Visitors to St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District, the unofficial name given to the area just south of Central Avenue’s newly revitalized 2000 blocks, where a handful of artists maintain studios in converted warehouses, will find the beginnings of an ongoing art exhibition right on the street. Earlier this month, two Tampa Bay-based graffiti artists, Akut and Center One, undertook a massive mural on the side of a commercial warehouse at 24th Street South and 5th Avenue South. In April, two more local artists, BASK and Tes One, will start another on the facade of Zen Glass Studio at 27th Street South and 6th Avenue South.
Both murals are the product of a collaboration designed to bring more attention to the burgeoning district. Glass artist Duncan McClellan, whose two-year-old glass studio has rapidly elevated the neighborhood’s profile, and sculptor Dan Painter set the project in motion. At their request, Central Art Supply Company owner Pat Jennings issued an invitation to the four mural artists.
The overarching idea — an arts district where the exteriors of galleries and artists’ studios become living canvases, too — has a precedent in Florida. Since 2007, Miami art collective Primary Flight has worked to cover the walls of buildings in Wynwood, the gallery district near downtown Miami, with street art murals. As a result, Wynwood’s warehouses have become a year-round art tourist attraction, helping to drive the neighborhood’s growth and the emergence of bars and restaurants.
For their wall, artists Akut — a Berlin- and St. Pete-based artist also known as Damir Tabakovic — and Center One (aka, Chris James) created a dark landscape beset by roiling storm clouds and lightning as a backdrop for their inventive freestyling. The final image reflects the personalities involved, Akut says. A glass tree and paintings of McClellan’s glowing glass vessels appear in the landscape along with a horned green demon modeled on Painter’s sculptures, homages to the artists’ studios across the street. Atop the landscape, Akut’s pyramidal mass of red-orange arrows and blue diamonds (shapes based on the letters of his name) threatens to zoom out of the wall and fly down the block, while Center’s red grid conjures an expanse of subterranean architecture. St. Pete may be starting to build its own street art museum — a phrase sometimes used to describe Wynwood’s graffiti collection — wall by wall.
More public art is coming to the streets of downtown Tampa under the auspices of a city project called Zack Street Promenade of the Arts. Despite its dorky name (who the hell promenades, anyway?), the project has a cool premise — to transform the three blocks of Zack Street stretching east from Florida Avenue to Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park into a distinctive, pedestrian-friendly passage.
The city’s manager of art programs, Robin Nigh, says Zack was chosen because the street already connects historic buildings downtown, and links downtown’s core to the Channel District and Ybor City. To create the promenade, the city will narrow Zack Street’s width along the three blocks and install expanded sidewalks that include landscaping and public art installations. The $1.2 million project should be mostly complete in time for the Republican National Convention.
So far three artists have been selected to contribute the art part of the promenade: Susan Gott of Tampa, Michelle Weinberg of Miami, and Andrews LeFevre Studios of New York. A fourth artist — a Tampa Bay photographer whose work would be transposed onto a tile mosaic wrapped around a column, according to Nigh — was awaiting final approval earlier this week.
Gott is already casting glass in her Seminole Heights studio for a series of screens and metal trellises for the promenade. The screens will be made of square glass blocks containing three-dimensional impressions of objects representing Tampa that Gott has collected or crafted with collaborators — a miniature pirate ship, an old cigar press, a nub of nautical rope, and a tragic theater mask molded from the decorative façade of Tampa Theatre. Gott’s goal is to get people talking when they see glimpses of the city’s narrative embedded in glass.
“I’ve done some similar projects before, but this one is perhaps the most exciting so far because it really pulls together elements of the community that people can relate to,” she says. “It strikes up a conversation. It’s not just a piece, it’s a dialogue.”
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2012.