Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration exhibit

For 2024, the work of 63 local artists is being showcased at the Tampa Museum of Art, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, Sarasota Art Museum and The Ringling Museum of Art. Twelve artists are featured at the USF Contemporary Art Museum (CAM).

TAMPA - Every three years, five Tampa Bay museums join together for Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration.

USF CAM Curator-at-Large, Christian Viveros-Fauné, decided on the theme of landscapes, but in a more complex way than it sounds.

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"It's the kind of theme that really kind of inheres in being a resident of Florida," Viveros-Fauné said. "We expanded it to actually include all kinds of landscapes, social landscape, political landscape, emotional landscape, mental landscape, actual natural landscape, realistic landscape, and on and on and on."

The variety of landscapes is equaled by the variety of mediums: paintings, aerial photography, large mixed-media and videos. Each artist has multiple pieces on display.

Keith Crowley’s paintings are inspired by causal, everyday photography. Many of his pieces are paintings of the front of homes.

"Images come to me as I'm in my daily passages," Crowley said. "When things appear immediately, you can sort of gather them, and it's a way of capturing the idiosyncrasies of those really familiar spaces."

Some of those idiosyncrasies that Crowley loves are repeated patterns like the grid lines of brick walls and fences.

"The images that I most trust are ones that I didn't over plan," Crowley said. "I find it interesting that a painting will often trigger memories in the viewer that in some ways are related, and some ways aren't, but it does something, it accesses these deep memory files in people's minds."

Viveros-Fauné hopes a diverse and large collection like Skyway will help build bridges within the community.

"We're in a situation, not just regionally or nationally or globally, where bridges are the kinds of things we should be looking to build. A project like this, I think is really good at doing that, building bridges between artists, between institutions, between different scenes, between audiences," Viveros-Fauné said.

Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration will be on display at USF’s Contemporary Art Museum until Nov. 23.

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