Work by Carlos Pons inside Kress Contemporary in Ybor City, Florida on Sept. 17, 2026. Credit: Dave Decker / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
Fall and spring arts previews, like the seasonal changes they accompany, arrive like clockwork. As the Bay area trades weeks of oppressive heat and humidity for 13 days of Uggs-worthy weather, natives and newbs alike look for ways to get out and experience their neighborhoods.
For the most part, there are clear cut ways to support the venues, events and individuals in arts previews. Theatergoers, live music fans, and movie buffs buy tickets. Bookworms aren’t going to ask an author to sign a Kindle.
Ironically, the picture’s not as clear when it comes to the visual arts. Yes, there are gallery openings, but for longer than there’ve been seasonal arts previews, visual artists have always needed people to, well, buy their art.
Luckily, most supporters agree: someone doesn’t have to be wealthy to collect art.
“You can’t always afford the art you want,” Tracy Midulla told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, “But you can purchase the art you can afford.”
Midulla, a fourth-generation Tampeña who is founder and director of Tempus Projects, reiterated that some people tailor their collections around their budgets while others shape their collections by what they have to spend.
“I know a lot of people that buy really small works of art from really big artists, and it’s expensive, but it’s not as expensive as buying a large painting,” she added. “Then there are people that buy work from emerging artists, which is usually more affordable because they’re earlier in their career.”
“Just imagine if you had bought a Basquiat when he was just drawing postcards on the street,” Effren Denson told CL.
No stranger to purchasing prints, Denson, who runs Honey Gallery inside the same Kress Contemporary space where Tempus lives, didn’t buy his first piece of art until just before the pandemic.
Denson, a second-generation Tampeño, grew interested in Ryan Lagasse’s work after seeing a jack-in-the-box style clown during a Pabst Blue Ribbon show at The Bricks. He reached out, wondering if she still had it.
“She said, ‘No, I don’t have that, but I have other things,’” he explained. “I remember I walked down to The Hub and met her. She showed me some things, and that was probably about five years ago.”
Lagasse ended up showcasing her poppy, almost surrealist acrylic paintings on canvas and paper at Honey Gallery last spring.
Last month, during another Third Thursday at Kress, Carlos Pons, a self-taught artist from Guatemala, opened his studio to visitors. One of his paintings is on the cover of CL’s fall arts issue.
“It’s actually still a work in progress,” he told CL. “I think all my art is a work in progress.”
Despite doing art full-time, Pons said his career is also still developing, with much of his time being spent on commercial and commission work.
“I’m not always relying on the sales of original artwork for sustaining myself financially,” he added. “Doing my art sometimes—most times—falls on the back burner. So when I’ve sold original artwork, I find myself incredibly fortunate and lucky.”
Midulla has theories on why Bay area artists might have a hard time moving work. For one, the collector scene here is thinner than it should be. There are people in Tampa who buy art, she said, but there’s a caveat.
“I think the majority of the people that are spending a large amount of money on art, people that are investing or collecting in a serious manner, don’t buy art in Tampa,” Midulla said. “I think they buy it when they travel, or they buy it from art fairs like Miami Art Week, or they have galleries that they work closely with.”
Tampa is still developing culturally, she added. Yes, there are certainly people out there doing good work, but for a long time, Tampa has been a city obsessed with sports, tourism and beaches. People love their paintings of football players and celebrities, or boring beach photos and sunsets.
The fact that small theater companies, galleries and music venues struggle is a reflection of that reality.
“We still suffer from that type of Florida cliche as far as where we put our value in culture,” Midulla said. “I don’t think that the visual arts are the only thing suffering from that.”
Denson says that while many of the people who buy art at his gallery aren’t buying $1,500 paintings, there are folks nearby who might.
“We have to bring in other people,” he said, noting how it’s rare to see people from Westchase, Brandon or Riverview at art shows. “We’re trying to figure out a way. How do we incorporate more people into the Tampa Bay art scene, because it’s much needed.”
Midulla is doing her part, preaching about the value of local galleries and nonprofits to anyone who’ll listen. In her role as an art consultant, she leans into people looking for art, to help them find pieces—local work that they wouldn’t otherwise buy—that fits their collection.
Hell, over the last six months, she and Tempus Exhibitions and Programs Manager Mitzi Jo Gordon, have held “Go Ahead, Buy Some Art” lectures where they invite local collectors and curators to talk about affordable art. “There are plenty of venues and artists that understand a spectrum in budget and sales and price point,” Midulla added.
This month, another installment of “Go Ahead, Buy Some Art” will happen inside Kress Contemporary in Ybor City on Thursday, Sept. 17, with a panel that includes FloridaRama founder Liz Dimmitt, Noelle Mason. Associate Professor, Sculpture & Extended Media at University of South Florida, USF Graphicstudio Marketing Director Kristin Soderquist, Dunedin Fine Arts Center Curatorial Director Danny Olda, and multimedia artist William Downs.
At the end of the day, Denson explained, buying art is about being surrounded by the shit you love. In your 20s, that might be posters from Ikea or Walmart, but at some point, people want to fine tune their lived environment.
“It just feels good to be surrounded by your own cool, curated stuff that you went out in the world and kind of picked up for yourself over the years,” he said. “And by the time you get in your 50s, 60s, and 70s, you have this beautiful collection of things that you just kind of collected through life—and art’s one of those things.”
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