About Skyway

Following the success of the initial Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration in 2017, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art , the Tampa Museum of Art, and the USF Contemporary Art Museum are collaborating on a joint exhibition to be presented in the summer of 2020. Skyway 2020 will feature the work of selected artists from the five counties served by our respective museums: Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Manatee, and Sarasota. Selected artists will be featured across the four venues and will highlight the diversity of contemporary art created in the Central Florida region. A call for artists will occur in the summer of 2019, and the submissions will be juried by representatives from each of the museums, plus a guest juror. The four participating institutions will co-publish a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring the work of each exhibiting artist, to accompany the exhibition. 

Skyway 2020: A Contemporary Collaboration Curators

Sarah Howard, Curator of Public Art and Social Practice, University of South Florida Institute for Research in Art
Christopher Jones, Curator of Photography and Media Art, The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art
Katherine Pill, Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
Joanna Robotham, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Tampa Museum of Art
Ola Wlusek, Keith D. and Linda L. Monda Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
Guest Juror: Claire Tancons, Independent Curator

About Guest Juror Claire Tancons  

Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in the discourse and practice of the postcolonial politics of production and exhibition. For the last decade, Tancons has charted a distinct curatorial and scholarly path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics as well as decentering and othering curatorial methodologies as part of a wider reflection on global conditions of cultural production. 

Tancons recently co-curated the first edition of Tout-Monde, Caribbean Contemporary Arts Festival (in partnership with the French Embassy Cultural Services, Miami, 2018) and curated etcetera: a civic ritual (Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France, 2017). Other curatorial highlights include Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Art’s Miami Beach district (2016); Up Hill Down Hall, a BMW Tate Live commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2014) and En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, organized and presented by Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-organized as a travelling exhibition by Independent Curators International, New York. She has also curated for established and emerging international biennials such Prospect.1 New Orleans and Gwangju Biennale (both 2008), Cape Town Biennial (2009), Biennale Bénin (2012), Göteborg Biennial (2013) and Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019).

Over the years, Tancons’ independent vision has been supported by a Prince Claus Fund Artistic Production Grant (2009), two Curatorial Research Fellowships from the Foundation for Art Initiatives (2007, 2009), an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2008) and an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2012). She is the recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her book, Roadworks: Processional Performance in the New Millennium.

Tancons holds an MA in Museum Studies from École du Louvre, Paris (1999) and an M.A. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2000) and is a former Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York (2001).

Born in Guadeloupe, Tancons lives in diaspora and works in situ.