Call them collaborations, call them partnerships, call them boundary-crossing, cross-pollinating, genre-blurring hook-ups — whatever the term, the urge to merge has never been more prevalent in the arts than it is today. The myth of artist-as-loner was always just that — a myth — but for reasons both aesthetic and commercial, alliances have become increasingly appealing.
New technologies that allow for easier, faster connections among people have helped power this trend, but it's also a reflection of the ever-tenuous economic status of artists and arts organizations; they know there's safety in numbers. And it's about chemistry; mix a painter and a dancer, a rock band and a filmmaker, even an arts institution and a savvy city agency, and — pow! — you might just come up with something new and maybe even explosive.
That's why this year's Spring Arts Issue focuses on a woman who's been an arts alchemist for almost half a century, the postmodern dance pioneer Trisha Brown. As Megan Voeller's story on p. 22points out, Brown has long been fascinated with the intersections between dance and other art forms, and her residency at the University of South Florida has enabled her to take those interests even further. Megan's story is also a reminder of the invaluable work being done at USF's Institute for Research in Art, where visionary director Margaret Miller is helping artists forge new paths — sometimes with the help of the university's science departments.
Matchmakers like Miller are vital to Tampa Bay's arts community, spread out as it is across the bay and throughout the neighborhoods. That's where organizations like Creative Tampa Bay come in, serving not only as a virtual hub for arts information but also making marriages happen in the real world — like the recent Salon Night at Ruth Eckerd Hall with the Taylor 2 Dance Company, a co-presentation with city, county and state governments. Tampa's ubiquitous creative industries manager Paul Wilborn has already shown the power of mixing it up, helping place the Flight 19 arts collective in an unused train station and injecting new energy into the Gasparilla Arts Festival through the Booty Art Expo. And emerging leaders like the Tampa Downtown Partnership's Kimberly Finn are driven by the belief that there's no shortage of talented people in the area — you just have to find a way to bring them together.
Finn has done her part in that department. Among her many volunteer activities, she's organized two of the Tampa Museum of Art's most successful Art After Dark events, including the near-legendary anime night (complete with kabuki, kimonos and dragon kites). Multidisciplinary art parties such as Art After Dark, Gala Corina and Dirty But Sophisticated (masterminded by the artist/impresario Jay Giroux, who's also spearheading Creative Loafing's still-in-its-infancy Sensory Overload) may be our most hope-inducing art form: Big wonderful grab-bag events whose diverse artists and audiences go a long way toward convincing Tampa Bay it can be as cool as it wants to be.
And nowhere is there a better example of the way art partnerships can turn this town around than in the scruffy but inspiring environs of the Transitions Art Gallery. Located in a small bunker of a building just behind Skatepark of Tampa off I-4, Transitions is at once an all-ages rock club, a funky art gallery and the site of one of the city's most intriguingly eclectic arts events: Unripe, a music/video/performance catch-all making its third bow on Feb. 10.
Matt Welch, 30, is the quiet force behind Transitions. A longtime Skatepark staffer (and skater), he knows firsthand the organic connection between skater culture, rock bands, visual artists and kids. He's found a way to bring all these elements together in a tolerant, safe atmosphere that's equally hospitable to 30-something post-punkers, teenagers and (sometimes) the teenagers' parents. Unripe's Aubrey Bramble, 27, is a fine arts and filmmaking teacher at Tampa's Blake High School who envisioned an arts event that would bring untried and experienced artists together "in a way I hadn't seen done" — and Transitions proved to be the perfect site for it. The rough edges haven't been ironed out yet; during her second event, which featured electronic music, the power went out. But that was part of the charm, and what happened next was part of the point: The musicians, undefeated, started to bang on whatever was handy in "a crazy acoustic jam," says Bramble, and they've been networking with each other ever since.
The connections are there to be made. I asked Finn and Welch, separately, what they envisioned happening in the arts scene in five years. Both dreamed of the same thing: a huge interdisciplinary arts festival that brings hundreds of thousands of people downtown. That may be a long way off, but with people like these two doing the dreaming (which in both their cases is tempered by considerable common sense), it's a dream that could become reality.
Meanwhile, we present to you a season's worth of recommendations for arts events worth connecting with. If enough of us get out there and mix it up, the creative ferment around here will just keep bubbling.
– David Warner
Mix it up: Spring arts
What to watch for
This article appears in Jan 31 – Feb 6, 2007.