By 
Four regional art museums, the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, are pleased to announce the opening of Skyway 20/21: A Contemporary Collaboration. Initiated in 2017 as a celebration of the talent and diversity of contemporary artists working in the Tampa Bay region, this second iteration Skyway 20/21 builds on the exceptional institutional alliance and cultural partnership celebrating the diversity and talent of artists in the Tampa Bay area. Due to the devastating and challenging circumstances of the global health pandemic COVID-19, Skyway 20/21 was postponed from its original date of summer 2020 to allow for the artists and their work to be fully celebrated.
Skyway 20/21 features the work of 49 artists and art collectives working in Hillsborough, Manatee, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties. Following an open call for submissions, the artists were selected by the museum curators and guest juror Claire Tancons, an independent curator and scholar whose practice takes a global focus on the conditions of cultural production.
Tancons offers her vision of this unique curatorial and cultural partnership in her curatorial essay, which is included in the fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
“In order to get closer to Tampa Bay as a natural and cultural ecosystem, I would like to present and test the idea of the museum as mangrove and of the exhibition as rhizome,” Tancons said. “By considering time and history, we might gain a little distance from and, at the same time, apprehend more wholesomely the strictures of space.
“Both aerial and subterranean, terrestrial and aquatic, rhizomes need not choose one environment over another as they simultaneously absorb the diurnal and nocturnal atmospheres offered above and below the horizon of visual perception. A rhizomatic exhibition likewise embraces proximate and contrary elements, like-minded and opposite ideas, circumventing conceptual divergences and cutting across stylistic preferences to form a creative ecosystem, inclusive of the widest variety of artistic species.”
Skyway 20/21: A Contemporary Collaboration is presented concurrently across the four venues. For more information visit: skywaytampabay.com.
VENUES + ARTISTS
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL – mfastpete.org (May 22 – August 22, 2021)
Robert Aiosa, Dolores Coe, Keith Crowley, Becky Flanders, Dakota Gearhart, Bassmi Ibrahim, Morgan Janssen, Ezra Johnson, Karl Kelly, Savannah Magnolia, Jon Notwick, Lynne Railsback, Gabriel Ramos, Matthew Wicks, and Janelle Young
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL – ringling.org (June 20 – September 26, 2021)
Carrie Boucher, Ya Levy La’ford, Kalup Linzy, Noelle Mason, OK! Transmit, Eric Ondina, Heather Rosenbach, and Jake Troyli
Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL – tampamuseum.org (June 3 – October 10, 2021)
Jaime Aelavanthara + Amanda Sieradzki, Kim Anderson, Wendy Babcox, Janet Folsom, Samson Huang, Cassia Kite, Jason Lazarus, Jenn Miller, Sarah O’Donoghue, Herion Park, Anat Pollack, Libbi Ponce, Selina Román, John Sims, Mike Solomon, Jill Taffet, and Kirk Ke Wang
USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL – cam.usf.edu (June 14 – September 1, 2021)
Rosemarie Chiarlone, Danny Dobrow, Babette Herschberger, Akiko Kotani, Cynthia Mason, Ry McCullough, Casey McDonough, and Kodi Thompson
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