BreakOut: Inspired Artist Studios @ PARC Inc.
March 14-April 19; opening reception Sat., March 14, 5-8 p.m.
Morean Arts Center, 719 Central Ave, St. Petersburg,
creativeclay.org
Baseball On My Mind
Sat., March 14, 5-9 p.m., Creative Clay, 1114 Central Ave, St. Petersburg,
creativeclay.org
Wing 4 at Pyramid Inc.
Gallery receptions during First Fridays Seminole Heights
Next: Fri., Apr. 3, 6-9 p.m., 1508 W Sligh Ave, Tampa,
pyramidinc.org
When Shane Hoffman pushes open the door to Wing 4 at Pyramid Inc., an old, out-of-tune piano stands in his path. He muses aloud about maybe taking the instrument apart and putting it back together as an art project before skirting the obstacle to resume our tour. An abandoned corridor of classrooms around us has long functioned as storage for Pyramid, a center for adults with disabilities, and around every corner is stuff predating Hoffman’s push to clean it up and create an entrepreneurial resource — expanded exhibition space and light, airy artist studios for rent.
He pulls artworks by Pyramid artists from shelves for me to see, among them a canvas “painted” with wheelchair tracks, advocating for the unfettered creativity that emerges from the organization’s visual art studio, where he teaches and facilitates.
“I’ve been trying to look back and find a click in my mind when I started to love this stuff, and I can’t. Maybe that’s just because it’s always been in me,” Hoffman explains.
Over the past year, Hoffman has gone all out to raise Pyramid’s visibility as an arts organization. He snagged a spot for it on the roster of First Fridays Seminole Heights, a gallery crawl along Florida Avenue that features venues such as Tempus Projects and QUAID, and staged an exhibition of member artists at the Venture Compound, a mecca for experimental music and art in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District. With Wing 4, he hopes to integrate artists across the ability spectrum, leasing the four rehabilitated studio spaces to professional artists who might attract new audiences to Pyramid and — Hoffman asserts with passion — could benefit from proximity to the ingenuity of Pyramid’s artists.
Hoffman’s efforts resonate with a trend in promoting artists with disabilities, increasingly without heavy-handed labels or brackets of specialness. The art world at large seemed to get the message loud and clear late last year when the Brooklyn Museum hosted a solo exhibition of Judith Scott, a deaf artist with Down syndrome who produced fiber-based sculptures at Creative Growth in Oakland, Calif., for nearly two decades before her death in 2005. Critics and other art authorities were rapturous in their praise for Scott’s wound and wrapped bundles of string, fabric and found objects; though her work was not unknown, such an extensive display of it had not been seen before, and certainly not on public view in a major art capital. The exhibition, which remains open in Brooklyn until March 29, inspired many people to ask: Why don’t we celebrate the work of artists with differing abilities more often?
Two events scheduled for St. Pete’s Second Saturday Art Walk suggest that Tampa Bay may be ahead of the curve.
At the Morean Arts Center, an exhibition titled BreakOut features around 20 paintings and drawings by artists working at PARC Inc., a St. Petersburg nonprofit that emphasizes vocational training in programs for adults with disabilities. Curator Maria Emilia is PARC’s grants writer, but in the mid-2000s she worked as executive director at Florida Craftsmen (now called Florida CraftArt). When she arrived at PARC less than a year ago, Emilia began thinking immediately about how to frame the output of PARC artists less as therapy and more as a job. She took a handful of men and women under her wing and raised money to frame their work, which ranges from geometric abstraction to a minimalist line drawing of a whale at sea. The Morean show is the group’s first, but Emilia has another exhibition planned for 2016 at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs.
“We’re looking to build careers for these artists outside of that context [of disability],” Emilia says.
No stranger to such thinking, Creative Clay — arguably St. Petersburg’s most compelling advocate for equal access to the arts — celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. (While the official date falls in May, look for a gala event in September.) The kinds of procedures Hoffman and Emilia are just trying to get off the ground at their organizations are, to some degree, old hat at Creative Clay. In 2014, the nonprofit operated seven distinct arts programs and participated in 24 events at venues including the Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg Opera, Eckerd College, the Sunscreen Film Festival, American Stage in the Park and the Museum of Fine Arts store.
The message, though, is the same. Creative Clay’s wide-ranging activities add up to a kind of multi-front attack against the boundaries separating people with disabilities from those regarded as normal. The organization’s programs illustrate the cause, Creative Clay director Kim Dorhman tells me during a visit. An inclusive summer camp serves children ages 6-12 regardless of ability; a hospital-based program provides arts and activities for patients; and art-making projects pair member artists and professional artists in collaborative teams. The latest is “Baseball On My Mind,” a showcase of artist-altered baseballs that opens Saturday. A week before the exhibition, the embellished baseballs, which appear to have been gleefully tattooed with drawings of people, lines and dots, adorn a shelf in the Creative Clay offices, commingling the work of professional teaching artists and client artists — a unity that suits Dohrman fine and reflects how she hopes Creative Clay is perceived.
“Instead of, ‘Come to this nonprofit and see art by artists with disabilities,’ it’s ‘Come here and see the great art we’re creating’” Dohrman says.
