Capture their imaginations to capture the audience
By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published May 17, 2003
Last week in New York, we stayed in Tribeca, the downtown industrial loft neighborhood that was hard hit by 9/11. In fact, our hotel, the Tribeca Grand, housed some of the area's temporary refugees who couldn't get back home.
While we were there, the second annual Tribeca Film Festival was under way, the one Robert De Niro and friends started last year to help bring people back downtown, to bring an influx of money into this part of the city. As we walked around, gaping at the grand architecture of the factory buildings, we kept passing people with festival name tags hanging from chains around their necks.
In a small gallery showing photographs, someone asked where we were from and when we told him, he said, "Oh, Tampa - you've got some great artists there." He mentioned James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg. So, good. Tampa wants to be known for the arts, and we were known here, if not for homegrown artists then for those who have worked at USF's Graphicstudio and come to be associated with the city.
Also, while we were in New York, the Whitney Museum announced it was scrapping plans for a $200-million expansion, designed by international architecture star Rem Koolhaas. It's not the first museum to cancel projects already designed by top-name architects. Hilton Kramer, in the New York Observer, observed, "It's safe to assume that Mr. Koolhaas' services do not come cheap even for projects that are never realized."
Naturally, this made me think of our little (relatively speaking) project here in Tampa, the $50-million one. The new Tampa Museum of Art building was to break ground this summer. Yet as the date approached, no one was talking, money-wise.
In mid February, downtown New York architect Rafael Vinoly was to unveil his revised design of the museum to the press and prospective donors. He didn't show. The museum's excuse was that Vinoly got snowed in, but the model got out along with his assistant, a soft-spoken young man who lacks the charisma needed to juice donors.
It happened to be the last stretch of the fierce competition to design the World Trade Center site, and Vinoly's group Think was in a dead heat with Daniel Libeskind, a contest that involved as much lobbying as it did design.
Libeskind won.
Let's face it, selling the project is part of an architect's job. Polshek Partnership and Arquitectonica, in their presentations as finalists for our museum building, made that very clear. They would be present, and pumped, at all fundraising events. Vinoly had to be asked about fundraising, and his answer was something about flying the model around.
At the February unveiling, someone asked how much money the museum had raised. We were told an announcement would be made in early March. Now it's mid May, a year after the first design was unveiled, the head of fundraising has resigned, and the museum is giving out its first dollar figure: $15-million. So the glass is about half empty or half full, depending on how you look at it.
No surprise; the economy is clobbering the arts everywhere. What bothers me more is this: From the people I talk to, I have to say neither the museum as an institution nor the design of the new building has succeeded in capturing the imagination in a big way. Whose fault is that?
Back in Tampa, pushing the Tribeca experience a little longer, we stopped in Gallery 1906 in the Ellis-Van Pelt building, an old cigar factory in West Tampa. It was the opening for a photography show, and some of the other artists who work in the building opened their studios also. It was packed. A very cool building, indigenous architecture, an atmospheric old neighborhood that's new to some of us, and a group of Tampa artists who got together and, without putting a hand out, just did it.
"See the crowd?" said an out-of-town artist, here for the first time. "Young, attractive, trendy? They won't buy anything."
But they were there.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
