When Teri Navajo completed her first big painting, “City Lights,” she was going through a lot.
“The next day I looked at it, and I was like, ‘Wow, it’s crying,’” says Navajo.
Navajo takes an intuitive approach to painting. “I don’t really have an end result in mind when I get started,” she says. “Raw emotion comes through. If I’m upset, you can see it in the painting.”
Looking at “City Lights,” Navajo realized it was time for a change. “I was really unhappy with my job, and I was trying to figure my life out,” she says. So she went on zapplication and caFÉ, portals for artists who want to apply for art shows, and applied for any art shows she saw in a 100-mile radius. She estimates that she applied to 60-100 art shows that year.
“I was just determined to make a go of it,” she says.
Navajo was already in her 30s when she was featured as an emerging artist at the 2016 Gasparilla Festival of the Arts. It was “City Lights “that got her in.
“Everything happened really fast,” says Navajo. “It was like, ‘OK here’s your first show, and here’s a whirlwind of events that are going to happen around you.’”
That same year, she was selected to participate in the Chad Mize-curated Mixed Tape, Oldsmar City Hall displayed her work, and she had her first solo show at The Bunker. Most of these shows took place within four months. She was also taking one of Tim Gibbons’s art classes during this time, and doing social media marketing for a couple of local breweries.
As new breweries opened up, they started asking Teri if she could put up art shows for them. Eventually, they were asking for more artwork than she could produce. When she explained her dilemma to Gibbons, he hooked her up with some artists interested in showing their work. “When I was working with Tim, we called it The Creative Life,” she says.
When Navajo struck out on her own, she started calling it Fringe. She wanted to create shows for those people who couldn’t afford an agent or installation fees.
“I remember starting out, being broke, and not being able to afford the paint I wanted,” says Navajo. “I just wanted it to be a free public art gallery… I really wanted a community out of it, too. I didn’t want it to be me providing a service. I wanted to build a network.”
Over the past two years, Navajo has assembled that network, of nine volunteer curators and more than 300 artists. Some are friends and some are people she’s met doing the shows.
“It’s had such an organic growth” she says.
There are now 15 venues hosting Fringe shows throughout the year in Tampa and St. Petersburg. The list includes breweries, bars, a restaurant, a gourmet market, an ice cream parlor, a coffee shop, a used clothing store and an office space.
Whenever Fringe hosts an art show at one of their 15 venues, Navajo advertises the show in Fringe’s private Facebook group, and artists interested in participating reach out to that show’s curator. Many of the artist are just starting out, as Navajo herself was only a few years ago.
Three years after starting Fringe Creatives, Navajo has painted a follow-up to her “City Lights” called “The Swamp at Dawn.”
“This new one is a reflection of how it’s been these past three years, and where I’m going to go,” says Navajo, “I maybe still don’t know that answer, but it’s a little bit softer, and things are figured out a little bit more.”
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 6, 2018.