Archives: Articles

Entries for the Arts Coast Magazine

The Art of Synchronized Swimming

By Amanda Sieradzki. I step through the side gate to the Southwest Pool, part of the Largo Recreation Center and home of the Suncoast WaterWorks’ Synchronized Swimming team. The club thrives as Pinellas County’s only competitive synchronized swimming program. I’m mind-boggled by the endurance demonstrated by these young swimmers who so often hold their breath while achieving the unimaginable. I’m also elated… Read More

Listeners Connect with Ona Kirei

By Kurt Loft. “If I’m authentic on the stage, with the music I do, the way I sing, how I present myself – the audience, no matter their background, will connect with what I’m giving them,” says Ona Kirei. “I try to focus on that everywhere I go and I always feel the warmth of the audience, and it’s the best feeling ever.” Kirei believes people need that “best feeling” in large doses today because of the anxiety from COVID, mass shootings and so much political division. “Art always plays one of the biggest roles in difficult times… Read More

Take My Selfie for a Walk

I few years ago I made a plaster cast of my face. (Or my two sisters did) The old-time process is hard to endure for the recipients, applying coats of… Read More

Healing Photographic Art from Deborah Rodriguez

By Deborah Rodriguez. I am a storyteller. The ultimate story is the acknowledgement that we are one human race. It is my goal to express my membership in this human race through the lens of my African American soul. My art is how I share my membership…. Read More

Poetry by M. Thandabantu Iverson

By M. Thandabantu Iverson. here’s a word of thanks
lettin’ you know I heard
testifyin’ that I ain’t scared no longer
to say out loud that listenin’ at the table and hearin’ all those prayers
mixed in with all the truthtellin’ makes sense to me now… Read More

Exploring Land Art

By Tony Wong Palms. It is all an adventurous, a celebratory, and a life preserving act when seeking out art – whether going couple of miles to galleries or museums in town, or a few thousand miles cross country, or over the ocean blue. A recent road trip had me driving from Tampa to Death Valley, where huge land art sites are dwarfed in an even more enormously vast untamed western landscape…. Read More

Hank Rippert, My Dad

What can I say about my Dad? I could speak for hours and hours about him and about our relationship. I’ll do my best to give a deep glimpse into… Read More

Healing Inspired by Zora

By Kendra N. Bryant. Creating a work on Zora Neale Hurston might seem trite for a Florida literary journal. However, years ago, while I was a student of Deborah G. Plant, Hurston scholar who edited Hurston’s Barracoon, I asked her, “How much more can we write about Zora?” Just as much as we can write about love, she said. & so it is…. Read More

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