Suzanne Townsend

Inside the GENERATOR gallery doors is the first piece of the exhibition which also bears its title.

The University of South Florida’s College of the Arts Contemporary Art Museum now straddles Tampa Bay. Since 1989 the USF Tampa campus has filled its Contemporary Art Museum with both visiting artist and student exhibitions, and now on the other side of the bay USF St. Petersburg hosts an extension of the museum in Harbor Hall called GENERATOR. The goal for this branch is to function as an incubator of ideas and a place for expanded artistic experimentation. 

The inaugural exhibition at GENERATOR is “SUPERFLEX: This Is The Tip Of The Iceberg”, curated by Sarah Howard and on loan from the Danish artist group SUPERFLEX and Galería OMR in Mexico City. This immersive installation is made up of large-scale mixed-media designs aimed to prompt reflection on the reality and consequences of climate change. Issues like these are particularly relevant to residents here in South Florida, many of whom live mere feet above sea level. 

Gallery assistant Neha Mitra explained that it is a two-piece exhibition. Upon entering the gallery doors viewers find themselves facing a glowing neon blue sign bearing the title of the exhibition. Through the curtains just beyond visitors stand in a dark room where a video plays. “As you enter the space you see an animation of a thing that not many people know what it is. It’s a siphonophore, this kind of jellyfish-like creature and essentially what it does is it comes up to the surface at night and cleans up all the carbon in the atmosphere. It's bioluminescent so sometimes if you go out in the harbor you can see it if you’re lucky,” Mitra said. Excess atmospheric carbon levels are one of the main driving forces behind global warming. This is why the siphonophore’s role of removing CO2 from the atmosphere is vital not only for oceanic but global ecosystems alike. “They are super crucial for our survival,” said SUPERFLEX co-founder Bjørn Christiansen during a lecture delivered at Harbor Hall last month.

The video, titled “Vertical Migration,” was originally projected 500 feet high onto the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York City during the 76th United Nations General Assembly in 2021 in order to highlight the critical nature of biodiversity and more generally the importance of recognizing and acting upon the issue of climate change. “The topic (of the UN meeting) was biodiversity. Humans cannot just sit there alone and discuss biodiversity. So we took one of those creatures that we met…We went down and filmed at night and decided we wanted to create an animation based on real footage,” Christiansen said.

Jessy Breckenridge describes the research she did for the St. Petersburg Museum of History exhibit Meddling: The Women Who Built St. Pete. 

The St. Petersburg Museum of History is strikingly modest for its downtown location. Plain white and undergoing some construction, the museum is nested at the base of the St. Pete Pier across from the Museum of Fine Arts and houses some gems of this peninsula’s great history. One of its latest exhibitions is Meddling: The Women Who Built St. Pete, curated by Jessy Breckenridge. “It started off as a bet,” she said. She grinned as she explained that she’s actually the archives and collections manager at the museum, not the curator. “It was women’s history month and I bet our executive director that I could find and write a profile on a different historical woman in St. Pete every day for the month of March, which has 31 days. And I did.” Breckenridge said.

Soon the project became an idea for an exhibit, and then an actual exhibit. Mainly using digital archives of newspapers, Breckenridge started her research with the founder of the museum itself, Mary Wheeler Eaton. Each research subject led to several more and soon enough Breckenridge had 30 profiles ready for the gallery walls and a slideshow of many more. “‘Meddling’ comes from one of our St. Petersburg history books which was quoted as saying that the men of the town did not quite like the meddling women of St. Pete,” she said.

Breckenridge explained some of the challenges she came across during her research. First of all, until the mid-1980s, if a woman was married she was almost always only referred to by her husband’s name. This made finding information about the woman herself difficult, and having to sift through everything that was only about her husband tedious. 

Another challenge came because Black history is not as well documented as white history, which makes it even more challenging and important to discern an accurate historical narrative. Breckenridge said the only woman without a photo in the exhibit is Anna Donaldson, who alongside her husband was the first permanent Black settler in Pinellas County. 

Despite the challenges, the exhibit has been received very well. Breckenridge’s work has even inspired the community here in St. Petersburg to get involved in its own local history. She said people have been calling in to the museum to tell about an additional woman from the city’s history to add to the exhibit’s slideshow.

“It’s really exciting to be able to tell these stories,” she said.

The museum is exploring ways to make “Meddling” a permanent exhibit.

Meet the Sea Turtle Trackers, the organization responsible for ensuring a safe and successful sea turtle nesting season in St. Pete Beach.

Turtle Joe checks Nest 60 for signs of hatching. This is one of the last two nests on St. Pete Beach.

ST. PETERSBURG – It was Friday morning, the air on the beach was still as the first rays of dawn cast gentle light onto lapping waves. This is what nearly all of Turtle Joe’s mornings look like throughout the summer: he’s on the beach as soon as the sun is coming up, driving his truck along the water and keeping an eye out for new sea turtle tracks and hatchlings. 

Few have a moniker as apt as “Turtle Joe” Widlansky, the vice president of operations of the non-profit organization Sea Turtle Trackers (STT). Throughout the sea turtle nesting season, which runs from May through October every year, you can find Turtle Joe, other STT staff and volunteers walking St. Pete Beach and Shell Key, marking off nests, filling in holes and picking up trash. Joe says their motto is “Clean, flat, dark.” These are the conditions needed for a successful nesting season. 

On the Gulf Coast of Florida nearly all nests are laid by loggerhead sea turtles, but Joe says we sometimes see nests from green sea turtles and Kemp's Ridley sea turtles as well. All species of sea turtles in coastal U.S. waters are either threatened or endangered. 

The Loggerhead Nesting Process

When it's time to lay her eggs, a mother sea turtle will return to the same beach she emerged from as a hatchling. In the dead of night, she’ll crawl up the beach, leaving behind her the tracks that STT keeps an eye out for, and dig a hole with her back flippers. This is called the egg chamber and it’s usually around 15-18 inches deep. Then, she goes into a sort of trance for about an hour or two, laying around 100 eggs. When she’s done, she’ll cover up the egg chamber with sand and head back to the blue. STT members follow the tracks, verify the nest by locating the egg chamber, and mark it off with stakes, caution tape and a sign identifying it as a sea turtle nest.

While the eggs incubate underground for about 60 days, STT members keep an eye out for predation; sea turtle eggs and hatchlings are a delicacy to nearly every other creature on the beach. Predators can include coyotes, ghost crabs, fire ants, birds and racoons. Turtle Joe explains that that’s why STT puts a self-releasing screen over every nest they find. This prevents larger predators (particularly problematic on Shell Key) from accessing the egg chamber but still allows the hatchlings to climb out on their own.

When the nest is done incubating, STT members will look for a “hatch hole,” or small divot in the sand. From the hatch hole they’ll find dozens of hatchling tracks leading (ideally) to the water. Hatches happen at night and sometimes lighting from beachfront resorts and restaurants can cause “disorientations,” confusing the hatchlings and leading them away from the water, making them more susceptible to death by predation or overheating. This is why code enforcement conducts two surveys per season, making sure lights are turtle safe: orange, amber or red, but not white. 

Three days after the nest has hatched, an STT member will conduct an excavation where they unearth all the eggshells and record the egg chamber data, including number of eggs hatched and unhatched and note any anomalies such as root impaction or bacterial growth. 

After the Storm

Left to right: Vicky Foster, Tammy Allen, Jim Jeansonne and Tori Yoos head out on Jeansonne’s boat Reefmaker to patrol South Shell Key Friday morning. Courtesy of Suzanne Townsend

While the Clearwater Aquarium monitors the beaches at Clearwater, Madeira Beach and Treasure Island, STT monitors St. Pete Beach and three barrier islands to its south which are North Shell Key, South Shell Key and Outback Key. Each day a separate team will patrol these keys but two are only accessible by boat after years of storms shaping and reshaping the islands. After Hurricane Idalia they lost five nests on the islands and more on the main beach to “inundation” or flooding. Supervisor Tammy Allen says after Idalia part of the beach became harder to access on foot, too, with debris blocking their usual walking path. Captain Jim Jeansonne is an STT staff member who has been using his personal vessel to help the organization access the islands until they raise funds for a reliable vessel. 

A view of Fluid Structures from the University Student Center.

This year the SHINE Mural Festival is shining on the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. At the intersection of Second Street and Sixth Avenue South you can now find the campus’s latest public artwork titled “Fluid Structures.”

The SHINE festival has been keeping St. Petersburg vibrant since 2015. It is produced by the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance with the mission of “revitalizing areas, inspiring dialogue, and uniting our community.” This year visiting graphic arts Professor Jay Giroux and a team of eight students and two of Giroux’s team members were a part of it. On Oct. 14 you could find the group hard at work stenciling, priming and painting the road outside of the University Student Center.

One of the participating students is RJ Martin, an architecture major who helped out on the project. “It’s fun planning…I cut the stencils for it. It’s a good feeling to be able to point out to people, ‘Hey I worked on that,’” Martin said in a USF Newsroom video.

The oxymoronic title “Fluid Structures” is appropriate for the work’s modernist motif which includes abstract geometric and curvaceous shapes in green, orange, red and white. Giroux explains that these big shapes are simple and easy on the eyes.

“A lot of direction for all these street murals, as far as the way that we take, it is built with efficiency, so everything’s kinda gotta be on a grid, everythings gotta be relatively simple to not only draw out but paint.”

Giroux also points out that an added benefit of the artwork is that it is traffic calming. “Not only is it a beautiful mural but it will help calm traffic and prevent any kind of pedestrian accidents.”

OCHOPEE – The drone of cicadas, the flat river of grass and gators lurking by the roadside, only their eyes visible above the black water: this is the Florida Everglades. It is a region that has long been imbued with fascinating history both haunting and beautiful, from being the location of marijuana smuggling routes (or as the locals call it, square grouper) and a hiding spot for killers on the run. But deep in the swamp lurks another source of intrigue: the skunk ape. 

Also known as Florida’s Bigfoot, the hairy biped has been a lifelong pursuit of Ochopee, Florida local David Shealy. He describes the skunk ape as being between six and seven feet tall, covered in hair and incredibly smelly. Since spotting the creature near his home at the northern end of Everglades National Park at age 10, Shealy has made it his life’s work to find this elusive character. He has reported other sightings since then, once in 1998 and most famously in 2001 when he recorded video footage of the creature trudging through the swamp, which is available on YouTube. 

Shealy is the founder of the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee. It’s one of several of Tamiami Trail’s roadside attractions (including the world’s smallest post office) and includes a campground, collection of live pythons and alligators, a gift shop and plans to expand. The building also houses Shealy’s two casts of skunk ape tracks. In 2000 he even applied for a grant from the Collier County Tourism Development Council, which was denied. 

Sightings of skunk apes have been reported since the 1950s and ‘60s. One discrepancy, however, is that the native Seminole and Miccosukee tribes have a legend of the skunk ape in their culture, too. For clarity, the tribes are separate politically but not culturally, according to the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Tara Backhouse, the collections manager at the Seminole Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum said in an email that, “there’s definitely not anything written down, and I don’t believe it’s a real Seminole legend in any way.” Shealy says something different: “That’s not the case at all and I grew up here with the Indians.” Indeed, Shealy's property is not far from the Miccosukee reservation. He recounted a story that Miccosukee tribal member Michael Frank told him about a time during the Seminole Wars. “At that time an Indian scout left the village and went into the Everglades, and he returned with a story that he had seen a group of men that were very large and covered with hair.” Shealy says there are as many as nine skunk apes in the Everglades. According to him they smell because they spend time in alligator holes, and they make a low bassy cooing growl. When he performs the skunk ape call, it sounds a lot like an alligator bellow. Shealy has a response for that, too. “I have big alligators that roar every time the garbage truck comes in so I know gators really good and it's not a gator.” 

So did Shealy make it all up? Some locals think so. The picture that many residents of the nearby Everglades City paint is that Shealy simply wanted to make more money. Some call him a fraud, some call him a scientific researcher. When I met him, though, the first thing I understood about David Shealy is that he is a storyteller. He has many tales of encounters with Florida's bigfoot, some his and some from other people, but all of them captivating. He spoke of a time when he collected a hair sample from one encounter but the next day two unidentified federal agents, “The men in black” as Shealy calls them, who came to his home and confiscated the sample, never to be heard from again. In another story a woman named Mary Billie was chopping down palm fronds for a chickee hut. As she was hacking at the fronds one fell away and she was face to face with the skunk ape. 

Despite the chorus of skunk ape deniers, there are others who support Shealy’s work. Brad Bertelli is the author of The Florida Keys Skunk Ape Files, which is a work of fiction based on real reports of encounters with the cryptid. Included in the book is a real clipping from an 1874 newspaper that reads, “Key West has a ghost covered with hair and about the size of a horse.” Bertelli says, “It reads to me like a typical skunk ape or bigfoot sighting.” And one of the earliest reports of such. Another story that inspired his book is a family on Key Largo who witnessed a smelly hairy creature on their property, which frightened them so much they moved out of the Keys entirely. 

Both skunk ape aficionados have responses for the nonbelievers. Shealy says, “It’s not a good attitude to have because what they are doing is possibly putting a threatened or endangered species at risk and that they really need to do their research, possibly go out on their own. Just discounting it is doing an injustice to our native wildlife.” For Bertelli, “A lot of it has to do with not being willing to engage with something that is unknown. There are things out there bigger than ourselves. You have to keep an open mind.”

TAMPA–Floridians are all too familiar with the regularly occurring red tide and its consequences. Beachgoers arrive hoping for a relaxing day of swimming and shelling only to be plagued with cough and the stench of decaying fish. 

Red tide is a naturally occurring periodical bloom of the phytoplankton, or single-celled algae called Karenia Brevis. The organism has been documented in the Gulf of Mexico since the 19th century but recently it's been exacerbated by excess nutrients and increased water temperatures. The harmful algal blooms of Karenia Brevis suck oxygen out of the water and release a toxin deadly to fish and other marine life, as well as having adverse effects on humans. This negatively impacts the tourism industry that Florida’s economy heavily relies on and in some cases has caused respiratory infections that land affected people in the ER. 

The impacts of red tide are felt first and foremost by businesses that rely on the ocean. Captain Dustin Quesenberry has been with Poseidon Fishing Charters of Tampa Bay since 2020. He recalls recent blooms and the effects it had on business. “We did have fewer bookings just because it’s all over the news. Bait was a big issue and then catching fish was a big issue because most of them died. Then they go to different areas when the red tide affects the water, so that was our main struggle.” 

David Karlen, an environmental scientist with the Environmental Protection Commission of Hillsborough County says the fish kills can be costly, both in cleanup expenses and for tourism. “The other issues are respiratory issues. People with asthma or other respiratory issues are particularly sensitive to the toxins in the algae that get released into the atmosphere. Currently there's a bloom occurring south of us near Lee County that reaches up towards the mouth of Tampa Bay so we’re going to see more bloom impact in the coming weeks.”

Southwest Coast Karenia Brevis concentrations. Courtesy of Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

What causes red tide?

Karenia blooms begin offshore in the Gulf, but the main problems arise once it makes its way to shore. Rhonda Watkins, a member of the Harmful Algae Bloom Task Force, wants people to remember that red tide is naturally occurring. “It’s never going away,” she said in a phone call. But it has gotten worse in southwest Florida. One cause of the increased algal blooms is temperature, according to a University of Florida study. Higher water temperatures due to climate change have been found to enable the proliferation of toxic phytoplankton, making red tide worse for Florida. “It also has been documented that nutrients and temperature act synergistically in the ocean to stimulate the growth of harmful phytoplankton blooms.”

Nutrients are a big component in exacerbating existing red tide once it gets closer to the coast. “Once red tide is near the coast it will consume any nutrients available to it. 

There’s nutrients in any coastal runoff that can exacerbate an existing red tide, it can sustain it for longer than it typically would be here,” Watkins explains. Nutrients that Karenia feeds off of include nitrogen and phosphorus which can come from fertilizer and sewage and it’s only becoming worse due to land development. When asked about the role of Florida’s sugar industries in excess nutrient runoff, Watkins says they’re not the main culprit. “The thing is that I know everybody wants to blame Big Sugar but Big Sugar has been here since the 60s, so nothing that they’re doing is changing. The thing that has changed is development and we know that the rules that we have for development for stormwater runoff are not addressing the nutrients in the water. Then you compound that with the number of people that are moving here and that’s more sewage, that’s more biosolids…” That’s more fuel for red tide. 

One example of a bad red tide happened in July of 2021 after the Piney Point wastewater leak in Manatee County. In March 215 million gallons of wastewater was pumped into the Bay, and in July the Tampa Bay Times reported that almost 2,000 pounds of dead sea life was picked up in the Tampa Bay area alone. Red tide usually naturally affects Florida’s coast during the winter months, so this unusual summertime bloom can be linked to the wastewater leak. 

There are clear connections between climate change and harmful algal blooms when we look at unusual storms, too. According to NOAA, hurricane season in Florida lasts from May to November. Still, Tropical Storm Alberto in May of 2018 was a somewhat unusual occurrence. This storm led to another bad red tide that lasted all summer, again, an unusual time for a bloom. Storms and hurricanes cause upwelling of nutrients from the bottom of the Gulf, as well as increased runoff from land, feeding outbreaks of Karenia. 

What needs to be done?

Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute are the main researchers investigating red tide. As for what everyday people can do, both Karlen and Watkins urge people to limit use of fertilizer. According to Watkins, “Recommendations at the state level are either not passing legislation or or the rules that they’re revamping are so watered down that it's not gonna make a difference.” She goes further by saying “We should stop growing grass. That's really one of the best things you can do, it’s such an artificial crop and it takes so much energy and nutrients to maintain. Grow food, grow anything else.” 

This year Art Basel Miami Beach will celebrate its 20th anniversary in the sunshine state. The event is held annually in the beginning of December, drawing art enthusiasts and professionals to Miami for a warm winter getaway. The event is held in the Miami Beach Convention Center where every square foot is occupied by art, gallerists and guests. This year 283 galleries will be represented from all over the world. In the past the art fair has had over 70,000 attendees, and this year expects even more.

The event has also grown into part of a bigger attraction known as Art Week Miami, which includes other programming by collectors and cultural institutions as well as parties and other events. Satellite fairs are set up under pavilions on South Beach as well as close by to the convention center, exhibiting more contemporary art and 20th and 21st century furniture, lighting and other designs. Some programs host panel discussions and lectures, as tour guide and art historian Nicole Zambrano explains. “You can see the latest work that a lot of famous artists are working on and they also have panel discussions which are usually really interesting. I like that especially in Miami it's inspired other smaller art fairs to emerge so all over the city it becomes Art Week so you have from the ‘finest’ of art to street art. It makes it a great time for people to be exposed to art and all kinds of art at every level.”

Art Basel originally began in Basel, Switzerland in the 1970s by gallery owners hoping to broaden the scope of their business selling Modern and contemporary art. The endeavor was a huge success which grew every following year, and by the year 2000 organizers announced their plans to expand to Miami Beach. Here in Florida contemporary art from Latin and American cultures could shine vibrantly alongside other internationally established galleries on a world stage. The first show in 2002 garnered 30,000 visitors and only grew from there. 

Miami is the perfect place to bring art and business together, with its glamorous tropicality beckoning wealthy buyers from all over. Celebrities and enthusiasts gather to celebrate art and culture, which are increasingly valuable social currencies. Widewalls writer Elena Martinique calls it “an orgy of luxurious capitalist excess.” This is an idea that Zambrano also comments on: “One of the positives is that it allows people to gain access to art all over the world…one of the negatives is that it lacks that full accessibility because ticket prices are so high. It's definitely marketed towards wealthy people.”

Despite its shortcomings Art Basel supports the city’s economy, bringing an estimated $500 million to the area and in turn supporting galleries, museums and cultural centers that operate in the city year round. 

From October 2022 St Petersburg’s SunRunner ran free of charge, carrying passengers between downtown St Petersburg and St Pete Beach, but complaints about an influx in homeless people around St Pete Beach have led to the installment of a fare sooner than was originally expected. 

Most of the complaints came from St Pete Beach residents who were concerned about this increase in the homeless population in the area and blamed the SunRunner for carrying homeless passengers to the beach from downtown. The air conditioning and power outlets provided on the bus made it possible to beat the intense Florida heat and charge electronic devices while you ride. Whether or not the SunRunner is definitively to blame for the increase in homeless, in the summer months the beach became a more popular spot for unhoused people to spend the night because it was cooler than downtown alternatives, although sleeping on the beach at night is illegal and violates trespassing laws. 

In a meeting on August 23, Sheriff Bob Gaultieri said that the “homeless issues” began in March, and law enforcement was having to expend more resources in order to deal with problems such as public nudity when homeless individuals used the showers at the public beach accesses. Families were concerned for obvious reasons, and local law enforcement also came across instances of public urination and defecation. Residents also complained that they were being accosted at the Dolphin Plaza shopping center, which is across the street from a SunRunner stop at one of the main beach access parks. At September’s monthly Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA) board meeting one St Pete Beach resident Jill Kashner said, “I'm afraid someone's gonna throw a molotov cocktail into my window,” despite a distinct lack of molotov cocktail incidents. 

Calls for service at Dolphin Plaza increased from an average of 20 calls per week in 2022 to 127 per week the following year. “It was costing $10,000 a week to have deputies out there,” Gaultieri said at the August PSTA board meeting. At the same meeting he noted that since July 25 there had been 52 arrests issued, 132 trespass warnings and 32 ordinance violations. 

PSTA’s Chief Executive Officer Brad Miller had proposed an immediate installment of fares only on the westbound stops where the bus was headed towards the beach. The proposal was struck down, however, because of its targeted nature. St Pete Beach City Commissioner Chris Marone blames the SunRunner for these issues as well. At a meeting on Aug 8 he said, “It’s the buses and who they’re bringing in, and the Sheriff said we cannot just pick these people up and drive them somewhere and drop them off. We're not allowed to do that. We can make their lives miserable.” St Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch, however, opposed the implementation of a fare and said he even allocated money in the city’s 2024 budget to keep the SunRunner free of charge.

When the SunRunner began running city officials decided it would be free in order to encourage more use and help people get accustomed to the new route. There had always been a plan to begin charging fares in October 2023, but due to concerns about homeless people fares began a month early. Starting in September a ride costs $2.25 or you can pay $5 for a day pass and $70 for a one month pass. Students, youths, seniors and those with disabilities can pay half that. Groups of up to five people can get a day pass for $10 and children 8 or younger ride for free. Only contactless payment is accepted, no cash, which opponents of the fare installment such as the Homeless Leadership Alliance of Pinellas say unfairly targets a specific group of people. Intrastate travel is protected under the Florida Constitution so some opponents of the change, including lawyers, have noted that the cashless fare is restrictive and discriminatory.