Collaborative exhibit now at Museum of Fine Arts

Seven artists, seven curators and five galleries collaborated in Skyway 2024, the latest iteration of a bay-spanning exhibit launched three years ago and now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

Along with the MFA, the exhibit is curated by, and traveling to, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, the Sarasota Art Museum and the University of Florida Contemporary Art Museum.

According to Katherine Pill, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art for the MFA, it began with a 2017 suggestion by the then-director of the Tampa Museum of Art.

The exhibition is called Skyway because it’s about building bridges between communities.

“This type of institutional collaboration is, I believe, unheard of,” Pill said on the Arts Alive! podcast in June. “To have five area museums partner on a collaborative exhibition that’s open across all five venues simultaneously, and celebrating artists that reside within our counties, is completely unique.”

Carola Miles, Tampa, FL, UFO Alphabet, speedball paper and graphite.

Museum curators reviewed over 300 submissions in response to an open call to artists from Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas and Sarasota counties.

Works by 64 artists are spread over all five venues; the specifics of each exhibition (i.e. the works on display) are not entirely the same.

In St. Petersburg, Pill said, “There are seven artists placed throughout the collection galleries, so viewers are going to have, I think, a really exciting time seeing our collection galleries in a totally new way.”

On view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg July 13 through November 3: Will Douglas, Kendra Frorup, Emily Martinez, Cynthia Mason, Carola Miles, Anat Pollack and Emiliano Settecasi.

On view at The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota through January 26, 2025 (opened in May, 2024): Caitlin Albritton, Ainaz Alipour, Mohsen Azar, Saumitra Chandratreya, Elisabeth Condon, Robyn “Avalon” Crosa, Rachel de Cuba, Jake Fernandez, Akiko Kotani, Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse, Libbi Ponce, Michael Vasquez, and Joo Woo.

On view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum July 19 through Nov. 23: Elisabeth Condon, Keith Crowley, John Gurbacs, Karen Tucker Kuykendall, Caui Lofgren, Bruce Marsh, Eric Ondina, Sebastian Ore Blas, Andres Ramirez, Bradford Robotham, Erin Titus, and Susanna Wallin.

On view at Sarasota Art Museum July 28 through October 27: Kim Anderson, Ryan Day, Sue Havens, Dominique Labauvie, Tatiana Mesa Paján, Samantha Modder, Roger Clay Palmer, Herion Park, Gabriel Ramos, Eszter Sziksz, Jill Taffet, Rob Tarbell, Kirk Ke Wang, Willow Wells and Corinne Zepeda.

On view at the Tampa Museum of Art Aug. 28 through January 5, 2025: Marc Brechwald, Samo Davis, Aesopbookofrot (Danielle Dragani), Joe Fig, Adrian Gomez, JD Hardy, Sami Harthoorn, Cort Hartle, Latonya Hicks, Dallas Jackson, Aimee Jones, Candace Knapp, David Mack, David McCauley, Marina Shalthout, David Sibbitt, Yajaira Urzua-Reyes and Corinne Zepeda.

Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg website