TAMPA, Fla. — With more than 240 artists featuring their work, there's definitely something for everybody at this year's Gasparilla Festival of the Arts. For some artists like Ryan Boase, it's about re-purposing and reusing old materials.
"I take 120-year-old phonographs, 100-year-old tube radio horns and salvage musical instruments and turn them into phone amplifiers. There's no electronics, you just set your phone in it and the speaker plays through the phone and is amplified by the horn built into it," Boase said.
Other artists, like Athlone Clarke, wait for inspiration to find them, using materials that mean something.
"I generally work with whatever is available. And I also work with objects because I believe that objects have memory and objects have energy, but you have to know how to manipulate the stories out of each object," Clarke said.
Overall this festival is about bringing the community together and making art more approachable. Jonathan Moore is the President of American Institute of Architects Tampa Bay.
"Come in, walk through our structure. There's architects there all weekend. We're not just corporate professionals. We're here to talk about art, talk about architecture, talk about design and support all these great artists out here," Moore said.
Finally, be sure to check out the 'larger than life' rhino, made completely out of recycled metals. Dominque Martinez is the CEO of Rustic Steel.
"Reclaiming, recycling, environmentally friendly. This is what we do with junk. This is what we do with scrap metal," Martinez said.
The Gasparilla Festival of the Arts is free and continues Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Julian B. Lane Park.