A visit to Scope Art Fair to see Experimental Skeleton/Flight 19’s project in collaboration with Miami-based Locust Projects takes me to Wynwood, the up-and-coming gallery district just north of downtown.

Whereas in Miami Beach you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting Paris Hilton—or somebody in her entourage—Wynwood’s gritty streets are lined with lower-middle class duplexes, bodegas, and artist-occupied warehouses. For the first time since entering Miami, I don’t have to sacrifice a newborn infant to the pagan gods of parking in order to find a space. Here they are plentiful and free.

Wynwood’s development suggests what pockets of the area north of downtown Tampa along the river—Riverside Heights, Tampa Heights and lower Seminole Heights—could look like in five or ten years: a few more restaurants, many more galleries, and a diverse economic and ethnic mix of populations.

The district spans roughly a twenty block (from north to south) by five block (from east to west) area. Along the northern edge (40th St. between NE 2nd Ave. and N. Miami Ave.), stretches the design district, where dozens of high-end retailers peddling everything from custom tile to mid-century modern furniture have set up shop. A few blocks south and west, Scope Art Fair, one of the original alternative satellites to Basel (it also takes place in New York, the Hamptons, and London each year), takes place in a giant tent inside Roberto Clemente Park.

At the end of a long row of gallery booths, nestled in a corner unit, is a project created by members of Tampa’s best-known artists’ collaborative, Experimental Skeleton, who program the city’s Flight 19 space at the train station downtown. About two weeks ago the group got a call from Miami’s Locust Projects, a non-profit contemporary art space. Locust asked the Flight 19 group to come up with a non-commercial project (meaning nothing would be for sale) to make a statement at Scope.

Joe Griffith, the Tampa group’s leader, has a long-standing relationship with Locust Projects. A year ago, at another alternative fair during Miami Basel, he found himself exhibiting in a booth next to the Miami group. They swapped ideas for a collaboration, and last month Griffith brought some folks from Locust to Flight 19 to stage an event that combined death metal performances with visual art. When Locust needed an innovative project to fill their booth at Scope, they returned the favor by calling Flight 19.

Griffith tossed a few ideas over to Locust (one featured Tampa artist Theo Wujcik), but the one they liked featured Negativland—an experimental musical group known for reworking copyrighted materials into subversive “culture jamming” messages. Flight 19 proposed to bring some of Negativland’s latest work, which tackles the thorny issue of when spreading freedom and democracy becomes imperialism.

To create the installation, Negativland drew on the talents of its roughly half-dozen members to create various aspects of the project: a video, oil paintings, an audio soundtrack, and sculptural elements. Griffith helped by building the centerpiece, a sort of ghetto animatronic Abe Lincoln—a deliberately poor illusion whose electronic parts peek out and whose misshapen, waxy face only a mother could love.

As a few passers-by at Scope gawk, Honest Abe repeats the same line of dialog—fumbled variations of “might equals right”—over and over again as a stern director snaps at him in the background. As Abe stutters, “the right right equals the right might,” you’re left to draw the inevitable connection between this perverted image of a past present and a certain somebody in today’s Oval Office. Who the director might be…well, that’s up for interpretation, too.

The recording is a remix of the voice of the animatronic Abe at Disney World—which will no doubt be suing Negativland in the near future. (Just kidding, we hope not.) The group’s legal troubles—they were most famously sued a decade ago by U2 for sampling their songs—have become as renowned, if not more so, than their work.

Griffith says it has cost Flight 19 about $2000 to bring the show to Scope. The money will come from funds the group has raised to support itself—the city of Tampa supports them by donating exhibition space, not money, and Negativland is too strapped paying its attorney’s fees to contribute. With the help of Paul Wilborn, the city’s creative industries manager, and Nancy Kipnis, Griffith tried to find private financial support for the exhibit, but with two weeks notice before the event, no donors came forward.

When he returns to Tampa, Griffith hopes to do some fundraising for Flight 19 with the feather in his cap of having brought the group to Miami during Basel. Considering their yearly budget of about $5,000, that Flight 19 continues to bring impressive, adventurous projects to the artistic no-man’s land of downtown Tampa seems like a small miracle.

In January, the group will bring The Art Guys, a well-known Houston duo, to the train station to create a valise sentence. It’s a signature piece for The Art Guys, who carve words into vintage suitcases and illuminate them from within, arranging them in a long row to create a statement. The Flight 19 valise sentence will be the longest one the artists have created yet—and to complete it, members of the Tampa group will lend a helping hand.

Pictured: (1) Street art pays homage to Duchamp in Wynwood. (2) Bicycle rickshaws shuttle visitors between Scope, at the district's north end, and Pulse Art Fair, to the south. (3) Inside Scope. (4) Flight 19 and Locust Project's booth at Scope. (5) Honest Abe, as built by Joe Griffith. (6) A painting of the commander-in-chief, part of an installation by Negativland. (3) Photographer Dove Shore waits to lift visitors up into his moving van gallery. During the fair, he parked outside popular venues in Wynwood. (5) Miami artist Susan Lee-Chun peeks out from her bunker "camouflaged" with black lace.