HCC Dale Mabry’s Gallery 221 began collaborating with the Tampa Bay Black Heritage Festival back in 2005 featuring an exhibition about the Tuskegee Airmen, curated and produced by Joan & Reilly Designs. “It’s kind of a long-standing collaboration between the festival and the gallery to support artists of African American heritage,” Gallery Director Amanda Poss explains.
IF YOU GO
“Relations” by Kalup Linzy
2nd-floor DLRCReception: Thursday, January 23, 5 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Artist performance to begin at 6 p.m.
Gallery 221, 4001 W. Tampa Bay Blvd., Tampa.
Runs from January 21 – March 5.
Each year, the gallery showcases work from a contemporary African American artist in conjunction with the festival. The goal is to find “someone who’s around currently, telling stories of the black community,” Poss tells CL.
In 2012, Gallery 221 showed photographer Michael Cunningham’s Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. In 2017, the gallery showed works by Delita Martin, a Texas-based artist known for her layered portraits combining printmaking, drawing, sewing, collaging and painting. In 2018, they showed Mark Thomas Gibson and William Villalongo’s work in Utopias. Then in 2019, they hosted Steve Locke’s The Color of Remembering, one of the most shocking and thought-provoking art exhibitions I’ve seen in Tampa Bay in recent years. Through these exhibitions, Gallery 221 exposed Hillsborough Community College students and Tampa Bay art audiences to black life experiences as expressed through art.
This year, Gallery 221 hosts Kalup Linzy. Linzy grew up in a black rural small town in Clermont, FL, watching soap operas with his grandmother. The influence was so strong, Linzy tells us, that he started making his own soap operas in high school and continued making them through college.
When I first saw Linzy’s work, I was struck by how different it is from most things I typically see in a gallery setting here in Tampa Bay.
When you walk into an art gallery or an art museum, are you expecting to see indie soap operas playing on TVs? Probably not. These aren’t your typical soap operas either. They’re more like art films inspired by soap operas. On the surface, all the melodrama is amusing, but dive deeper and you’ll start to think about your own relationships.
“His work touches on so many levels,” says Poss. “The show is called ‘Discord, Melodrama and the Intimate in the Work of Kalup Linzy,’ because he doesn’t mask that part. Families and relationships are often messy and full of drama, but also really intense highs and loves along with the lows. We can all relate to that.”
This isn’t the first time Linzy’s work found it’s way into a Tampa Bay art gallery. Although he’s not living in Florida at the moment, Linzy earned his MFA at USF Tampa, and his work still appears in group shows here.
“Kalup is such a known entity around here,” says Poss. “Everyone’s either gone to one of his performances or starred in one of his videos, or one of his videos has been shot at their home.”
But outside of all those group shows, Linzy’s only had a single solo show in Tampa that I can recall — his 2016 Tempus Projects show, Sun. Moon. Stars. Dreams. The Tempus show was specifically showing work Linzy created during his Tempus Projects residency. According to his online resume, Linzy’s had more solo shows in New York than in Tampa. “We thought what he’s done and [what he’s] contributed to the local community here warrants a solo show,” Poss told CL.
This show will probably be the most comprehensive Kalup Linzy art show to grace a Tampa art gallery yet. “It’s almost a mini-retrospective,” Poss tells us. They’re bringing out four television sets, each showing multiple episodes, so you can see Linzy videos going all the way back to 2002. “The oldest one we have in the show is Ride to da Club,” says Poss, “which was kind of a precursor for Conversations [wit de Churen].”
On top of all the videos, the show features Linzy’s Family Tree installation, two original live performances, and even some behind-the-scenes content.
“We’ll have like a little behind-the-scenes feature where you can see some of the costumes and things that relate to the making of the videos,” Poss told CL. “He actually gave us one of his notebooks in which he’s working through the lines, and we got to go through and look at it. [In it] you can see him develop from loose structures and concepts to the end, [where] they become a defined script.”
Because this is all part of the Tampa Bay Black Heritage Festival, we asked Linzy the somewhat awkward question of how his heritage influences his work.
“My work is pretty much inspired by me growing up watching soap operas with my grandmother…my great grandmother listened to soap operas on the radio in the 1930s…that sort of thing was passed down in [the] family,” he told us. “But [my work] also draws from African American culture. It’s like a southern black family in Conversations wit de Churen. The work started with family. Family Tree is also exploring family, but also gender and race within that. The Tree itself is speaking to lineage and heritage, and how we kind of all — although we kind of treat things as separate — we are all here together. And then histories. If you look at world histories, from that perspective, or earth history, it’s kind of all a part of the same history, in the long run. To me, that’s how it is. The tradition of me growing up with gospel, and having that translate into my performance art — it’s all related to my upbringing in a black rural small town.”
When we asked Linzy what he hopes people will get out of this exhibition, he said “I would like people to go in and kind of engage with the characters, even if you don’t know or figure everything out about the character. Hopefully, it’s a nice feel, and they will feel inspired and feel that this is something that has real emotion to it. Like it’s another world, but it’s reflecting our world.”
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This article appears in Jan 16-23, 2020.
