St. Petersburg artist and arts administrator Maria Emilia, whose home is chockablock with work by Bay area artists as well as her own paintings, folk art and crafts, likes to joke that she needs to get rid of some things. The irony is that she wouldn't dream of divesting herself of any of the paintings, prints, sculptures or other precious objects that adorn her home and bear witness to a decades-long career in the arts.
To walk through Emilia's home is to encounter a roll call of Bay area-based practitioners. In a nook off the kitchen, a huge Theo Wujcik painting hangs; composed of jeans mounted to stretched canvas and splashed with yellow paint, it shows off the artist's witty and playful side. In Emilia's living room, a series of etchings by Polly Knipp Hill, a St. Petersburg artist who died in 1990, document the history of African-American culture in the city. And in the family room, a giant mobile made of coiled celluloid film by Nancy Cervenka commands attention.
Some of the objects in her home attest to her three-and-a-half-year tenure as executive director of Florida Craftsmen; others to her time as a graduate student in visual arts at the University of South Florida. Emilia now works for the Pinellas Opportunity Council, using the arts to stimulate economic development in the county's low-income communities, but she still finds time to make her own work, which has been collected by institutions including the Polk Museum of Art, the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, USF and the National Museum of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Throughout the home, Emilia's creations accent work by others she has collected over the years. An unconventional "quilt" made of felt and paper hangs in the entryway. Bold paintings of mythological creatures in bright red and pink hang beneath Cervenka's mobile. A tidy studio holds work-in-progress by an artist who just can't stop.
"I have this sickness where I always have to be doing something," Emilia says with a laugh.
