Several months ago I was part of a Tampa Bay Creative Time Summit at the Tampa Museum of Art, which asked provocative questions: “Who do we, as a community want to be, and what forces shape who we are? Who gets a voice in the formation of a collective identity for Tampa?”
The controversy about the proposed expansion of our interstate highway for “Lexus Lanes” was swirling and there was a powerful exhibition of work by Christo upstairs at the museum. The resulting mash-up of these ideas of activism and Christo’s evocative images of urban and rural landscapes gracefully covered in drapes inspired me to create a similar effect in Tampa.
I wanted to drape the historic neighborhoods that would be demolished if the TBX proposal were realized. The reality of Christo’s experience was that his projects cost millions and took years to implement. So, I thought that a more immediately gratifying project would be to drape crime-scene tape between helium balloons.
Too droopy; not the effect I’d envisioned.
Looking for something visually arresting and inexpensive, I thought of yellow ponchos and crime scene tape carried between marchers. Voila! Colorful and low cost.
Last Saturday’s Stop TBX March attracted hordes of protesters who purchased all 100 ponchos. And it worked out well: When the gray skies turned to a steady drizzle, our protesters had ponchos! Spirits stayed high and heads stayed dry.
Each month we plan to march in a different neighborhood, V. M. Ybor and Seminole Heights to show what homes, apartments, businesses, gardens, churches and trees would be destroyed be the TBX Project.
Ultimately, we just have to convince the majority of MPO Board members to vote on June 7th to remove TBX from their plan, save $6 billion and pursue other transportation solutions.
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2016.