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Creative Pinellas introduces its 2023 Emerging Artists

Bill DeYoung

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Lance Felton performs "61 Unused Pages." Screengrab provided.

Creative Pinellas will introduce its 2023 Emerging Artist grantees with a reception Thursday at the organization’s Walsingham Road gallery.

It’s the seventh annual cohort, featuring works by a group of 10 area artists in all media. “We’re looking for artists that aren’t in school – this isn’t the first thing that they’ve done, ever,” curator Elizabeth Gelman said in a recent Arts Alive! podcast. “But they’ve been able to show their work to a slowly-growing audience.”

Patrick Arthur Jackson is not a visual artist, but a theater-maker (actor, writer, director). “Traditionally, many of the people that receive the grant are non-performance artists,” he said. “I really wanted to support the movement of bringing more awareness to the performing arts in the area.”

Last week Jackson directed a single, staged-reading performance of 61 Unused Pages by Vincent Terrell Durham, with actor Lance Felton playing eight different characters, at thestudio@620. The poignant drama concerns a young Black man dealing with hurtful memories of his absentee father.

Jackson

Jackson discovered that he and Felton had similar family issues. “I do believe in divine order, so it ended up being the right piece for me to produce and direct,” Jackson said. “And while the piece is about Black fathers and sons, I think it’s really universal, about that relationship between parent and child, especially as we move into adulthood.”

In 2021, Jackson-the-actor participated in a live Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist production for director Tatiana Baccari. “We actually performed during the opening exhibition,” he related, “but there are some challenges doing a theatrical performance in a gallery; with tons of people walking around to see art, there wasn’t as much focus on the performance.”

So for his own “emergence,” Jackson decided to introduce technology. “We’ve edited about a 10-minute video that’ll have me talking about my process, and a little bit about the show, and then you also get some clips from the production.”

There’ll be a prompt in the gallery, “asking people to reflect on their own relationship with their father, or their parent. Something maybe they’ve never said, they’ll write it down on a piece of paper and we’ll create our own notebook – connected to the themes of the play – that will be up on the wall.

“So I will have some type of visual art experience, in addition to the actual theater performance that I produced.”

Emerging Artist grants are funded by the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners, Visit St Pete/Clearwater, the State of Florida, Department of State and Division of Cultural Affairs.

Writer Troy Bernardo has also done something different – his part of the exhibit consists of several different “objects,” each with its own QR code. By scanning the code, the visitor will be able to hear a short story about the object in question.

Each Emerging Artist will give a weekend talk, on a Saturday or Sunday through July. Jackson’s is the first scheduled, for Saturday, May 13. Artist Talk schedule.

Creative Pinellas asks for RSVPs for Thursday’s 6-8 p.m. exhibit opening, which is free. RSVP here.

2023 Emerging Artists

Work by Jennifer Chandley.Troy Bernardo, writer;

Jenipher Chandley, oils;

Marie Cummings, watercolors;

Kate Cummins, mixed media, abstracts and installations;

Dennis DeBon, glass art

Kimberly Engel, abstracts painter;

Aimee Jones, painter;

Amy Wolf, ceramics and mixed media

Agueda Zabisky, ceramics;

Patrick Arthur Jackson, theater artist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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