The group's name comes from "kunsthaus," the German term for art gallery, with a tweak that Reller says "seemed appropriate."
As Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood has boomed, so has its long-running home for adventurous fine art, Tempus Projects. Once a scrappy startup in a back-alley garage, Tempus now fills an entire complex on N. Florida Avenue, and is broadening its scope to include artist residencies and a home for a new woman-oriented team of collaborators.
That group, Cunst Haus, is made up of 14 of Tampa’s most forward-thinking women in the arts, including MFA St. Pete curator Katherine Pill, USF professor Noelle Mason and Seminole Heights developer/artist Becky Flanders. Starting in August, they’ll fill the new wing of Tempus with programming including not just visual art, but video, performance and music.
“We’re intentionally all women,” says Tempus Projects director Tracy Midulla Reller, who’s doing double duty as a Cunst Haus member. “Tampa doesn’t have any sort of organized, creative, female – I’m trying not to use the word feminist, but maybe feminist – group. You get all these smart women together, and even the definition of feminism becomes a question, and we’ve just decided it doesn’t matter.”
Cunst Haus will take over the former home of Frolic Exchange, a vintage boutique which itself expanded and moved a few doors down. The group's name comes from "kunsthaus," the German term for art gallery, with a tweak that Reller says "seemed appropriate."
“The space became available, and I can’t say no to that, that’s just how I am,” says Reller. “The way that the neighborhood is growing, I don’t think we would have gotten the space if we’d waited.”
The Cunst Haus wing of Tempus is still in preview mode, showing a handful of pieces including a mind-bending video by the duo Destineez Child (USF grads April Childers and Carmen Tiffany). They’re currently scheduled to have a full show in the space in October.
Once it’s complete, the Cunst Haus wing of the building will, along with gallery space, include a wood shop with basic tools for sculptors. Tempus also recently took over a three-bedroom apartment above the gallery, and has begun hosting artists-in-residence. The first resident was the nationally-recognized Kalup Lindsey, whose work is currently on display at Tempus, and applications for the next residency are open until August.
There’s also hope that controlling the whole building will open up new options for performances in the space, since being a good neighbor had previously meant keeping things quiet.
“I’m excited to see how things get livened up around here,” says Reller.
Though women-centric, Reller says the programming for Cunst Haus won’t be exclusively female. When the space officially opens in August, one of the first events will feature poet Ed Steck, who has been lauded by the Poetry Foundation and the Brooklyn Rail.
Though Reller is excited by the expansion of Tempus, she emphasizes that it’s still a struggle. “I’m not going to lie, we are in desperate need of funding all the time. We have one really great private funder, the Gobioff Foundation,” along with a growing membership program and a strong record of successful grant applications.
But that adds up to just about enough to cover rent, and on top of her growing art empire, Reller holds down a day job teaching studio art at HCC Ybor. It’s a full plate, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I very specifically called it ‘Tempus Projects’ when we started,” says Reller, “And not ‘Tempus Gallery.’” I wanted to do a lot of different things.”
This article appears in Jul 7-14, 2016.