Customers browse at the Tampa Artist Emporium in South Tampa. Pictured below: Boggs stands behind the Emporium’s front desk.
Two years ago, Tampa photographer Shelby Boggs took a gamble. Inspired by the Kress Emporium, an historic building in Asheville, NC, that serves as a marketplace for more than 80 regional artists and craftspeople, she set [...]

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Denis Gaston. Little Boxes. Mixed media on masonite, 20″ x 16”. Pictured below: Denis Gaston. Ground Control To Major Tom (Grab ‘n Go Art Collection). Ink on paper, 7″ x 5″. Images courtesy of the artist.
If it’s summer, it must be time for the Cool Art Show. Any other time of year, the region would [...]

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Tes One’s spray-paint-on-wood painting measures 10-ft. by 11-ft.
You know what they say: when the going gets tough, the tough get…bigger?
Despite the ongoing economic malaise—which seems to find Florida in a particularly compromising position—St. Petersburg artist and art party impresario John Vitale isn’t giving up. Though the muralist and owner of Vitale Studio recently downsized [...]

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Image courtesy Polk Museum of Art
This weekend, the Polk Museum of Art celebrates the debut of its recently acquired Art-O-Mat with an interactive talk by Art-O-Mat founder and creator Clark Whittington.
Whittington, a conceptual artist based in Winston-Salem, NC, first hatched the Art-O-Mat idea for an exhibition in 1997, when he transformed a dilapidated cigarette machine [...]

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Neverne Covington’s drawing, Portrait of Bob Devin Jones (detail), 2005. (Pictured below left: Covington’s Portrait of Dave Ellis. Pictured below right: the complete portrait of Jones, which measures 45″ x 88″.)
Since April, St. Petersburg’s Studio@620 has been unfurling a series of events designed to celebrate the multidisciplinary arts venue’s fifth birthday. Following a gospel [...]

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Image courtesy Isabel Czerwenka-Wenkstetten and Leslie Fry
Tuesday evening marks the public debut of a collaborative project between St. Petersburg-based artist Leslie Fry and Austrian artist Isabel Czerwenka-Wenkstetten at the Studio@620. The pair met via email and Skype earlier this year then teamed up for an intense, ten-day collaboration in St. Petersburg. During Tuesday’s opening reception [...]

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The lineup for October’s Ringling International Arts Festival features New York cabaret sensation Meow Meow. Meowmeowrevolution.com.
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, in partnership with the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, announces the first Ringling International Arts Festival, scheduled to take place in Sarasota this October. The festival, which runs Oct. 7-11, features [...]

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Photo by Marina Williams
Photographer extraordinare and ARTpool owner Marina Williams has posted some beautiful people pics from the St. Pete gallery/boutique’s one year anniversary party on Flickr. Check ‘em out. Congrats to Marina and company for a great first year!

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I became a fan of Tampa-based fashion designer Ben Chmura after seeing his work at Dirty But Sophisticated 4. (He was also featured in last summer’s installment of Wearable Art at the Dunedin Fine Art Center.) Chmura describes his design aesthetic as “retro-futuristic” and lately has been incorporating the influence of ancient global cultures into [...]

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Sensory Overload 4.0 has come and gone, but you can watch video of the event on YouTube (above) and check out pictures on Flickr (click on the image of artist Valerie George below). Congratulations to the judges’ choice winner of the student competition, Thomas Pregiato, Ringling College of Art and Design, and the audience favorite [...]

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3D rendering from Giancarlo Giusti’s Occupiable Highways
For the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing the artists who participated in Creative Loafing’s Sensory Overload and writing about their work in advance of the event—but I’ve never been involved in planning the annual art-music-performance party. This year, after CL staffers decided that Sensory Overload [...]

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On Sat., Mar. 21, the 3rd annual Self-Employment in the Arts Conference at the University of Tampa aims to give practitioners in the visual, literary, performing and film arts a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency. The daylong lineup includes sessions on marketing, networking, work-life balance and intellectual property led by professional artists, writers, filmmakers, professors and an attorney. This year’s conference is organized by Suzanne Williamson, a recent transplant to Tampa Bay whose experience as a visual artist makes her uniquely suited to the task.

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