St. Pete’s ‘Poetry Alley’ wants you to bring a meaningful object to the MFA on Saturday

Lizzi Bougatsos and Lonnie Holley’s “Never the Same Song” is one of the most powerful art exhibitions on display in Tampa Bay right now, and the MFA St. Pete is inviting locals to come interact with the installation.

The show is an exercise in improvisation with deep connections to not just the artists’ pasts, but outlook on the future. Much of the exhibition uses found objects, and on Saturday afternoon, the community is invited to make their own art, too.

From 11 a.m.-1 p.m. anyone is invited to bring “a meaningful handheld object” to the MFA steps where it’ll be duplicated in two dimensions using a copy machine run by the FAX 727-289-3069 collective, which is helmed by Bay area artists Keifer Calkins, Eleanor Eichenbaum, and Tyler Gillespie.

On the first of the month, the collective installed 64 fliers on power poles in an alley south of Central Ave between 20th and 28th streets—all in the hopes of reactivating analog communication.

For the “Personal Prints: Copying Event,” objects brought to the MFA steps will be copied twice. One sheet goes to the participant, and the other will get married to words written in notebooks by Bougatsos during her time with Holley in Atlanta and then installed at Poetry Alley on Aug. 1.

There’s no cover for the “Personal Prints: Copying Event” happening at MFA St. Pete on Saturday, July 20.

"Never The Same Song" is up through Sunday, Sept. 15.

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