After strolling through rows of juried booths at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park, visitors to the Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts inevitably find their way to the Community Engagement Village. A painted angel or a grinning orange cat might entice them into a booth before they understand the significance of what they have found. The talented artists exhibiting there wouldn’t have it any other way. They will return to the riverfront March 6 and 7, 2027.
An Arts Show Where Everyone Is An Appreciated Artist
MTC, formerly known as the MacDonald Training Center, has been part of the Festival for 13 years. The relationship began in 2014, when the GFA Board of Directors invited the center’s Fine Arts Studios to exhibit. Phyllis Gutham, MTC’s Senior Director of Community Engagement and Partnership, says that single invitation has become a cornerstone of the center’s art program.
Their very first year produced the story the studio still tells. A festival judge walking the grounds stopped in the MTC tent and pinned a second-place ribbon on one artist’s painting. The judge didn’t know that community partners weren’t eligible for the official competition. The young man who made the piece didn’t care about the technicality. An expert had looked at his work and ranked it among the best in the city, and Gutham says that ribbon changed how he saw himself for good.
The recognition has kept coming. MTC artists have since collected awards from Festival sponsors, and the booth has grown from a one-tent experiment into a multi-artist marketplace with a loyal following. Collectors now arrive with a plan. Some come to add another of Kelly’s hand-painted angels to their collection. Others are looking for Glen’s whimsical cats or one of Paul’s colorful Tampa landscapes.
Gutham says what matters most is how people look at the artists. Festivalgoers aren’t buying out of sympathy. She describes parents in tears watching a stranger fall in love with their child’s work, treating that artist “not as a person with a diagnosis, but as a respected peer, an entrepreneur, and a professional.”
One weekend, MTC studio artist Chris McDarby left the booth and set up his easel on the festival grounds to paint plein air. Crowds stopped to watch him work. For an artist who finds public settings challenging, Gutham says, it was a weekend happily spent as a featured live painter.
MTC’s booth will be once again sponsored by TECO. They have been sponsoring MTC for several years prior. They will make the $2500 sponsorship and match a donation of MTC’s art sales of up to $2500. Gutham credits corporate partners with covering the cost of the exhibition space and matching weekend art sales up to set tiers, so every purchase puts more money in the artists’ pockets and back into the studio.
Arts4All Florida Gives Emerging Talent a First Arts Show Stage
Arts4All Florida joined the Village a couple of years before the pandemic. Jennifer Sabo, Executive Director of Arts4All Florida, remembers being on site in 2020, staying with the Festival through its virtual year in 2021, and returning to the riverfront in 2022. Marian Winters, Former Executive Director of Arts4All Florida, has sponsored their booth for the past four years and makes an additional donation matching a portion of the organization’s festival weekend art sales.
“A lot of artists would never have the opportunity to be represented at such an amazing art festival,” Sabo says.
Many of the artists Arts4All serves are early in their careers and still learning how to answer a call for art. The organization’s adult artist coordinator walks them through it, from choosing which images to submit to writing an artist statement.
Sabo is clear that the tent isn’t a showcase for everyone who applies. Arts4All runs its own juried call and expects work that holds up next to anything else at Gasparilla.
“Just because our artists have disabilities doesn’t mean that they aren’t amazing artists,” she says.
Artists keep their earnings. Arts4All holds back only a small percentage paid for pieces over $500 to cover credit card processing, and everything else goes to the artist. For about a quarter of the exhibitors, a Festival sale is the first time they have been paid for their art.
“All artists need to be paid for their talents,” Sabo says.
The organization has also learned what sells. Smaller pieces priced around $300 and under move quickly, and a lot of them go to young collectors buying their first original work. Last year was the tent’s busiest yet, with more than twenty pieces sold. The artists who were painting live in the booth started asking whether they could sell pieces they hadn’t finished yet.
That live studio element is part of the appeal. “It makes it come alive,” Sabo says. At a time when anyone can generate an image with AI, visitors get to watch art being made by hand.
Some Arts4All artists move on to bigger stages. Sabo points to Richard Celley, who went on to exhibit as an emerging artist at the Festival through the Emerging Artists Program. This year’s Arts4All call carries the theme “Friends and Fur, Feathers and Scales.” It celebrates the animals in our lives, from family pets and service animals to working farm animals. The artists were already painting animals, and those pieces were selling.
Famous Tate and the Business Case for a Free Arts Show
For Famous Tate Appliance and Bedding Centers, sponsoring Pyramid Inc.’s tent started with someone on its own staff. An employee at the company’s South Tampa store had worked as an art teacher at Pyramid, Inc. Jason Horst says supporting the program was an easy decision for a local business that wants to back events that bring Tampa together.
This is Famous Tate’s fourth year as a sponsor. Horst brings his wife and daughter to the Festival, and he calls it an annual highlight for his family and for the company. The family that owns Famous Tate has bought art from the Pyramid booth and hangs it in their stores.
Horst also points out that the Festival is free to attend, and sponsorships help keep it that way.
“I recently went to a Vintage Market, and we had to pay $10 to get in,” he says. “It didn’t seem fair to have to pay to go shopping. That’s one of the reasons I love the Festival.”
Famous Tate matches Pyramid, Inc.’s art sales up to $1,500 and donates it to the organization. A painting bought in the Pyramid, Inc. booth earns its artist the sale price, and the match sends the same amount again to the program that trained them. A painting bought in the Village earns its artist the sale price, and the match sends the same amount again to the program that trained them.
A Village That Keeps Expanding
While MacDonald Training Center, Arts4All Florida and Pyramid, Inc. are the anchors of the Community Engagement Village, Gasparilla Arts also invites a fourth organization to participate each year. As it does for the three returning organizations, Gasparilla Arts seeks a sponsor to cover the cost of the exhibition space and make a matching contribution based on the organization’s weekend art sales.
The organizations that fill that fourth tent all incorporate art into their programming, but the people they serve vary. Past participants include Project Return, which uses art in its work with people recovering from mental illness, and Paint22 which provides free art activities for veterans, military personnel and their families.
The rotating invitation broadens the Village’s reach while preserving the idea at its center: Artists deserve the opportunity to show their work, meet collectors and be paid for what they create.
Artists First
The Community Engagement Village is not separate from the Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts. It is part of what makes the Festival such a diverse and vibrant event.
The artists exhibiting there have developed their talents, prepared for the weekend and put their work in front of thousands of people. Their paintings, drawings and sculptures are not displayed as an act of charity. They are there to be considered, discussed and, if a visitor falls in love with one, purchased.
That is the significance visitors discover after an angel, a cat or a colorful Tampa landscape draws them inside. They encounter the art first. Only then do they learn about the artist who created it and the organization that helped make the opportunity possible.
The Community Engagement Village returns to Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park during the 57th Annual Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, March 6 and 7, 2027. Admission is free.
Businesses and individuals can help make this experience possible by sponsoring one of the organizations in the Village. Sponsorship covers the cost of participating in the Festival and can include a matching contribution that multiplies the value of every piece sold. To learn more about sponsoring the Community Engagement Village or another Gasparilla Arts program, visit our website’s Sponsorship page or email Sponsorship@gasparillaarts.com.
