In Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration, Tampa Bay Area curators joined forces to bring to life this large scale triennial exhibition that celebrates the breadth of artistic practices within our region. Curators from The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum; the Sarasota Art Museum; the Tampa Museum of Art; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art; and guest juror Evan Garza narrowed down submissions from over 300 projects by different artists and artist teams to 63. Curators from each museum then selected which artists they wanted to feature.

Apart from two artists whose work is being shown at more than one venue, different artists and works comprise each museum’s exhibition, but they all fall under the Skyway 2024 umbrella, which gives contemporary artists the opportunity to be featured at the region’s major and significant arts institutions.

“Each of the curators looked for different things. For us, it was trying to find artists who we thought were doing innovative work, really pushing boundaries in terms of their media and practice,” says Christopher Jones, the Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Art at The Ringling. “We wanted a diverse cross-section of artists to showcase as well, because our region and community are incredibly diverse and cosmopolitan.”

The Ringling’s Skyway 2024 exhibition is a microcosm for contemporary art in the Tampa Bay area. “Many of the artists do deal with these large, universal themes in their work, but they are very different in media,” adds Ola Wlusek, the Keith D. Monda Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Ringling. The exhibition highlights artwork produced in varied mediums, such as jewelry, gourds, immersive installations with textiles, traditional painting, photo-based practices, and more.

The concept of where the artists find themselves, within both broad global and cultural contexts to their sense of self in their own bodies, grounds much of the work in The Ringling’s Skyway 2024. Some artists, such as the duo Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse, as well as Jake Fernandez, open a window into the natural environment, from the whales that inhabit the Gulf to the wild landscape of Myakka. “There is a lot of reflection on to the idea of home, including Florida’s neighborhoods and streets to natural formations found throughout the U.S.,” says Wlusek. “There are artists who explore these ideas of citizenship and belonging and are questioning what nostalgia, memory, and home are, and what it means to be this individual grappling with two national identities.” South Korean-born artist Joo Woo explores her experience as an immigrant, while Iranian-born Ainaz Alipour considers the role that the body plays in defining identity. “She’s thinking about the political or social aspects of the body, the body as a carrier of meaning, and the social constructs that revolve around idealized bodies versus bodies of difference,” adds Jones.

Many of the pieces create a sense of tension between the viewer and the work and pose more questions than they provide answers. In one work by Rachel de Cuba, a curtain covers a television screen. “Just having a video behind a curtain generates a lot of tension,” says Jones. “That’s something that I respond to, when artists develop a sort of tension or even frustration when it comes to putting pressure on our desire to consume and see images, whether it’s making it challenging in a way or obstructing, which puts the onus back on the viewers to reflect more.”

Skyway 2024 draws back the metaphorical curtain, offering museum goers a glimpse into the rich Tampa Bay contemporary arts community. “I hope that viewers walk away finding something within contemporary art that they find accessible, challenging, and rewarding, something that they connect with,” Wlusek adds, “and a sense that they had a productive experience, that they either learned something new, whether about a local artist, one of the themes within the show, or even about themselves through the artwork.”

Image: Caitlin Albritton, Flamingo Float, 2021, Sterling silver pendant with 28 pieces of g8 pieces of gold sheen obsidian, pink opal, petrified palm root, amazonite, howlite, and jasper.