Tampa, Fla. (December 14, 2021) – The 52nd Annual Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts has announced its festival juror and featured image for the 2022 festival, which will be held at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park March 5-6, 2022.
“As we emerge from the Pandemic we must come together to celebrate all that unites us,” said Gasparilla Festival of the Arts President Jamie Jenkins. “It’s events like GFA that bring the community together to celebrate our common interests, passions, and purpose.”
Since holding the country’s only juried virtual art show virtually last year, which was the only one to award prize money, the all-volunteer led team at GFA has been working passionately toward making the 2022’s festival one for the record books.
GFA has announced that artist and Tampa Bay native Janet Echelman will jury the 2022 show. Echelman is a world renowned artist who is local to the Tampa Bay region and has a deeply personal connection to GFA.
“We are so excited to have Janet’s continued support of GFA and thank her for being a part of this year’s festival”, noted Jenkins. “Her inspiring creations can be seen around the globe. Most notably, ‘Bending Arc’ is one of her works which can be seen at the St. Pete Pier.”
According to art enthusiasts around the globe, Echelman defies categorization. She is well known for creating billowing sculpture engineered to the scale of buildings, choreographed by wind and light, that shifts from being an object you look at, to a living environment you can get lost in.
Echelman’s TED talk “Taking Imagination Seriously” has been translated into 35 languages and viewed nearly 2,500,000 times.. Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, and Fulbright Lectureship, Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.” Oprah ranked Echelman’s work Number One on her “List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!”
“I grew up helping my mother, the late silversmith Anne Echelman Cantor, with her handcrafted jewelry so it’s always a special joy to return to my hometown to meet artists and share their work,” said Echleman.
GFA has also announced Betsy Best as its festival image artist. Twister II – Twist Again, uses Printmaking as the canvas for a playful and poignant representation of the intimate interactions we’ve all missed over the last year and a half.
“The pandemic curtailed some of our most intimate interactions…holding hands, hugging, dancing, playing. Twister Il – Twist Again is an homage to the physical contact and play that we’ve had to do without” said Best. “Here, the physical proximity of the traditional Twister game is extreme, resulting in a jumble of tangled and entwined bodies. Discerning one figure from another is formidable. The varied array of patterns adds to the commotion. Yet, there is no caution here, only levity and an acknowledgement of the human need for fellowship.”
“This is but one way to interpret this piece. I hope viewers will observe my work through the lens of their own experience and construct a story or a meaning of their own. Above all, I am most pleased when my work resonates with an individual and provokes a nod of recognition or a smile,” said Best.
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About Janet Echelman
Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Echelman’s work defies categorization, as it intersects Sculpture, Architecture, Urban Design, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineering, and Computer Science. Echelman’s art transforms with wind and light, and shifts from being “an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in.”
Using unlikely materials from atomized water particles to engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel, Echelman combines ancient craft with computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents, from Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai, and Santiago, to Beijing, Boston, New York and London. Permanent works in Porto (Portugal), Gwanggyo (South Korea), Vancouver, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Phoenix, Eugene, Greensboro, Philadelphia, Seattle, and St. Petersburg (FL) transform daily with colored light.
Curiosity defines Janet Echelman’s nonlinear educational path. After graduating from Harvard College, she lived in a Balinese village for 5 years, then completed separate graduate programs in Painting and in Psychology. A recipient of an honorary Doctorate from Tufts University, Echelman has taught at MIT, Harvard and Princeton Universities.
Her TED talk “Taking Imagination Seriously” has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views. Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, and Fulbright Sr. Lectureship, Echelman received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” In popular culture, Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow! , and Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.”
About Betsy Best
Before Besty’s printmaking studies at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, she earned a degree in Graphic Arts from Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. In subsequent years she attended a printmaking residency in Japan, studying woodblock printmaking with master craftsmen, with further printmaking studies in Florence, Italy. These opportunities are significant to my art practice. While in Italy she studied under the American printmaker, Karen Kunc, learning an innovative reduction method using two woodblocks. In Japan, she attended the Nagasawa Art Park Japanese Woodblock Printmaking Program. During this two month residency she learned the Japanese water based printmaking technique called moku hanga; best known as the technique used in the ukiyo-e genre of Japanese prints. This approach employs precise carving and registration techniques, and the use of water-based pigments.
She’s enchanted by the printmaking process, and respects its historic capability to make both information, and original works of art, available to everyone. Relief printmaking has been my primary medium for the past two decades, and my work as a graphic artist in my early career has influenced my aesthetic. Using a preponderance of pattern, color and line, stylized figures, and a personal visual vocabulary, she examines the familial constructs, and the meaning of home. Some of her inspirations include athletics, fashion, textiles, ceramics, and architecture.
