Public Art in Tampa/Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season

While your humble blogger awaits photos to be emailed to him from the Fall River Festival of the Arts, he amused himself by continuing with vengence his "trying to reason with hurricane season" visit to Tampa, FLA.

Nothing opens a blog better than a little fish gutting, which this guy above is doing at Ballast Point Park in southern Tampa, minutes from Mac Dill Air Force Base, where central command is located for the Iraq war.

Your humble blogger drove down a beautiful street in south Tampa (Bayshore Drive) not knowing that after about 5 miles it literally runs into Mac Dill. Since your blogger is too old to be drafted, he had little fear of the guards grabbing him and throwing him in uniform.

Of course, six months from now that may be different.

The Florida Manatee has quite a presence in Tampa Bay, so much so that the city put up this sign with the do's and don't's of dealing with this giant, sluggish creature. If you look closely, you'll see that it states that nearly every manatee in the area has propeller scars from colliding with drunken motorboat wackos (ok, I made the drunken motorboat wackos stuff up).

But this blog is not really supposed to be about all that. Since the Narrows Center for the Arts is also a center for the visual arts, I thought it might be fun to see some of the "street level" creations available for free in Tampa.

Here's one fronting the Bank of America Plaza in downtown Tampa. It's called "Solstice" and was done by Charles O. Perry.
Mr. Perry's stuff is also displayed at Harvard University, Dartmouth College and many other public locations as far away as Singapore. Sidebar note: the dude has patents on designs of chairs. Cool.

Learn more about this interesting guy by clicking here.

The other public art I photographed in Tampa is "Family of Man," by Geoffrey Naylor. The work, located not far from where the guy was gutting the fish, is described by the Tampa Museum of Art as "minimalist stainless steel artwork" which "depicts a man, a woman and children."

Geoffrey Naylor was a University of Florida professor who died in 1997. One of his other pieces was purchased by David Rockefeller who put it on display at Chase Manhatten Bank in New York City.