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City Life

Downtown art isn't just found in a frame

By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published July 23, 2005

I picked up a promo postcard somewhere, announcing: TART magazine presents Cosme Herrera Art and Tapas. It was at Spain, the restaurant downtown.

I had never heard of TART, but I like art, tapas and Spain, so I figured why not go?

One of the sponsors was Skypoint.

Skypoint is the condo tower that will rise from that great big hole - a whole city block - across Ashley Drive from the Tampa Museum of Art. Right now the hole is surrounded by a facade showing the beautiful steel and glass tower and the beautiful young people who will be living there.

This is the building so many people want to buy into that names are being drawn in a lottery. The first lucky 100 or so have been chosen. I was curious to know if they're all young, since the registration form requires you to list your approximate age, but Greg Minder, president of Intowngroup, the Tampa half of the development team, replied through a flak that "he was not able to participate." The condos are a steal, comparatively; prices begin in the $170,000s.

Skypoint probably doesn't even need its ultracool Web site with audio of Latin jazz and a gorgeous young woman waking up on white sheets, considering what to do on a lazy Sunday.

"Franklin Street's fun," she muses. "The Museum of Art?"

The Skypoint pitch is heavy on downtown development (Franklin Street fun?) and on art.

Living in Skypoint: "This is life as art."

The building: "Skypoint is architecture as sculpture ... the analogy fits, being as Skypoint is located adjacent to the Tampa Museum of Art."

Well, not exactly "adjacent," and a tricky assumption, since no one seems to know where the museum will be. Still, it's no surprise Skypoint would sponsor a young artist's show at Spain, downtown's little slice of South Beach.

When I got there about 6 p.m. on a Wednesday night there were so many people standing around I couldn't see the art, or, for that matter, the tapas. The crowd was mostly not young, and most were speaking Spanish. I cruised around to look at the artwork on the walls, when necessary stopping right at the table of people eating dinner.

The art was good.

I asked a tall, dark-haired young man, who looked like his name could be Cosme Herrera, if he was the artist, and he said, no, he did the magazine. So he was the editor?

"I'm the - pretty much everything." He went on to say that the magazine was a crazy idea he had late one night that had turned into a whole lot of work. He was smiling, though.

His name is Francisco Gramage, a Tampa native who grew up in Spain and Venezuela. After getting a degree in business at USF, he realized he was more interested in the sketches he'd made in his notebook margins. So now he's an art student and works at Graphicstudio. The reason I hadn't seen the magazine around, he explained, is because it's an Internet magazine: www.tartmagazine.com

Take a look. It's good. In each issue of TART (Tampa Art, get it?) there are in-depth interviews with three artists - almost all of them work in Tampa. One is Cosme Herrera.

He turned out to be very blond with light blue eyes, wearing a blinding chartreuse shirt. He is fourth generation Tampa and grew up in Town 'N Country. His degree in art is from USF, but this fall he's off to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.

He has never been to Brooklyn.

He said he wants to be a working artist, but, "It's not gonna happen here."

He has had 30 shows, and his work just isn't selling. He shrugged.

"I don't know if it's Tampa or if it's me."

Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sandrathompson1@mac.com

[Last modified July 23, 2005, 00:52:10]