March 20, 2020 | By Jennifer Ring
Making Art in a Time of Social Distancing. . .
The list of closures keeps getting longer as the coronavirus crisis rages on in Tampa Bay. As of Tuesday, March 17, both the Dunedin Fine Art Center and the Morean Arts Center are temporarily closed. Despite this, both are working hard to safely reach out to the community — so we can still make art together in this time of social distancing.
On Wednesday, the Morean’s Beth Reynolds started a new YouTube series called Prompt. Each day, a Morean or Chihuly staffer flips through a gigantic dictionary, choosing one of the first words they see to be that day’s prompt. Home viewers then create a piece of art inspired by that word and share a picture of it to social media, tagging it #morean #prompt.
Reynolds chose “pack” as the initial prompt.
One of the first participants in the Morean’s challenge was Ronnie Stewart (@ronniestewart1 on Instagram), whose Coronavirus PACK IT IN uses a combination of text and images to reflect the messages we’ve been receiving throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Pack’, ‘in’ and ‘liquid hand soap’ are all written in the shadow of coronavirus particles against a backdrop of Publix green. It reminds us of countless trips to Publix to get supplies and those constant reminders we receive to wash our hands, stay in and stock up — but don’t hoard.
Further north, the Dunedin Fine Art Center is using Facebook Groups to reach out and connect. They’ve created three new Facebook groups this week, where you can share your quarantine photos, paintings and drawings.
The photo group, One World: I’ll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours already has over 100 artist members sharing how they’re spending their time at home — whether it be walking their dogs, making notecards, cooking or painting.
You can access the links to all three new Facebook groups via DFAC’s new Community Sharing page.
. . .
