When you walk into The Studio@620 in St. Pete, a red-and-black piñata greets you with a single, three-letter word written in cursive: Yes.
It’s The Studio@620’s mission statement, made into art by Angela’s Piñatas.
“Someone once said — someone at Bank of America actually — that we were a yes in the community,” says Bob Devin Jones, the Studio@620’s artistic director. Jones liked how that sounded. Now it’s the Studio’s official motto.
Jones started The Studio @620 with his friend and next-door neighbor David Ellis in 2004. “We just wanted to have some place where the community could come together,” says Jones. “Some folks thought of it as like a theater, but I’ve done a lot of eclectic things and so has Dave Ellis.”
Fifteen years later, the Studio now has a six-person staff and a 10-member Board of Trustees. But they’re still saying “yes” to everything they can, including art shows, comedy shows, plays, live music, literary events, dance performances, film screenings, radio theater, and even yoga.
“Occasionally, someone on our board tells us, ‘you can’t always say yes,’ and I say, ‘yes you can,’” Jones tells me. “That’s the mission of this place. We want to find the next James Baldwin… but you don’t know who’s going to be James Baldwin.”
“Right. Unless you take a chance,” I interject.
“And we do nothing but chances,” says Jones.
As a result, the Studio has played host to some interesting acts over the years.
“We’ve had published authors, we’ve had Dick Gregory (an American comedian, civil rights activist, and author), we’ve had Corey Flintoff from NPR… and we’ve had people you’ve never heard of,” Jones tells me.
In 2006 the Studio@620 hosted the first Sunscreen Film Festival; in 2008 they hosted freeFall Theatre’s first performance; and in 2018 they hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King courtesy of Tombolo Books. In 2014, the studio hosted Blake High grad Zach Dorn, whose miniature puppet shows eventually landed him a paid summer internship in Japan. You may not think of a miniature puppet show as high art, but that’s not the point.
“Our mission is to be a yes in the community. Which means sometimes what you’ll see here is so delicious you’ll want seconds and thirds, and sometimes it’s just important for [a person] to have that expression. I have no high and low art in the sense that it all comes from a human,” says Jones. “We had a group of women who did a musical here on Mother’s Day. They weren’t necessarily the best singers in the world. In fact, two of them were not singers, but they had a full house of people to watch them do the thing that they wanted to do.
“It’s good for people to have self-expression,” Jones adds. “It’s also good for them to have triumphs and to have some things that aren’t exactly triumphs. And it’s good to have a witness to all of it.”
When they first started, the Studio @620 hosted about one event every two weeks. Now they host about 15 art shows a season and 3-4 events a week.
This month, The Studio@620 is hosting a quinceañera community art show and party to celebrate its 15th anniversary. Jones lived in a Latin section of LA called Silver Lake before moving to St. Pete, so he’s seen a few quinceañeras. “I’d love it when someone on our block was having one,” Jones tells me. “You’d see all these big poofy dresses, the music and the piñatas.”
When I visited the Studio during Second Saturday ArtWalk, there were already several piñatas on display. The hollow papier-mâché party favors, made by Angela’s Piñatas, take the shape of an ice cream cone, a slice of pizza, a mug, an acoustic guitar, a cactus, a flower, a star and more. My favorite is the three-tiered white birthday cake, embellished with pink, yellow, orange and blue flowers made of crumpled tissue paper.
Latin music played in the background as I perused the quinceañera-themed artwork during Second Saturday ArtWalk. The bright, three-dimensional piñatas drew most of my attention, but there are also some quality paintings and prints hung on the surrounding walls, mainly from Studio@620 member artists Jane Peppard and Patricia Tierney-Moses, and Studio@620’s marketing and administrative director, Coralette Damme.
This Saturday, the Studio@620 is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a quinceañera of its own. They’ll have music from DrLoHerz, 15 piñatas and lots of cake. Right now, they have about 25 different people contributing dessert; “we’ll do a dessert march or conga line through the studio, then we’ll hit a couple of the piñatas,” Jones says. “We stuffed them full of all kinds of artsy things, gift cards and such.”
“As we turn 15, we’re at a moment of extraordinary gratefulness. I worked at a lot of nonprofit theaters, but I never thought I’d be running one,” says Jones. “It’s a modest space. It’s concrete floors and treated termite-eaten wood, and we’ve been here, come June 20th, 15 years. It makes me giggle. It’s the longest job I’ve ever had.”
Studio@620 Quinceañera 15th birthday celebration | The Studio@620, 620 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg | June 15, 6:20 p.m. | 727-895-6620 |www.thestudioat620.org.
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This article appears in Jun 13-20, 2019.
