About SPACEcraft

Vision

SPACEcraft brought creativity into an active environment, sharing hands-on, transformative art experiences with the people of Pinellas County inside of two converted cargo shipping containers.

This modular network of creative spaces was designed to feature both instructor-led and self-guided activities on the themes of Make, Play, Read, and Grow, inviting people to interact and create together at each site SPACEcraft visited.

Beginning with its soft launch July 2020, this one-of-a-kind project traveled continuously throughout the county, moving every eight weeks to a new public park, through July 2023. The project was funded by the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners, with additional support from the City of Largo in the final deployment.

The SPACEcraft containers were open several times a week to offer participant-driven programming guided by artists, musicians, writers, performers, educators and other partnering creative people. For example:

Make: Maker space/art studio featuring art workshops, crafting, mending, art installations, exhibitions, tool and equipment demos.

Play: Interactive playroom/stage sharing musical performances, drum circles, board games, playground games, building and educational toys.

Read: Reading room presenting poetry and storytelling, a free library, writing workshops, zine making.

Grow: Personal/community growth space offering yoga, meditation, gardening, nutrition, nature crafts, personal wellness.

Interactive elements on the outside of each container provided creative engagement that could be enjoyed at all times without supervision:

Make: A modular magnetic mural of colorful shapes
Play: An interactive Duplo-block play wall
Read: Large-scale magnetic poetry
Grow: A free public plant share

Origins

Artist team members talk about the SPACEcraft project.

Project Mission & Funding

SPACEcraft was one of five proposals presented to a public arts panel selected by Creative Pinellas, the county’s Local Arts Agency. The panel was made up of Tampa Bay arts educators, artists, community builders, and business influencers. In December 2018, the panel made its recommendation to Creative Pinellas, and SPACEcraft was selected for activation.

More from Creative Pinellas:

The spirit of this project is to foster community through a county-wide traveling art experience by transforming and activating public places. By bringing interactive art to the community, we encourage our residents to have a personal experience with the art. In doing so, we aspire to create a legacy of communal participation and ownership across Pinellas County.

Land Acknowledgement

The SPACEcraft team acknowledges that our work took place on the traditional Homelands of the Tocobaga tribe. We recognize the historical and continuing impacts of colonization on Indigenous communities, their resilience in the face of colonial and state-sponsored violence, and fully support Indigenous Sovereignty. Our team makes this acknowledgment in support of truth telling, as a step toward dismantling the ongoing legacies of white dominance and settler colonialism, and as a commitment to social justice.

Concept

The project spaces were fabricated from locally sourced shipping containers, symbols and indicators of consumption. These containers were made in China, filled with goods, and made one trip by ship into the Gulf of Mexico, then into Tampa Bay. It’s not cost effective for the containers to go back to China empty, so they become a by-product of our consumption.

What if we could flip them? What if we could give them new lives as a counter-response to their original use? What if instead of indicators of consumption, they became symbols of the richness of the natural creative resources and minds we have here in Pinellas County?

These questions guided our project through concept and fabrication. Sometimes “Art” can feel exclusive, so we chose the themes Make, Play, Read and Grow for this project because they feel accessible. We believe that within these themes is something for everyone.

Deepwater Horizon Disaster
& BP Settlement

In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling unit, owned and operated by Transocean and drilling for BP, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles southeast off the Louisiana coast. The explosion and subsequent fire resulted in the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon and the deaths of 11 workers; 17 others were injured.

The same blowout that caused the explosion also caused a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing 2.6 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. It is considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the world, and the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

In 2013, Pinellas County filed a lawsuit against BP and other defendants for damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, alleging "negligence and willful misconduct" on the part of BP. In July 2015, the county approved a settlement in the amount of $9,515,923.

In 2017, the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners set aside $500,000 of BP settlement funds for an innovative, traveling public art project. Creative Pinellas supported delivery of this unique and engaging project to communities throughout Pinellas County, generating discussion on the role the arts play in our daily lives, and cementing the County’s legacy as an arts and culture destination.

Tocobaga temple mound at Phillipe Park. Safety Harbor, FL

Project Team

This project was originally conceived and produced through the creative vision and collaborative efforts of Carrie Boucher, Bridget Elmer, and Mitzi Gordon, three Pinellas County-based socially engaged artists. Each stays busy with their own projects and practices, while also joining forces to work on larger, community-focused events and engagements such as SPACEcraft. Production for the Largo 2023 deployment was delivered by artists Emily Stone and Tiffany Elliott.

Carrie Boucher

Carrie Boucher is a socially engaged artist who believes creative expression is a human right, all forms of expression are important, and all members of a community collectively create its unique culture. After a decade in Chicago, where she earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Carrie returned home to the Tampa Bay area and developed an ongoing practice of surveying the local cultural landscape to take note of whose perspectives are uplifted, whose are suppressed, and why this difference exists. Through her collaborative projects – NOMADstudio, Justice Studio, and SPACEcraft – she works to highlight and address disparities by facilitating creative engagements and organizing networks of artistic support in places where people typically lack access to the means of creative production.

Bridget Elmer

Bridget Elmer is a socially engaged artist and educator with a passion for service, a commitment to equity, and a belief in the power of art to improve community wellbeing. She received an MFA in Book Arts and an MLIS from the University of Alabama, and has taught at numerous venues. At Ringling College of Art and Design, Bridget served for seven years as Coordinator of the Letterpress and Book arts Center and co-founded The Makerspace. She is a co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA), a union for creative practitioners, and a founding member of Print St. Pete, a community letterpress and risograph print shop. Bridget has 20 years of experience as a development professional in the creative sector. She currently works as a Development Director for NOMADstudio and Development Coordinator at ArtsConnect.

Mitzi Jo Gordon

Mitzi Jo Gordon is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. Her projects center socially-engaged collaboration and reclaimed materials at every scale, from mini zines to room-sized installations. Passionate about access and mobility, Mitzi believes in the transformative power of shared creative experiences. She is the founder of multiple traveling and interactive art projects, including the Bluebird Books Bus (2011-2020), a rolling free library and book–arts studio housed on a converted short bus. In 2014, she developed the Carmada art car showcase, bringing art-on-wheels events to public spaces in the Tampa Bay area and beyond. Mitzi received her BA in Journalism from New York University, and is currently based in the Pacific Northwest, where she is writing a book about her experiences in social practice.

Emily Stone

Emily Stone is a fiber artist based in St. Petersburg, FL. For the past decade, she has been dedicated to building and curating space for the creative community in the Tampa Bay area. Emily attended Penland School of Craft in 2016, presented a collage series at Kolaj Fest New Orleans in 2019, and was an emerging artist at Gasparilla Festival of the Arts in 2020. Her current focus is on natural dyeing and garment construction.

Tiffany Elliott

Tiffany Elliott is a jeweler who received her trade-related certificates, Diamonds Graduate and Applied Jewelry Professional (AJP), from the Gemological Institute of America. She is the owner and designer behind TeeSankey Designs, which features limited edition and one-of-a-kind artisan jewelry made for those who find beauty in simplicity. Devoted to inspiring and aiding in the benefits of creative freedom, Tiffany facilitates jewelry workshops with members of the community residing in underserved areas. She wants her artwork to not only be visually pleasing, but also to impact communities via social engagement. She is currently the Director of Culture for NOMADstudio, a Florida non-profit dedicated to “putting creativity in motion to fuel connections and nurture communities.”

This public art project was funded by the
Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners.

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