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Customers browse at the Tampa Artist Emporium in South Tampa. Pictured below: Boggs stands behind the Emporium's front desk.

Two years ago, Tampa photographer Shelby Boggs took a gamble. Inspired by the Kress Emporium, an historic building in Asheville, NC, that serves as a marketplace for more than 80 regional artists and craftspeople, she set out to create something similar (if smaller) in Tampa. Using some money she’d pocketed after flipping a house in the once-hot real estate market, she snagged a favorable lease in Hyde Park Village.

Boggs dubbed the location, once occupied by retailer Ann Taylor, the Tampa Artist Emporium and soon began renting wall and shelf space to local artists, who displayed their work. Monthly mixers and an open-door policy during the shopping district’s popular outdoor art fair led to sales. In relatively short order, Boggs’ pie-in-the-sky idea didn’t look so crazy after all.

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Sheree Rensel. Twingo. Copper and mixed media on wood. 11-3/4" x 11-3/4" x 3". Artist's statement: "Twingo" is the unique and original tweet language of Twitter Tweople. Bio: BFA, MFA, Detroit artist born, NOW living and loving my art life in the real and virtual Universe.

If you’re following St. Petersburg artist Sheree Rensel on Twitter—that’s to say, if you’ve signed up to read her "tweets" or 140-character updates throughout the day—you can pretty much count on receiving a smile-inducing greeting routinely at around 9 a.m. It goes something like this:

“Good morning ART Tweople!”

(For those not already fluent in Twitterspeak, tweople—or tweeple—is a blend of “Twitter” and “people” used to refer to other users of the service. To learn more Twitterisms, consider consulting a twictionary like this one.)

A self-described “hyperactive” early adopter, Rensel has taught visual art to emotionally and developmentally disabled kids at a public school in Gulfport for 17 years, incorporating digital projects like photo portfolios and basic animation into the curriculum when possible. A mixed media artist by practice, Rensel—who describes her age as 50-something—uses Twitter mainly to keep up with other artists whose work she admires.

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Ricardo de la Vega and Felipe Packard. Strolling in the Park. Mixed media, 2007. Image courtesy Morean Arts Center.

Thursday

5-7 p.m. – Opening reception for Green: the Primary Color, featuring environmentally-themed art by Florida artists, at Art Center Sarasota.

5:30-7:30 p.m. – One Wild Night networking event, in conjunction with Wild Spirits exhibition at the Morean Arts Center. $10 admission includes interactive activities with the artists, heavy hors d'oeuvres and cash bar. RSVP to Lara Shelton at 727-822-7872 x15 or e-mail lara[at]moreanartscenter.org.

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Aqua Wynwood 2007: Rusted wheelbarrows cut with lace-like patterns by Cal Lane at New York’s Foley Gallery. Photo by Megan Voeller.

Since reports (like this one) surfaced that collectors were actually buying earlier this summer at Art Basel in Switzerland, the international art fair circuit has managed at least partially to shake its recent image as a victim of the economy.

In December, when Art Basel Miami Beach arrives in Florida, St. Petersburg’s C. Emerson Fine Arts will take part in Aqua Art Miami, one of the popular satellite fairs that orbit around the larger showcase. Aqua, which plans to ditch its original venue (the Aqua Hotel on Miami Beach) and set up shop only in the Wynwood gallery district, has a reputation as one of the stronger satellites. It typically includes galleries from around the US along with a smattering of international participants.

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Photo by Brian Vandervliet

Friday

5:30-8:30 p.m. - S'REAL Happy Hour and opening reception for summer exhibitions: Mabel Palacín: Una noche sin fin [An Endless Night], Dalí at Work and Play: The Photographs of Marc Lacroix and Dalí: Seen Through Glass, at the Salvador Dalí Museum. Complimentary snacks and cash bar. Half-price admission ($8.50) after 5 p.m.

6-9 p.m. – Summer Jazz Series with the Campfire Quartet at the MFA; $15 for non-members, $10 for members, includes admission to Hazel Hough Wing galleries (currently on view: Andy Warhol prints).

7-9 p.m. – Opening reception for Discontinuum, photography by Brian Vandervliet, at the Globe Coffee Lounge. From the release: These forty photos were taken close to home in St. Pete, on the other side of the world in Asia and Europe, and around the United States. An Indian actor shares the wall with a bemused grandmother in Bangkok, and she with celebrators in a Pride Parade.

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Denis Gaston. Little Boxes. Mixed media on masonite, 20" x 16”. Pictured below: Denis Gaston. Ground Control To Major Tom (Grab 'n Go Art Collection). Ink on paper, 7" x 5". Images courtesy of the artist.

If it’s summer, it must be time for the Cool Art Show. Any other time of year, the region would be lousy with outdoor art fairs—but from July through September, who wants to brave heat, humidity or the chance of an afternoon thunderstorm?

Twenty-one years ago, Dunedin artist Denis Gaston had a simple idea that turned out to have staying power: round up a group of the Tampa Bay area’s most committed professional artists and add air conditioning.

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Tes One's spray-paint-on-wood painting measures 10-ft. by 11-ft.

You know what they say: when the going gets tough, the tough get…bigger?

Despite the ongoing economic malaise—which seems to find Florida in a particularly compromising position—St. Petersburg artist and art party impresario John Vitale isn’t giving up. Though the muralist and owner of Vitale Studio recently downsized out of a company warehouse that doubled as an art gallery, his response to tough times is simply to take the show on the road.

All the way downtown to Nova 535, that is.

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The application warns that contestants will need to have a current passport and submit to all medical and psychological examinations deemed necessary. So bring the drama, but leave the crazy at home.

Official Bravo casting call

Media Bistro's UnBeige blog

Megan Voeller is Creative Loafing’s visual art critic. She teaches at the University of Tampa and blogs at Artsqueeze.com.

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Allen Leepa (American, b. 1919). Homage to Tarpon Springs, 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 5 x 12 feet (2 panels). Courtesy Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art.

Earlier this week, Allen Leepa-- abstract painter and founder of the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art at St. Petersburg College-- died at age 90. In celebration of his legacy, the museum will showcase his art in an exhibition scheduled to open on Aug. 2, Allen Leepa: In Memoriam.

In 1997, Leepa and his wife Isabelle donated $2.5 million to St. Petersburg College (then St. Petersburg Junior College) along with an extensive collection of works by Leepa, Esther Gentle Rattner (his mother) and Abraham Rattner (his stepfather). The collection, which is valued at upwards of $20 million, also includes works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Georges Rouault and Hans Hofmann.

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Bruce Marsh, Riverwall (detail). Photo by Megan Voeller.

Downtown Tampa's Riverwalk gained a public art cornerstone recently with the installation of Bruce Marsh's Riverwall-- a 40-foot long mural composed of photographic images of the Hillsborough River. Fired into porcelain enamel on steel plates, the images show the river-- a 54-mile long waterway integral to the region's ecological health-- in a variety of incarnations, from a forking artery seen from above to a forested stomping ground for boaters.

Marsh, who taught art at the University of South Florida from 1969 to 2003, is well known in the region and beyond as an outstanding landscape painter. Though the Riverwall relies mainly on photographic depictions of the river, some of his paintings appear as pictures among the 550 featured images (each 8-inches by 9-1/2-inches). From afar, the grid forms a purposely enigmatic, river-like shape based on a photograph of floating water lilies.

“The whole idea [was to make] something that would offer a visual hook... that would entice and draw people... and function as a gathering point,” Marsh says.