Photo via cityofstpete/Flickr
Tesla inspired Mural by Carrie Jadus on the Genius Central building 2232 5th Ave. S.
This is life in Pinellas County, where natural and manufactured beauty collide in the streets. It’s easy to see art by accident in Pinellas County, but one rarely makes art by accident. Making art takes time and money, and a plan.
How do you plan for art and culture? Hire a cultural planning group like the Cultural Planning Group (CPG), apparently. OK, maybe they could’ve been more creative with the name, but we won’t hold that against them.
CPG is forming new art cities throughout the U.S., from Broward County in Florida, to out-of-state places like Greensborough and Sacramento. Thanks to a new partnership with Creative Pinellas, Visit St. Pete Clearwater and local government, CPG makes Pinellas County home for the next 14 months. During this time, they’ll talk to arts community insiders, explore our neighborhoods, and survey our residents to discover what defines the county’s art scene and how to improve it.
Creative Pinellas CEO Barbara St. Clair rallied for a Pinellas County cultural plan for the same reason most cities hire cultural planning groups. Obtaining arts funding from any municipality requires a plan with measurable benchmarks. She reached out to contacts and discovered some of the most successful cultural plans in the U.S. then considered what made each of those plans successful. From these traits, Creative Pinellas drew up a request for proposals in collaboration with Pinellas County. About seven or eight cultural planning groups responded to the RFP. St. Clair was among the five panel members who selected CPG’s proposal.
“We were looking for somebody who would take time and do a lot of research to produce a document that was evidence-based, and that was very specific and very unique to Pinellas County, and [CPG] rose to the top on all of those milestones,” St. Clair said when the plan launched in October. “Their focus was on community engagement, discovery, and listening.”
“Their belief system was that we needed to expand the arts for everybody with an emphasis on digging into the community, finding the gaps, finding the needs, and bringing us together to find some answers,” St. Clair continued. “We looked at a lot of communities that they had worked in before. They have done these kinds of plans nationwide. And over and over again, those plans have led to actionable items, and they have led to positive change in those communities.”
CPG research lead Linda Flynn, Ph.D., quickly affirmed the central role that community conversations play in their work. “What we find is that almost all of the best ideas emerge from the community. We are here to take those ideas and develop them into a plan,” she said.
In Pinellas County, the conversations began at the plan’s launch. Several arts community insiders attended the three-hour-long launch event at SPC EpiCenter in Clearwater on Oct. 19. CPG gave each table 30 minutes to discuss the strengths of Pinellas County’s arts and culture scene, what makes us unique compared to other communities, the challenges we face, and what we’d like this new plan to change.
My group, which included an independent artist, and a Dali Museum employee, had no trouble zeroing in on what we loved about Pinellas County’s art scene and what we’d like to see change. We love the street art, the murals, the art walks, the mural bike tours, workshops, and events. We don’t like finding out about these things after they happen. This rarely happens to me as an arts journalist, but that’s not the case for everyone else.
Papers like this one provided more comprehensive arts coverage before the pandemic cut budgets (and staff). Now, community members enter their events into our calendar, and more things fall through the cracks; no one likes when this happens. Now, Tampa Bay finds out about art events on Instagram, and if you don’t follow the right people, spend a lot of time on social media, or just fall victim to the algorithm, you miss stuff.
“Last weekend, there was this queer maker’s market at New Moon (@newmoonmakersmarket), five minutes from my house,” one of my group members shared. “It was so amazing—all these great artists. It was like the best event I’ve been to here, but I had to find out about it through Instagram.”
My group wasn’t the only one who brought up spotty media coverage and the need for a comprehensive Pinellas County arts calendar.
“There’s so much happening in this county, everywhere,” Creative Artists Guild Board Member Kristin Karcher added to the discussion. “I usually find out after the fact, and that’s terribly disappointing.”
We have so many art museums and galleries hosting so many art exhibitions and events here, it’s easy for visitors, and even locals, to be overwhelmed by them all. A cultural plan could help.
Kylan Stephon Hayes of Powered by Verity Social Design Studio spoke about a single pass that could get Pinellas County visitors into several museums. Hayes used New York City as an example, where the official CityPASS gets you access to five different attractions, including the Empire State Building, the American Museum of Natural History, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and the Guggenheim.
Tampa Bay’s official CityPASS provides access to Busch Gardens, The Florida Aquarium, ZooTampa at Lowry Park, and your choice of two of the following: the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, Tropics Boat Tours Dolphin or Sunset Cruise, the Museum of Science & Industry, or the Glazer Children’s Museum. Art attractions are notably absent from the list.
Hayes also mentioned adding shuttles to art attractions like Florida Southern College does for its students. My group discussed hop-on and hop-off trolleys, like the ones that roll through Savannah during tourist season. Ideally, visitors could purchase a ticket and board the trolley at a major attraction like the Dali, then take the trolley to additional Pinellas County cultural attractions, hopping on and hopping off throughout the day. Or, we could shuttle tourists from the beach to downtown, where they could visit cultural attractions on rainy days.
Several groups spoke about how Pinellas County’s art scene revolves around St. Pete, with comparatively little attention given to arts and culture in North Pinellas. As Flynn said, “I’ve been over here a couple of times visiting. Typically, I stay in St. Pete and do St. Pete Arts District stuff, The Pier…What I learned in pre-planning is that the next time, I need to go to Tarpon Springs and Dunedin.”
Participants mentioned increasing funding, affordable housing, and educational opportunities for artists, as expected. And several Pinellas County residents expressed an appreciation for how affordable our art events are here, mentioning reduced museum admission in the evenings and library museum passes.
Photo via cityofstpete/Flickr
Two water tanks at the Northeast Water Treatment facility, 50 feet high and a total of 120,000 sq ft total, painted by artist Tom Stovall.
“We are still too much of a best-kept secret in Pinellas County as far as the art scene goes,” Creative Pinellas Board President David Warner, a past Editor-In-Chief at Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, said at the event’s conclusion. “We have work going on right now that matches anything going on anywhere else in the country.”
“That’s one of the things I hope comes from this,” Warner continued. “Education for the world, education for the county, of what a treasure we have here. Geography is a challenge, obviously. North Pinellas and South Pinellas have a big avenue between them. But if we can come together and find all these things and teach each other what our options and opportunities are, this cultural plan is going to make a huge difference, for us and the county.”
The October discussions were just the beginning.
“It just scratched the surface, and it really began to show us what the range of issues are that we need to be paying attention to, that we need to explore further…” CPG Partner Martin Cohen told CL. “Today was a great beginning.”
CPG’s plan comes in four phases. We’re in Phase One—the initial planning phase. December takes us into Phase 2—Community Engagement and Research. Come Spring, CPG will take all this community input and use it to develop a plan (Phase Three), which they’ll take back to the community for approval in Phase Four in November 2024.
To be successful, CPG needs input from Pinellas County residents, both inside and outside of the arts community. Share your thoughts, wants, and needs with CPG at currentartscoast.com.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
