings that fill the entire gallery. Even with diagrammed charts indicating each artist and his/her work, this was overkill. Each should have claimed a separate space, with the family composite on a separate wall.
Study the charts and you'll quickly discern who's who. They're all worth getting to know. P.S. Dunedin Fine Art Center guest curator, Janis Karam Gallo, mounted separate exhibitions for two young Miami artists, both with graduate art degrees from Yale.
Cuba-born Luisa Basnuevo's sensitive drawings and paintings absorb the touch, smell, and metaphor in a life touched by place and dislocation. Cone-shaped eucalyptus seeds are subjects here — isolated or massed, foregrounded or receding, they invoke the artist's childhood and encoded visual remnants of the human experience. Her fine work, recalling Rothenberg's mysterious "New Image" painting, would have benefited from a smaller exhibition or more variety. Similar subject matter has a way of saturating viewers.
Though John Bailly is as internationally grounded as Basnuevo, their work could not be more different. Bailly is one of the more challenging artists I've come across lately. His layered surfaces seem energized from the inside out, the result of his restless passion for social, political and cultural dynamics. In these vibrant allover paintings, some lit by interior hues, linear devices or seductive color continually temper underlying chaos.
Like many other artists in this review, these two are worth keeping an eye on.
Art Critic Adrienne M. Golub can be reached at randagolub@aol.com.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2003.
