In 1963, Steve Holm had to make a choice. He could sign up for a tour of duty in Vietnam at age 18 — a prospect that seemed like a death wish — or he could go to college to study art, a vocation he’d inherited partly from his father, a Sarasota sign painter. In seven years, he earned scholarships at New College, Ringling School of Art (now Ringling College of Art and Design) and USF, then emerged from academia just in time to field a job offer from Hillsborough Community College, the two-year college founded in 1968. Over prospects in other cities, Holm chose the Tampa gig because he’d be helping to found an art department from scratch at HCC.
“This place had no politics,” he says. “It was new.”
The same year — 1970 — Jerry Meatyard was weighing his options in New Jersey, where he’d lived and taught since earning a master’s degree at NYU on the GI Bill in the early 1960s. Among the guests at a gathering at a friend’s house there was the new president of HCC.
“I met him, and he offered me a job,” Meatyard recalls.
On the same week, Holm and Meatyard — a painter and a sculptor, respectively — converged on HCC’s fledgeling Tampa campus. A far cry from the complexes run by the college today at Dale Mabry, Ybor, Brandon and Plant City, the campus then consisted of land and buildings formerly used by Tampa International Airport; Meatyard remembers that his first office was located up five flights of stairs in an old air traffic control tower. Neither man imagined that in the ensuing 30 years, they’d become known together as the backbone of art education at HCC: two complementary personalities that generations of students would experience as a dynamic whole.
“If you were cooking, you’d have something sweet and something spicy,” Holm says. “They were hard to take individually, but together they were magic.”
Through September, the legacy of Meatyard, now 83, and Holm, 68 — known to former students simply as “Jerry and Steve” — is being honored with The Jerry and Steve Show, an exhibition at HCC Ybor’s art gallery. Rather than art by the former professors, the exhibit showcases works by nearly 45 of their educational offspring, many of whom have gone on to become professional artists or avid hobbyists. The exhibit closes next week with a reception at the gallery and a roast of Meatyard and Holm on HCC Ybor’s Mainstage Theatre.
Patrick Thomsen, who was a student of both in the late 1980s, conceived and organized the show. Earlier this year, he represented Meatyard during negotiations to remove the former professor’s sculpture, “Future Walk” — a group of balletic figures moving forward, crafted in steel — from outside the HCC Ybor art building. Because the batch of Cor-Ten steel Meatyard had used to make it two decades ago was flawed, rust eroded the sculpture over time until pieces of it threatened to fall off the work’s tall outdoor perch.
After “Future Walk” was taken down, Thomsen wanted to commemorate his teacher’s legacy in some other way. Looking back at Meatyard’s influence on his education as inseparable from Holm’s, he created an exhibit that would pay homage to both.
The resulting invitational doesn’t display any overarching rhyme or reason in visual terms, but as testimony to the Jerry and Steve experience it packs a sensory wallop and touches the heart.
The farthest flung of their alumni might be Medhi Movasagghi, who arrived in Tampa in the 1980s as an exile from the Iranian revolution, Thomsen says. (The two were classmates at HCC.) Now an art professor in Tehran, Movasagghi contributes a small cast bronze sculpture made with additions of copper and stone; the piece harmonizes all three elements in a form resembling a miniature shelter. He’ll skype in for Thursday’s roast.
Another is James Michaels, the Palm Harbor-based painter who for 35 years dominated local outdoor art shows and cropped up in museum exhibitions with his pop expressionist compositions. (At 66, he’s now retired from the fair circuit.) Michaels’ painting in the show combines half a dozen composite male figures based on images of men from mass media, along with references to Caravaggio and Rembrandt, into a black-and-white art puzzle that asks: what’s going on here and what looks so familiar about it?
Michaels, who makes a living from his art, says that during times when persevering as an artist was tough, he often recalled encouraging or inspiring conversations with Holm and, especially, Meatyard.
“They instilled in me, both of them, that if you had the ability and desire, the rest will come,” he says.
Other participating artists include Joe Griffith (two of his cast resin evil eye pendants guard the gallery door); Rocky Kester (ceramic plaques of mythological creatures, made in the artist’s Goo Foo Pottery studio in Ybor); and CL creative director Todd Bates (who photographed Ybor City’s famous roosters).
Thomsen contributes a piece, too: a giant drawing that spans the atrium outside the gallery. Amid a dream-like compilation of images, the drawing depicts Steve and Jerry’s hands at larger-than-life scale. (Jerry’s is easily recognizable because it lacks one finger and the tip of another due to a saw accident.) The piece fuses what Thomsen remembers as each teacher’s most passionate teaching point: artful composition (Meatyard) and accuracy of anatomy (Holm).
On Thursday, the exhibit’s artists share memories of what they learned from both professors.
“I live in fear and trepidation,” Holm joked last week.
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2012.