Creative Pinellas, the county arts program, is preparing for fall with events to help local artists and promote them in the Tampa Bay area. The group seeks to foster the work of both professional artists with established careers, as well as emerging artists who are just beginning.
“This year we added an ‘Artist Laureate’ category to our Professional Artist Grant,” said Barbara St. Clair, executive director for Creative Pinellas. “We selected Akiko Kotani for her lifelong dedication to the arts.”
This is the fourth year of the Professional Artist Grant for the Pinellas arts group. The 10 recent grantees gathered to share their experiences and discuss how the grant enhanced their projects.
Kotani, a working artist since the 1960s and the first Laureate, said her piece “Soft Walls” represents the repetitive work women do, such as laundry, cooking, and cleaning.
“It’s a very large work of crocheted plastic from recycled 45-gallon waste containers,” she explained. “The crochet hook is a very large wooden one, custom-made, and the crochet takes a long time, but I enjoy it.”
Dancer and choreographer Charlotte Johnson, a Pinellas native, moved to New York to study dance. After graduating from Julliard, she danced professionally in New York before returning to St. Petersburg after the birth of her first son.
“I’ve been dancing since I was seven,” said Johnson, 35, who used her grant to transition from full-time dancer to choreographer. After two seasons with the Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company, she decided to focus on creating and producing.
“This was my first grant, and I used it to develop a piece called ‘Journey to Freedom,’ that explores life’s difficulties through dance and spoken word,” she said. “It’s meant to be healing, to show we can overcome our problems.”
Johnson wants to establish opportunities for dancers to perform in Pinellas, so they don’t have to leave the area to find work. Another recipient of the Professional Artist grant for 2019 is Victoria Jorgensen, a videographer and filmmaker, also a longtime Tampa Bay resident.
“I started out studying creative writing at USF, but I took an art course that showed the film The Andalusian Dog, and decided I wanted to make films,” she said. The famous collaboration between Picasso and Dali spurred a four-decade career in photography and film and her own successful media company in Tampa.
Now she’s working on an indie film, The Magic Hour, exploring aging. Jorgenson says the grant allowed her time for script rewriting and do work “outside the box.” Other professionals who received grants for 2019 are equally talented, and all have many awards to their credit.
‘We manage and market the grants, but we are not part of the selection process,” said St. Clair. “Our great panel is from all genres — academics, curators, artists and academics. They’re objective, and they’re from outside the immediate community.”
According to St. Clair, these grants are open to any professional, but they must live in Pinellas County.
This year’s award winners included two musicians. Stephen P. Brown, general director of the Dunedin Music Society, also conducts choirs, concert bands and composes. Tom Sivak, a composer and conductor of documentary film scores, classical pieces and a variety of musical forms says his goal is to “meld together a musical genre” to create a new musical experience.
Novelist and poet Steve Kistulentz is the author of the novel Panorama and two award-winning collections of poetry; his work appears in numerous literary journals. Other visual artists are Babs Reingold, Cynthia Mason, Carolina Cleere and Gabriel Ramos. Reingold has exhibited in New York and other venues across the U.S., earning numerous prestigious awards for her work. Her sculptures and installations focus on poverty, the environment and beauty.
Cynthia Mason trained as an architect and makes soft sculpture and mixed-media constructions that mix the spatial and material codes of painting and sculpture. Carolina Cleere paints her life experiences and is best known for large-scale paintings of children in lush environments, evoking her Florida youth.
Puerto Rican-born Gabriel Ramos lives and works in Tarpon Springs. His art includes sculpture and installation, as well as video and photography. His work has been featured in many local and international publications and shown at film festivals worldwide.
The next event at Creative Pinellas is “The Art of Marketing and Branding, From Advocacy to Impact—Expanding the Impact of Our Arts Messaging!” The workshop will provide insights and tools to help build new audiences, business partnerships, and other aspects to enhance area arts community.
The Art of Marketing and Branding, From Advocacy to Impact—Expanding the Impact of Our Arts Messaging! Fri. Aug. 23, 8:30 a.m.–4 p.m. $25. Creative Pinellas, Largo. creativepinellas.org.
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This article appears in Aug 22-29, 2019.