Samo Davis’ ‘I’m Alive’ at Tampa Museum of Art in Tampa, Florida. Credit: Photo via TampaMuseumofArt/Facebook

In her introductory essay for Tampa Museum of Art‘s Skyway exhibition, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Joanna Robotham says that the 18 artists selected for the show “range from MFA students and self-taught artists to creative makers with established careers.”

Together, their “deeply personal and introspective” artworks “reveal a creative zeitgeist informed by our post-pandemic world.”

Skyway ’24 closes Sunday, Jan. 5 at the Tampa Museum of Art.

Don’t miss

Cort Hartle, “You and me on a long walk” I saw this before Helene and Milton, but now it’s taken on new resonance. Small sand-colored ceramic houses, reminiscent in their plainness of Monopoly pieces, are arranged in a circle, each one inscribed in red text that speaks to the inexorability of time, tides, and “ground too soft to support its own weight.”
Samo Davis, “I’m Alive” A 12-foot mixed-media creature with shaggy arms and spindly legs embedded in a mess of fanciful plastic detritus, including psychedelically colorful mushrooms and a bubble-coated pig. And don’t miss Davis’s much smaller sculpture, “Saru (Monkey).” He’s a delightful little gremlin.
Latonya Hicks Her richly colorful tondos (circular artworks) overflow with family memory: baby shoes, her father’s vintage clock, beads, yarns, velvets and details a viewer can get lost in.

David Sibbitt’s deliciously spooky paintings of a couple blithely rowing into Apocalypse A family watching a shark movie at a drive-in theater as tornadoes threaten and strange beings flit about; and a gathering of famous artists in an airplane with Medusa as the flight attendant.
Joe Fig Wonder at his miniature mixed-media recreations of artists’ studios and his small-scale paintings of museum and gallery visitors looking at art. The painstaking attention to detail in both paintings and miniatures is amazing, and pays much respect to the artists whose work he’s depicting. Most striking: the dollhouse-size re-creation of his own studio, complete with a miniature Fig at work (you can peep him through the doorway) and details as mundane as roof insulation rendered with impeccable craft.
Marina Shaltout, “Ablutions & Affirmations” A corner niche complete with shower curtain, soap dishes, and smiley-faces, Shaltout’s installation centers on a video of a soapy woman’s hand attaching wet hair to bathroom tiles. Adjacent to the video is a cursive “Live Laugh Love” sign—also on tiles, also made from hair. It’s at once icky and awesome, a satirical consideration of the self-care movement and its pressures on women.

Also look for

The powerful collage paintings of Dallas Jackson, drawing upon images from his family history.
David Mack’s playful but penetrating ceramic vessels honoring African-American heroes.
Yajaira Urzua-Reyes’s painting Mar de Cruces (Sea of Crosses), haunting in its simplicity and harrowing in its portrayal of migrant lives lost.
David McCauley’s “Resurrection” installation, which reflects his joy in discovering tools that enabled him, as a quadriplegic, to play guitar again.
Marc Brechwald’s drawings (a man drowning in the tentacles of an octopus, a man whose face is half-covered with bees, the graceful hands of flamenco dancers), which look uncannily like photographs.
Sculptor Candace Knapp’s sinuous ceramics.
Plus works by Aesopbookofrot (Danielle Dragani), Adrian Gomez, Sami Harthoorn, Aimee Jones, and Corinne Zepeda.
Make sure to look for “Skyway Celebrates,” a tribute to two beloved local artists who left us too soon: the photographer Wendy Babcox and the mixed-media artist John Sims, who died in 2024 and 2022, respectively. Video interviews from their past participation in Skyway shows underline the value of this collaborative project to both the artists and the wider community.

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