By Jake-ann Jones. Celeste Davis became executive director of Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture and the Arts (TBBCA) in February of 2021, bringing decades of professional design experience along with an insightful curatorial eye. She points to the growing appreciation of both established and contemporary Black artists and their work coming to area museums as “a natural experience for curators, for visitors, for everyone to think more broadly, more diversely, more inclusively…. Read More
Let’s chat about erotica. You may already be aware of Bands of a Small Hurricane, my next literary fiction release due out in just a few months, Oct 4. But… Read More
The Greatest Joys As an actor, I live my craft as a storyteller. The characters I play help to tell a part of a larger story peopled by other characters… Read More
This week I went into filming for my short dance film, the project for which my Creative Pinellas Grant is funding. It is a solo work that I am dancing… Read More
By Laura Kepner. “We bring people together,” says Jennifer Malin of Community Foundation Tampa Bay. “We work with philanthropists who invest their money with us and we match them with a community need.” CFTB’s newest space at 110 Central Avenue in downtown St. Pete is dedicated to showcasing local art. Right now their space hosts paintings by Nathan Beard, works by Nick Davis and a permanent mural by Ya La’Ford…. Read More
In Winter Haven there is a small but lucrative gallery called Ridge Art Association. To the wider art establishments in the state of Florida it is an insignificant place, yet… Read More
By Margo Hammond. The Cultured Books Literacy Foundation is a nonprofit, book-promoting organization with an unusual mission. Unlike most literacy programs which look to the needs of individual children, CBLF is interested in fostering literacy throughout an entire community — the Black community of south St. Pete. “It’s not just about focusing on the children,” the foundation says on its website, “It’s about supporting and involving parents as well.” For CBLF, literacy is a lifestyle…. Read More
By Jake-ann Jones. A dynamic display of contemporary Black women artists, including Shannon Elyse Curry, Kendra Frorup, Nneka Jones, Jodi Minnis and Princess Smith, is currently on view at the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) in Verde: Poetics of Shade. Taking its title from contemplation on the color green and its various emotions and feelings, the exhibit considers several shades and symbolic messages evoked from the color through the mediums of painting, sculpture, ceramics, and embroidery on canvas…. Read More
By Carol Mickett. I knew as soon as I walked into The Visit, the first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. by Uruguayan-Spanish artist Yamandú Canosa, that I was not in the typical Museum show. It’s rare to find a show such as The Visit which quietly and simply creates a place. The entire show itself is generated from Canosa’s visit to the home of Salvador Dalí in Port Lligat, Spain. Canosa uses the home of Dalí and its landscape to construct a place of his own that pays homage to his visit and to his roots in Spanish art history and surrealism…. Read More
