Get schooled at Sarasota Art Museum’s ‘Skyway’ installation

I might have gone with one of those “I went to all five Skyway shows so you don’t have to” headlines for this story. But I won’t, because really the headline should be: “I went to all five Skyway shows and now you have to.”

Because if you are even the least bit interested in the local visual art scene, “Skyway 24: A Contemporary Collaboration”—the work of 63 artists and art collectives across five museums—will give you a panoramic view of the scene’s many facets.

And it’s fun. Seriously. There are delights and surprises in all five shows. Visitors also get to experience (or re-experience) the museums, each one its own unique cultural environment. Skyway offers the chance—or maybe the excuse—to take a few weekends out of your life to bask in their glow.

The opening dates of the Skyway shows were staggered over the spring and summer, some launching as early as last May, and the closings are staggered, too.

Hurry to Sarasota Art Museum, for instance, because it closes its show Oct. 27. The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete follows soon thereafter, closing its show Nov. 3; the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum’s (USFCAM) end date is Nov. 23; the Tampa Museum of Art’s is Jan. 5; and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota finishes up its Skyway run on Jan. 25.

The third such multi-museum collaboration since 2017, Skyway 2024 was curated by guest juror Evan Garza of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and curators from the five participating museums. More than 300 applicants responded to an open call to artists from Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties. The curatorial team rated the submissions, with some artists receiving online studio visits from the local curators.

So what happens if more than one museum wants the same artist? Is there a degree of horse-trading? No, Katherine Pill, Senior Curator Of Contemporary Art at St. Pete’s Museum of Fine Arts.

“We all really enjoy working together, so it never gets heated,” she told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

Each curator made their own decision about how to group the works they chose. Pill chose work that could be integrated interestingly within the MFA’s permanent collection. Christian Viveros-Fauné of the USFCAM assembled pieces that rang multiple changes on the theme of landscape. Tampa, Ringling and Sarasota staged their shows in special exhibition galleries without specific themes. But across all five museums you’ll no doubt pick up on visual echoes and trending concerns.

“It’s fantastic when there are themes that run from museum to museum,” said Pill, “themes that visitors can pick up throughout.”

My initial inclination was to give you a detailed description of every one of the artworks in the shows (314 in all, by the count of arts writer Tony Wong Palms, who did an excellent overview for Creative Pinellas’s Arts Coast Magazine). There is so much good work! But the folks at CL, in their wisdom, would not likely stand for a 10,000-word magnum opus.

So what I’ve done here is try to highlight the works in each show that stood out for me or remained in my memory weeks after viewing them, starting with the first two shows closing in October and November. I’ve also included options for dining and other aspects of the exhibitions you might want to check out. We start at the Sarasot Art Museum where it’s time to get schooled.

The Sarasota Art Museum, which opened in 2019 as the anchor of the Ringling College of Art and Design’s south campus, is housed in a former high school. Maybe that’s why its Skyway exhibition docents are so good at educating. Curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., Senior Curator, Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design

Don’t miss

Samantha Modder, “A Field of Lost Hair Ties” Created with digitally manipulated ballpoint pen and taking up an entire gallery wall and then some, “Field” has the mischievous charm of a children’s book illustration. But it also can be seen as a statement about over-consumption, liberation, and enslavement. (Ask a docent.)

Sue Havens, “Motherboard” What do you do when your to-do lists are done? During the pandemic, seeking relief from the pressures of virtual academia, Havens scrunched hers into tiny balls along with other “paper ephemera” and attached them to flattened Amazon boxes in a grid-like pattern that suggests the innards of a computer and the homespun squares of a quilt.

Kirk Ke Wang, “GimGong Road” The signpost outside the Skyway galleries, with its lacy filigrees in the style of Asian papercuts, looks nothing like a traditional Tampa street sign. But there is an actual GimGong Road in Tampa, named in honor of the Asian-American man who pioneered the cultivation of citrus trees in Florida. Wang seeks to look beyond the GimGong myths, fraught with romantic stereotype, to evoke his life in a huge, riotous painting layered with images of him as a young man surrounded by deities, vines and flowers.

Jill Taffet, “Sentient Beings” Time for another fun game of Ask the Docent. They will show you the app you can use to make the squiggles and blobs in Taffet’s work come alive as paramecia-like organisms, swimming and splitting apart before your eyes.

Tatiana Mesa Paján, “Piedra (Stone)” series Paján’s art practice includes “mini-public interventions,” covering found objects with dandelion seeds and leaving them in public places where the seeds will eventually dissipate. There’s one such “intervention” happening in the gallery (ask a docent to show you where), but its impact fades in comparison to the antique marble heads she has collected, shrouding them with gauzy dandelion-seed veils and showing them under glass — as haunting as death’s heads, at once solid and ephemeral.

Also look for

• Dominique LaBauvie’s “The Forest,” wood-and-steel standing sculptures that suggest both fragility and resilience.
• The angry, funny, politically charged fables of Roger Clay Palmer
• Willow Wells’s mysteriously compelling video, “Consumption.”
• Ryan Day’s explosive paintings and his “Swirling Sandbox,” a monumental stack of Styrofoam stones
• Plus works by Kim Anderson, Herion Park, Gabriel Ramos, Rob Tarbell, and Eszter Sziksz

And be sure to have breakfast or lunch (or weekend brunch) at the Bistro, a light-filled cafe in the Paul Rudolph-designed building behind the main museum. Order a delicious quiche at the counter and settle down for a little more learning: a mural showing the design history of the classic Thonet chair, a replica of which you’ll be sitting on. Open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. daily.

Look for more Skyway previews in the weeks to come.
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This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2024.