Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration

In the summer of 2021, we mounted the triennial exhibition Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration across four venues, a full year later than its original June 2020 date. Skyway 20/21 offered a reprieve from the new normal of daily uncertainty and the effects of a global pandemic. During those paused months of the pandemic, it felt like life might not ever return to normal. If it did, what would life look like? Could we return to our old selves? What needed to change, and what did we need to do to thrive again, both as individuals and as a community?

In preparation for Skyway 2024, the six-person curatorial team met with artists over Zoom and in person. During my studio visits, we talked about emerging from the cocoon of artistic isolation and how this impacted their work. Artists shared how they made art during an unprecedented period of uncertainty. Our conversations revealed what making art means today and how COVID-19 forced an alteration of their process. Many artists used this time as a period of reevaluation of practice and self. Thinking about the future included a reflection of the past, with a common goal of pushing towards something new. Conceptually, the year 2020 reset the clock, allowing artists to experiment and explore materials, techniques, and ideas with abandon.

The eighteen artists selected for the Tampa Museum of Art’s Skyway 2024 exhibition are showing their work for the first time in our regional triennial. They represent a range of backgrounds-from MFA students and self-taught artists to creative makers with established careers. Notably, the art in this iteration of Skyway is deeply personal and introspective, with work referencing lived experiences and observations of the changed, chaotic, charged world around us. The works allude to heroes and heroines, friends and family, self and the body, and the fragile line between life and death. Viewed together, the art reveals a creative zeitgeist informed by our post-pandemic world.