Last August, in our fall arts preview issue, we highlighted promising young local artists under the age of 25. For that story, we focused our attentions on Hillsborough; this time, for our spring 2006 preview, we're scouting out talent on the Pinellas side of the Bay.
Not surprisingly, several of the artists profiled here are past and present students of the Pinellas County Center for the Arts, the arts magnet program of Gibbs High School in St. Petersburg. Now housed in a brand new campus on 34th Street S., PCCA is a remarkable place. The mood shifts from one classroom, and from one art form, to the next — from the show-bizzy energy of the musical theater majors to the quiet introspection of the art studio to the camaraderie of an exercise class practicing the limbo in a hallway.
Yet for all this variety, and all this fun, the underlying mood is dead serious. To get into PCCA and stay there, a kid has to have the talent, the endurance and the smarts to carry a full academic course load plus the required classes in his or her arts major.
It's not a regimen for everyone — and maybe that's why the students we spoke to seemed so singular, not just in their talents but in the eerie maturity of their attitudes toward school and career. There's an unwritten contract between students and teachers, all of whom are professional artists themselves: In the immortal words of RuPaul, they know you gotta work to make it at PCCA, and to make it as a singer or a dancer or a lighting designer or an actor.
Yet this work ethic co-exists with a sense of play, a balance that's so successful it makes you wonder: Why can't all schools function like this? And why would any sane legislator cut funds to arts education, when it's so clearly succeeding in ways that traditional models often do not?
Fortunately for Pinellas, the evidence of this spacious new facility is that someone around here got it right. And like the many Blake High grads from Hillsborough that we wrote about last year, the students who go through PCCA contribute both tangibly and intangibly to the cultural riches of Tampa Bay — riches that we lay out for you in this preview of what's happening in the arts in the spring of 2006.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2006.
