Call him a prodigal son.
In 1965, Robert Stackhouse graduated with the first class of art students to receive bachelor's degrees from the University of South Florida. The Bronxville, N.Y., native spent his teenage years in Auburndale, mingling with water moccasins and alligators along a Polk County lake, but his career as an artist soon took him far from Florida. First came graduate studies in Maryland, followed by a teaching gig at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art in Washington, D.C., then time spent in the artistic hothouse of New York's Soho, and other nomadic pursuits.
In the intervening 30 years, Stackhouse became an internationally known artist, seeing his work enter the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and the Smithsonian. Then, after a spell as an art professor at the University of Georgia, he and his wife and collaborative partner, Dr. Carol Mickett, decided to call the Bay area home. They've been back since 2002 (living in a 25,000-square-foot former industrial building on St. Petersburg's waterfront), and over the next two weeks a series of exhibits four years in the offing finally unfolds as an official welcome back to the Bay area for artist Robert Stackhouse. A rare collaboration between institutions in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Lakeland offers a three-venue, time-spanning and in-depth look at the artist's career — made all the more meaningful by the fact that Stackhouse is not simply from Florida but of Florida.
At Lakeland's Polk Museum of Art, Swimmers and Floaters, a small but satisfying 30-year retrospective, illuminates his local roots. The exhibit charts the organic synthesis in Stackhouse's paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures between the aesthetic preoccupations of his time — minimalism, representation, concept, process — and water-born symbols and sensations of Florida life.
"Great Rain Snake," a 40-ft. long construction of hinged oak pieces created just four years after his graduation from USF, rules over a spacious gallery like a primal monster-god, though its wooden materiality is laid bare. "Snake Story," a four-frame narrative drawing, tells the story of Stackhouse's communion with a skin-shedding reptile that would reappear in his work for years. And a series of works charts the rise of mysterious, ghost-like boat hull and deck forms in his paintings, drawings and walkable A-frame "passageway" structures that he has installed at institutions throughout the country.
The themes of transition and transformation seen through the lens of a water-based iconography continue in a show of prints and other works at USF's Contemporary Art Museum, which — thanks to a generous donation by Stackhouse in 1997 — holds his official archive of editioned works. (Stackhouse's relationship with his alma mater is one of deep mutual respect and affection; in 2006, the university awarded him with an honorary doctorate.)
But most thrillingly, Waves of Meaning, a collaborative exhibit at the Arts Center, features a new site-specific sculpture and paintings by Stackhouse and Mickett, a former philosophy professor who began collaborating with Stackhouse when they met in the late '90s. (They married in 2000.) A series of image maps and a walkable passageway made of wood will be installed at the Arts Center for the opening on Jan. 18. They connect to Stackhouse's past work but mark a foray into new and uncharted territories. Bay area residents got their first view of the Mickett/Stackhouse partnership on First Night 2008, when the pair created Peace O'Eight, a wooden boat inscribed by Sharpie-wielding celebrants with New Year wishes, then set afire. Now, with the Arts Center show and an ad in next month's Art In America, the rest of the world is getting the news, too.
"We're looking at this whole new body of work with a new sense of energy," Stackhouse said in a phone interview from the St. Pete studio he shares with Mickett. "In a way, for me it's another start. It's a start for both of us. This show at the Arts Center is really the beginning of the rest of our lives."
Sketchbook
Also opening this weekend, Orlando-based photographer Les Slesnick debuts the product of his exploratory trips to Dunedin in an exhibition at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center. During his visits to more than 50 private homes in the city, Slesnick captured vivid color photographs of highly personal domestic interiors — his artistic trademark. Private Spaces — the Dunedin Project follows similar undertakings in Mexico and Cuba. At an opening reception for the show on Fri., Jan. 11, Slesnick will speak about his work at 7 p.m. For more information, go to dfac.org.
On a less cheerful note, the New Year brought some unsettling news about Flight 19, the downtown alternative space leased by the city of Tampa to the nonprofit artists' collective Experimental Skeleton. A portion of the restored baggage claim building at Union Train Station where the collective has staged events and exhibits for more than two years will likely soon be leased to a new commercial tenant, Highland Properties, which plans to install electricity, running water and other amenities. In the words (via e-mail) of ES's Joe Griffith, "At the very least this will make our space more attractive to other leasers or even to Highland Properties, whose owner has already expressed an interest in the larger
In anticipation of an eventual threat to Flight 19's existence, Griffith has called for a letter-writing campaign to remind the mayor and City Council of the importance of the space to Tampa's arts community. To recap some recent Flight 19 achievements, the group hosted Identity In Progress, an exhibition of local artists of Latin American and Caribbean descent in conjunction with Arte 2007, and has collaborated extensively with the Tampa Museum of Art and USF to co-host exhibits by nationally known artists including the Art Guys as well as student artists. Flight 19 also represented Tampa at the Scope Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach 2006 through an informal relationship with Miami alternative space Locust Projects.
I could go on, but I won't — at least, not here. For further discussion of this issue, check out my blog at artsqueeze.com. Address letters in support of Flight 19 to Mayor Pam Iorio, 306 E. Jackson St., Tampa, FL 33602, or members of Tampa's city council, whose contact information can be found at tampagov.net.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.