In 2002, St. Petersburg artist Maria Emilia was visiting Sicily on a group trip organized by former Tampa mayor Dick Greco when she had a revelation. Looking out over the hills of rural Agrigento, a province where many of Tampa's turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants originated, she was struck by the sight of young men herding sheep as if frozen in time.
"Can you imagine what it took in the early 1920s and 30s for some teenager in Agrigento to come to the coast and get on a boat to America? There was no television, no assurances — they didn't know what they were getting into," she says. Their willingness to take a risk helped make Tampa the multicultural community she's proud to call home today. "Anytime you're in a community that does not display that kind of diversity, that's not what America is," she says. "That's an artificial environment."
Emilia, who fled Havana at age 14, now serves as executive director of Florida Craftsmen Gallery in downtown St. Petersburg, one of about 40 major participants in Arte 2007, a Bay-area-wide festival celebrating Tampa's connections with Latin American and Caribbean arts and culture. This year's Arte festival has been carefully timed to trumpet the Bay area's cultural diversity to national and international business leaders who will be attending the 2007 National District Export Council (DEC) Conference at the Tampa Convention Center next week. For Emilia, the connection is clear.
"It makes perfect sense to me. Why not have the events at a time when you're going to have the most important audience?" she says. "People want to do business in diverse communities with a variety of voices where a lot of different people can come together and be comfortable."
For many Bay area residents, Arte 2007's November run will offer opportunities to enjoy the sights, sounds, and tastes of Latin American and the Caribbean — from portraits of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (at the Tampa Museum of Art or Largo's Gulf Coast Museum) to Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso's melodious voice (at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center) or the graceful moves of the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico (at Ruth Eckerd Hall) and cutting-edge contemporary sculpture by Cuban duo Los Carpinteros (at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum). While individual events and exhibits certainly play a starring role in Arte 2007, some local business and civic leaders will be waiting to see how an even bigger performance comes off: Will Arte — now and as it grows in the future — help position Tampa Bay as a gateway for commerce and cultural exchange between North and South America?
"If you look at international business hubs anywhere in the world, they tend to be art and cultural hubs. There's a direct correlation," says Charlotte Starfire, director of Global Trade at SunTrust Bank.
Starfire heads the division of SunTrust that helps Florida companies looking to buy or sell their products overseas. She chairs this year's DEC Conference, which is slated to bring hundreds of local, national and international trade gurus and decision makers to the Tampa Convention Center from Nov. 7 to 9. (Assistant Secretary of Commerce Israel Hernandez is scheduled to visit, and the president of the Dominican Republic has been invited to deliver a keynote address.) Arte serves as a backdrop for the conference, but one that goes beyond mere decoration. What they see will tell them a lot about Tampa and whether they want to do business here, Starfire says.
About six years ago, the idea of an Arte-like festival emerged during a lunch meeting between a pair of key players in the local arts community. TBPAC president Judith Lisi and USF CAM director Margaret Miller developed the initial concept, recalls Ron Jones, dean of USF's College of Visual and Performing Arts, who quickly became involved. Envisioned as a Cuba-themed festival, the idea ran aground when political sensitivities cropped up — the Bush administration's strong anti-Cuba policies didn't help matters, Jones says. Dormant for a few years, the idea resurfaced as a festival of Latin American and Caribbean arts (a way to broaden the festival's appeal and include Cuba without emphasizing it), and the festival launched in 2005.
The goal was to put Tampa on the map as a distinctive arts and cultural destination. "We wanted to do something that was authentic to who we are and who we were," says Paul Wilborn, who was involved in 2005 and spearheaded Arte 2007 as the city's creative industries manager. (In June, his position was eliminated in response to property tax cuts, and he is now executive director of The Palladium at St. Petersburg College, one of the venues participating in Arte.) Miami has only been a Spanish-speaking city since about 1960, Wilborn points out; Tampa's Cuban heritage goes back much farther. "Arte connected to that history and to our current aspirations to be a trading city with Latin America and the Caribbean," Wilborn says. "And we had all this great talent" in the form of local artists and performers to tap, he says.
When Arte 2005 met with a favorable reception, the group immediately began planning for the next installment, Jones says. They learned that the DEC conference was slated for November 2007 and changed Arte's run from April to November, realizing that an international audience of business and commerce leaders would be in town — exactly the type of people they wanted to market Tampa to. "In terms of the economic development of the region, it's not rocket science to say that our greatest opportunity is our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean. It's only natural," Jones says.
This time around, the city upped the ante by taking on the marketing efforts for the festival. (In 2005, TBPAC handled most of the publicity.) Venues from art museums to concert halls could plan events and exhibitions of their choosing; in return, the city spread the word. "What's amazing is the buy-in from arts organizations. I've never had to ask anybody twice," Wilborn says. The result is an unprecedented array of exhibits, performances, workshops, demonstrations and concerts in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Polk counties organized around a single theme. In the weeks before the festival, the list has grown to include a kick-off event Sat., Nov. 3 at the TBPAC (with mega-retailer Target as a sponsor) that will feature a Latin cooking demonstration by Food Network chef Ingrid Hoffman and a marionette workshop for children.
But perhaps the crowning moment will come when Iorio welcomes DEC delegates to Tampa at Flight 19, the city-donated art space run by a coalition of local artists known collectively as Experimental Skeleton. The space currently houses Identity In Progress, a showcase of local artists ruminating on Latin American and Caribbean identity, and will feature performances including a group of locally based Peruvian flute players during the private DEC reception, says Nancy Kipnis, executive director of Arte 2007, who has taken over since Wilborn's departure.
Starfire, the SunTrust executive, says Arte is the perfect diplomatic introduction to Tampa for delegates from abroad. "I've been doing business in Latin America since the 1970s, and whenever I go to a Latin American countries, I always make sure that I'm aware of some of the trends in their arts," Starfire says. "I go to their museums and make sure I can talk about those things. We talk about our teams in the U.S., and they like that, too, but another topic that's very common is the artistic and cultural perspective."
To local or national business leaders, Arte sends another message: Come do business in Tampa. "People who do business internationally want to be based in a community where their clients can feel comfortable," she says. "It ties in with cultural diversity, and I think Tampa is developing a rich cultural diversity. People who want to do business here feel comfortable. They can find places of worship that they're comfortable in, people who speak their language, people who know about their country, and they can enjoy the expression of all those things."
But before Arte can become a successful arts and cultural festival that broadcasts a strong message about Tampa, it still has a few kinks to work out, cautions Jones, the USF dean. The event's strengths — namely, the independence of each participating venue to program whatever it wants during the festival's run — are also its weaknesses. Because museums would already be showcasing exhibits anyway, and concert halls would already be hosting performers, it costs relatively little for a venue to participate in Arte, he explains. The shoestring budget and piecemeal approach have enabled Arte's quick rise, but the same factors have produced a patchwork festival that lacks "a neighborhood dimension." Time will tell whether Arte can become an event to rival something like Charleston, S.C.'s 31-year-old Spoleto Festival. "Spoleto wasn't a great success the first year. It does take time when you don't have bundles of money to make something happen," Jones says. "I think we have several more festivals to go before it can really be a thing that the people in this community will talk about."
But the international buzz has definitely begun to build. With just days to go before Arte 2007, Kipnis, the event's executive director, says she's still getting last-minute calls from groups who would like to participate, including Cuba's National Ballet. Their inquiry came too late for this year's festival, but she had a ready reply: "Let's talk about 2009."
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.