At the 2007 Gasparilla Festival of the Arts. Image via Aesthetic Grounds.

This weekend marks the 38th annual Gasparilla Festival of the Arts. A couple of years ago, I thought Carrie Mackin had managed to get the City of Tampa to support a contemporary art component of Gasparilla. As you may remember, in 2006 she had local groups and galleries—including Experimental Skeleton, Red Labor, Bleu Acier, Greene Contemporary, and Covivant—set up in PODS along Franklin Street near the main festival (inspired by the format of Art Positions at Miami Basel). Unfortunately, barricades and a confusing lack of signage prevented most Gasparilla-goers from recognizing that the Booty Art Expo was an additional attraction worth walking over to and not just a mysterious agglomeration of storage units.

As often happens in Tampa, when the originator of the idea moved on (in this case to New York), the idea more or less went up in a puff of smoke. (I believe former art czar Paul Wilborn also deserves credit for Booty; he has moved on to a position as executive director at the Palladium Theater in St. Pete since the city eliminated his job last year.) In 2007, the city attempted to launch Booty again in a different, distantly related form. This time, a moving truck served as a mobile exhibition space for a single curated show of work by Jay Giroux, Chris Kelly, Josh Pearson, and others. Though the work was good, the focus on artists coming out of a street art/lowbrow/graphic design background, I think, precluded broad interest in the project. The strength of Carrie’s Booty was that it embraced a variety of work styles and philosophies about art, from ES’s interactive “wishing well” to the Fluff Constructivists’ inscrutable taxidermy installation to Greene Contemporary’s thousand-dollar-and-up Omar Chacon paintings, etc.

Anyway, this year there’s no Booty at all. Not exactly sure why that is, though city budget tightening springs to mind as an obvious explanation. Still, I think the budget for Booty was never more than a few grand. Can’t we keep this sort of thing around for a fraction of a cent per resident?

Instead, while you’re perusing artist tents and munching on a corndog this weekend, keep an eye peeled—on north Franklin beyond Gasparilla’s boundaries—for some subversive art-type activity courtesy artLOUD!, a group of “commercial real estate women and local artists” who have organized “an eclectic collection of original artworks displayed in storefronts that depict artistic renderings of the future retail renaissance of North Franklin Street.” What that might entail, I have no idea. But the hope that it might be some small something will make me drag my booty up there.

Click to view the artLOUD! flier.