The SHINE festival returned to St. Petersburg and the city once more became a canvas for artists, local and international alike. This year’s festival expanded the art to the Pinellas Trail, more traffic boxes were decorated and the public participated with a community mural. Jonah Hinebaugh | The Crow’s Nest
By Jonah Hinebaugh
Murals cover the walls across St. Petersburg, a surreal experience for Derek Donnelly, who remembers downtown as a boarded-up area nobody visited.
The mission of SHINE aims to continually illuminate the power of art in public spaces by revitalizing areas, inspiring dialogue and uniting communities, according to the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance.
Donnelly, 35, a St. Petersburg native, helped curate and facilitate the Open Call winners for the festival this year. Its progress, paired with the effort of local artists, has created a culture Donnelly never expected to see in his lifetime.
Over the past four years, SHINE has brought artists from around the world who have helped the city gain international recognition. But staying local is what makes the festival unique.
For Open Call winner Melanie Posner, it’s the one time of the year where artists are out in the community, helping the city become more vibrant and beautiful. In her eyes, it is everything St. Petersburg represents.
“(The community) has been so heartwarming,” she said. “It’s been really awesome. I didn’t expect the amount of outreach that we’ve gotten.
“It’s funny, the last couple years I always came out to SHINE and always watched the other artists work, but to then have it happen to you, it’s really sweet.”
The community support, whether it be artist to artist, local business owners allowing artists to paint their buildings or people stopping by every day to see the progress, was echoed by every artist.
Mitch Cook, 29, praised his ability to “hear everyone’s different version of how to skin a cat when it comes to tackling big walls.”
Cook, who goes by Noirs One, moved here from North Carolina only a few months ago, but wanted to encapsulate the city in his mural.
“My work is mostly pattern-based, it’s things I find in the environment, like chain link patterns, barbed wire, patterns on sewer grates, in my apartment, the stairs. I used the colors of the St. Petersburg flag. With this piece, I’m just trying to show a little bit of St. Petersburg,” he said.
His canvas, at 500 Delmar Terrace S, is a federal wall that restricted his work to the abstract. It served as a new challenge for the artist, who commonly uses characters in his pieces.
Justin Wagher, 19, said SHINE represents a movement of artists that have taken a route that wasn’t always looked highly upon. Wagher attended St. Petersburg College briefly before deciding to focus all his efforts on his art.
“In his senior year of high school he did like 12 full-sized portrait murals of his girlfriend at the time,” Donnelly said. “It was incredible.”
Wagher said he met Donnelly and Sebastian Coolidge, another mainstay of the local art community, at 13 years old. He spent five years shaking cans, mixing paint, moving ladders for them and learning how to do everything correctly and efficiently.
When Wagher turned 18, he started painting murals by himself and participating in gallery shows.
“He’s the epitome of what it takes to make it in St. Pete,” Donnelly said. “He’s smart, resourceful and tries to do something a little outside the box.
“He really understands the area that he’s in. (He has) a passion and drive, he doesn’t really stop for anything.”
Wagher likes to work using darker tones, enjoying the ability to create more subtle transitions exemplified in his SHINE mural with black telephone poles contrasting a gray background.
Posner used to work in a green hue scale before moving into a full color spectrum. The more “grotesque” color scheme she focused on had a negative impact in her own life.
The five Open Call winners share the same stretch of conjoined businesses, showing the juxtaposition of each of their works.
According to Donnelly, there were more than 40 submissions for the Open Call, and only three winners were to be chosen. But he was able to influence the committee to add two more. Jake “Tasko” Jacquillard, Michael Vahl and Sarah Page were the other artists from the Open Call.
Donnelly wants to keep SHINE as free from political influence as possible, but cites how the over past seven or eight years the economy and culture have exploded to the point where the festival has raised a lot of red flags for people as far as gentrification.
“It’s almost a necessary evil, but the change is scary for people, artists especially,” he said. “It’s a tourism economy, I don’t know how receptive a lot of people are to art when they were originally coming here for the beaches, but now it’s both.”
The growth worries him, but he’s still optimistic. He said that nothing but good things can come from this many artists working together.
He said the community engagement with the festival helps give people ownership over some of the culture which has grown beyond just the beaches.
“That’s the thing about murals, it’s something that’s for everybody but for nobody at the same time,” he said. “Everybody can enjoy it and observe it, but nobody can take it home.”
