Tampa to be home to the Peninsularium, an immersive art experience

Like St. Pete’s much-ballyhooed Fairgrounds, scheduled to debut early in 2021, there’s an immersive, walk-through art project coming to Tampa. The Peninsularium, conceived and launched by the nine-member Crab Devil artist collective, is in the early stages of creation at 3800 N. Nebraska Ave., in the Ybor Heights district.

The two-acre site, purchased by the collective in September, will house – in the (to be remodeled) main building – Crab Devil, LiveWork Studios, the Tempus Projects gallery and Deviant Libations craft brewery.

Plans call for the installation, on the northern half of the site, of 24 to 27 steel shipping containers, each 40 feet in length and fully electrified, insulated and air conditioned. Visitors will enter the connected maze through a replica old-Florida bait shop.

Inside each, says artist Devon Brady, will be a different artistic interpretation of what makes the Sunshine State, in all its historical and contemporary weirdness, such an unusual and fascinating place to live.

Brady is a multi-media, multi-disciplinary creative; he’s also the senior partner in LiveWork, which is the “design and fabrication arm” of Crab Devil and the Peninsularium.

The bait shop entrance is intended to suggest a “classic” Florida roadside attraction. “You have a strange experience that keeps getting stranger the deeper you go,” Brady explains.

It’s Alice in Floridaland.

Earlier this year, a Call to Artists was issued, for “environments” in any and all media. “You can tie all that stuff together into one experience, whether it’s narrative-based, storytelling or immersive sculpture or sonic installation,” Brady explains. “Or video installation or any of those things. And it’s all in the service of immersing the viewer in an all-encompassing experience.”

In creating the narrative for the Peninsularium, he says, he’s discovered that “the truth is sort of stranger than the fiction of it. Any time we introduce a fantasy element to it, we realize that there’s a reality that’s just as strange that we can tie into.”

Those accepted and working hard thus far are Trent Alyse, John Byrd, Brandie Dziegiel, Adam Emerick, Mitzi Gordon, Joe Griffith, Ben Galaday, Melvin Halsey Jr., Michael Horn, Illsol, Roxanne Jackson, Johanna Keefe, Fahan Sky McDonagh, Stephen Lindsey, Jenn Ryann Miller, Cristina Molina, Nina Nichols, Juarice Moore, Taylor Pilote, Anthony Record, Kale Roberts, Selina Roman, Phil Roach, Heather Rosenbach, Ron Simmons, Emily Stone, Jonathan Traviesa and Briauna Walker.

Another call is going out soon; the story will change, Brady says, as different artists’ work is adapted to jell with that already created and installed. In time, the shipping containers could conceivably be switched out, sent out on loan to other installations or otherwise changed.

Like Fairgrounds founder Liz Dimmitt, Brady and the others in Crab Devil were inspired by the work of New Mexico arts collective Meow Wolf, which premiered its large-scale immersive art installation in 2008.

“I was there shortly after they opened, and saw what was going on there,” Brady says. “And it opened my eyes to the possibilities of a different way of doing business. Since we had all been engaged in these large scale immersive projects over the years, they were all done through this kind of nonprofit model, whether it was grant-based or donor-based – however it was that we were able to cobble together funding to put on these large projects. And Meow Wolf kind of flipped that model on its head by doing this for-profit venture.

“Which to me was kind of counter-intuitive at the time. But I realized, ‘This is the way we could break free of the cycle of grant writing and funding and nonprofits and all of the legwork and time involved in putting those kinds of projects together.’

“In a sense, it allows for more freedom to do this as a for-profit venture.”

The runaway success of the traveling Van Gogh Alive immersive exhibit at the Dali Museum is evidence that there are new and innovative 21^st century ways to experience art, and live inside the visceral product of the creative process.

Which would suggest that the time is right for Fairgrounds – and for Crab Devil’s Peninsularium, which Brady believes will open towards the end of 2021.

“Other than us and Fairgrounds, there’s really not anything like it in Florida,” he says. “And Fairgrounds has been great in terms of being open to us … and we’re trying to be open to them, and really have a collaborative spirit. All of us, I think, are basing this off the craft brewery model, that the rising tide lifts all boats.”

Artists’ rendering of the 3800 N. Nebraska site.