The year in visual art: Milestones, goodbyes and new beginnings

Remembering Theo: While 2014 was memorable for many happy reasons, it was also a time of loss and sadness for Tampa Bay’s visual art community. In March, artist Theo Wujcik, a revered mentor to several generations of Tampa artists and longtime art professor at the University of South Florida, died of cancer. An accomplished printmaker, Wujcik arrived in Tampa in 1970 to oversee USF’s then-fledging Graphicstudio but quickly transitioned to teaching, which he continued until his retirement in 2003. Wujcik was celebrated — idolized, even — locally for achieving national success, mostly during the 1970s, with his meticulously drawn portraits of other artists such as personal friends Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha. In subsequent years, he embarked on a stylistically diverse career that included the formation of a Tampa-based, Dada-inspired art collective called Mododado and a deep exploration of painting in the vein of Pop Art.

Kirk Ke Wang, an artist and former student of Wujcik’s who teaches at Eckerd College, recalled a professor who treated pupils as equals and instilled in them a freethinking sense of what art can be.

“When I became a teacher, I wanted to be the same way,” Wang said during an interview in March.

Remembering Allyn: Sarasota lost two leading lights whose work touched many in Tampa Bay. Kevin Dean, a Ringling College of Art and Design professor and director of its Selby Gallery, died in May. A curator and educator who was also an artist and a critic, Dean introduced countless RCAD students to contemporary art through his classroom teaching and the staging of exhibitions that brought in artists from around the world and also strengthened the careers of local artists who were featured. More recently, November saw the passing of longtime gallery owner Allyn Gallup. Gallup was known for his passion for art by living artists and his keen eye in selecting which of them to promote — Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art, which he ran with his wife, Sheila, represents more than fifty. The gallery remains open under Sheila Gallup’s care.

Historic collaborations: For institutions, it was a year of remarkable collaborations. In June, the Tampa Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, teamed up to present My Generation: Young Chinese Artists. The exhibition, curated by New York-based critic Barbara Pollack, focused on 27 artists born in China since 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It marked the first time that the TMA and MFA had colluded to present an exhibition in both of their facilities at the same time — a rarity in the museum world — and the result was one of the outstanding visual art experiences of the year. (Look for a new TMA director; Todd D. Smith departed in July to lead the Orange County Museum of Art in California, leaving us with one of the big questions of 2015.)

Other highlights were provided by the Dalí Museum, which dazzled visitors twice in 2014 with excellent exhibitions. Warhol: Art. Fame. Mortality., undertaken in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, investigated Warhol’s art through the lens of themes that also resonate in Dalí’s oeuvre.

Picasso/Dalí. Dalí/Picasso., open through Feb. 16, places works by the two Spanish artists, who knew each other during their lifetimes, side by side thanks to an alliance with the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.
Smaller organizations weren’t to be outdone. Art spaces along Florida Avenue in Tampa including QUAID, Workspace, Tempus Projects and the Hatchway Gallery at Florida Avenue Brewing worked together to create First Fridays Seminole Heights, a bona fide neighborhood art walk. (At various times, neighboring spaces including Susan Gott’s Phoenix Glass Studio, Bleu Acier and Kirk Ke Wang’s studio got in on the act.)

Bluelucy teamed up with Savoir-Faire Labs to create a six-month pop-up gallery in Ybor City. And the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance’s Second Saturday Art Walk just kept growing until it encompassed more than 40 galleries and studios in the city’s five distinct downtown-area arts districts.

The Warehouse Arts District Association wrapped up the year with a huge victory. The coalition of approximately 80 member artists and businesses raised more than $350,000 to buy the Ace Recycling compound, a property located on 22nd Street South in St. Pete, where WADA plans to rehabilitate five existing buildings as a 50,000 square-foot artist studio complex called the Warehouse Arts Enclave. The successful completion of its first phase of fundraising allows the group to make a down payment of $200,000 on the property, which it has agreed to purchase for $975,000; what’s left over after closing costs will fund the construction of 4,000 square-feet of studios by September 2015. The rest of the rehab will proceed as quickly as WADA can raise the $850,000 it needs to see the Enclave through to completion, explained association board president Mark Aeling when reached by phone last week.

The group reached its goal in less than six months with contributions from more than 150 individuals and $75,000 in city funding, but the tipping point was a $200,000 donation from the J. Crayton Pruitt Foundation of St. Petersburg.
“I was walking on air when I got that email,” Aeling said. “After that it really started to happen.”

Now that WADA will own the property (subject to a five-year mortgage), the association is planning for a busy new year of fundraising events and applications to granting agencies at local, state and federal levels. It will also announce a new hire soon — an interim executive director for the Enclave, recently selected to help lead the cooperative project into 2015.

“We’re going to hit the ground running,” Aeling says. 

This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2014.