Every year, the Zodiac Membership Committee invites 12 local emerging artists to exhibit at the Museum during The Dalí Dozen, a special one-night event. The Zodiacs are an all-volunteer group that supports the mission of The Dalí Museum by building meaningful relationships with members and helping to strengthen the ties between the Museum and the arts community. For more information about the Zodiacs, please contact membership@thedali.org.
This year, The Dalí Dozen are:
Jackie Kaufman
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Brett Holden
Jackie Kaufman is a custom jeweler specializing in lost wax casting. She has been selling her jewelry globally and online since 2008. She considers herself an artist-entrepreneur, 50% art and 50% business. Jackie was born in Swampscott, Mass. Went to college at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, then stayed in Florida to start her business and art career. Her unique jewelry style has been seen on TV shows, worn by celebrities and highlighted in numerous magazines, newspapers and catalogs. In 2018 she started a local arts and crafts group called The Mad Crafters in Madeira Beach with over 125 members where she taught many of the workshops. She then transitioned into teaching workshops at local arts centers and museums in the St. Petersburg area.
Georgia Hardage
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Frances Recheungel
Georgia Hardage is a local Multi-Media Perfume Artist born and raised in St. Petersburg, FL. Her first art show was in High School in 2009 where she displayed her ceramic sculptures and surreal jewelry at the Dalí Museum. While she does work with many various art forms, Georgia focuses primarily on natural perfumes. In 2019 she created Aura Perfumery, a completely natural perfume house influenced by perfume history and traditional, environmentally conscious ways of making perfumes. Telling stories through scent, the first sense that humans experience from birth has become her favorite form of artistic expression.
Vince Pompei
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Harvey Drouillard
Vince Pompei has been an artist in the Tampa Bay area for two decades. He has shown his work in nine states and over twenty-five cities. For the last fifteen years, Pompei’s main focus has been repurposing vintage, metal, and cooking utensils into sculptures and elegant timepieces. Vince’s style celebrates traditional design but fuses it with whimsy and character. His mission has been to generate works of art that tap into the viewer’s creative mind. His choice of subject matter and building stimulates people’s inner child, allowing them to recreate the powerful feeling of adolescent wonder. Some of Vince’s other creative adventures include: Building drivable miniature electric vehicles, Creating and programming “The Paint Robot”, and Co-creating “The Art Ride”, an automated, animatronic ride with a vintage flair, that was re-themed nine times in its two-year run.
Lisa Presnail
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Janna Kennedy Hyten
Big hair, fast cars, and loud music fueled Lisa’s imagination while growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, MI. Intoxicated by the salty heat of Florida’s Gulf Coast, Lisa made the move to Tampa Bay in 1985. A career in property management served her financially, however, Lisa desperately sought a way to express her love of the human form, and face; animals; fashion, and music. Lisa wrote, she designed clothes, she even bedazzled. Nothing felt natural until picking up one of the earliest digital cameras, a Sony. Lisa fell in love with this tool. Lisa’s first and lasting love is studio photography, where she designs dramatic portraits using a combination of artificial and natural light. Animal advocacy plays a dynamic role in Lisa’s work, as does the beauty and form of women, shown through her artistic nudes, boudoir, and personal portraiture.
Sallie Hackett Brown
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Janna Kennedy Hyten
Early on in life, Brown developed a unique way of looking and seeing, hearing, and listening with a sensitivity to the challenges of everyday life. She calls her process “Reconstruction,” as she reconstructs and verbalizes her observations of familial and societal situations through the vitality of pre-tooled wood and metal components. The process of finding these beautifully tooled, abandoned pieces and putting them together is a reconstruction of how Brown sees people constructing their life situations. Many years of working on craft development in third-world countries heightened her need to convey a clear message of the pain and pathos of everyday life through her work.
Vannessa Circe
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Jenny Lasseter
Vannessa Circe is a visual artist from Bogota, Colombia. Her paintings and projects incorporate expressions of feeling and personal experience, through informative, satirical and deeply spiritual themes. Her latest works represent the complex and beautiful cultures that she has researched personally. Over the past five years Vannessa has been studying the histories, traditions and territories of the native communities of Colombia. She communicates the stories, beliefs, struggles and hopes of Indigenous communities that she works directly with, along with depictions of their natural surroundings and other pristine and at-risk species and ecosystems. The genre of her artwork has been described as “Visionary” or “Surrealist,” but she is very versatile. Vannessa has exhibited at galleries, cultural centers and events in many parts of the United States, as well as in Colombia and other parts of South America. She is also a co-founder of the “Unbounded World” initiative, whose mission is an integrated approach to environmental and cultural preservation.
Debbie Bright
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Jeremiah Tipton
Debbie is a long-time resident of St. Petersburg Florida and a hairdresser by trade. She is a self-taught artist that has been mentored by Judi Dazzio and many other talented artists at the Dazzio Art Society in the Art District of St Petersburg Florida. Her paintings may be found in private homes, and corporate collections, both locally, and internationally.
Margherita Tibaldo
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Kisha Linebaugh
Margherita Tibaldo is an Italian Fine Artist based in Dunedin, FL. At the young age of 19, Margherita and her family moved to Florida, all the way from Italy, where she has been able to focus on her art career. For the past few years, she has been honoring her skills in oil and acrylic painting, and wood and metal sculpture. Attending the College of the Arts at the University of South Florida has been fundamental for Margherita to develop her own style and ideas surrounding the art world. Margherita painted scenes from her own perspective, with the intention of finding value and beauty in each simple moment. In 2020, Margherita also started a Nude Collection, which is a contemporary revisitation of 19th Century female nudes, mostly realized by male artists who were commissioned by other wealthy men. By being a woman, and painting another woman, Margherita removed the concept of the male gaze and the idea that a woman exists to satisfy a man’s needs. Margherita is now focused on growing as an artist, conveying her ideas, and inspiring people to be part of the world and of the work itself.
Letisia Cruz
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Laura Bethea
Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is the author of The Lost Girls Book of Divination (Tolsun Books, 2018). Her poetry manuscript Migrations & Other Exiles was awarded the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming in 2023 from Lost Horse Press. She is the recipient of a 2022 artist grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance for her project Rituales: An Exploration of Faith in the Caribbean. Her writing and artwork have appeared in [PANK], Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, Saw Palm, Third Coast, Duende, Moko Caribbean Arts & Letters, 300 Days of Sun, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Ink Brick, and Sakura Review, among others. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and a member of the Artist Enclave of Historic Kenwood (AEHK). She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with her partner and their cats, plants and several hundred lizards.
Helen French
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Pamela Joy Trow
Helen French, a St. Petersburg native, received her BFA from The Juilliard School and her MFA from Hollins University. In 2001 she was invited to join Buglisi Dance Theatre (NYC) where she rose to principal dancer and served as rehearsal director. As a choreographer, Mrs. French focuses on collaborations and exploring the relationship between dance and other art forms. In her work as an educator and arts advocate, she has served on numerous dance faculties including George Mason University and The Juilliard School. Helen is currently on faculty at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School. She is a founding member of the St. Petersburg Dance Alliance and serves on the board of the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance.
Sharon McCaman
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Pamela Joy Trow
Sharon McCaman was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida. She began pursuing her dance degree at St. Petersburg College where she earned her AA. She then went on to receive her BFA in Dance at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Provoked by her thirst for knowledge, she yearns to create work that will challenge, grow, and inform her ideas. It is from this place of continued self-exploration that she approaches the process of creating art. Sharon is currently working as a Project Manager for the Tampa Bay Rays Creative Team and also works as a freelance interdisciplinary artist, teacher, and designer.
Philip Walker
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Member Patti Siltala
Philip Bennett Walker was born in New Smyrna Beach April 4th 1979, and is a 5th generation Floridian. He is a self-taught, motivated and determined artist who never lets his passion take the backseat. He currently resides with his wife and Artist, Elizabeth, in Atlantic Beach, Florida. He began embellishing surfboard and t-shirt designs, and his art career took off during the early 2000s with MuseumWorks Galleries in Aspen/New York and with Living Out Loud Galleries in Aspen/Atlanta. He currently shows with Art Republic in Jacksonville/Miami, and Mad Gallery in NYC. Philip is also tied to the two-person art collaboration known as #theMP, between Mobarick Abdullah III and himself. Over the years Philip has experimented with several different styles, making a version of the subtraction technique his own. His bold color fields and negative and positive spaces serve as backdrops to the controlled chaos trapped both inside and outside his designs. To achieve his desired effect, Philip works with a combination of acrylics and spray paint on canvas. He produces one-of-a-kind Originals and small limited edition signed and numbered giclee prints.
Christian Caiazzo
Sponsored by Dalí Museum Zodiac Liaison Megan Moyer
Christian Caiazzo was born in West Palm Beach Florida in 1997 before moving to Southern California at six months old. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he showed apt creative expression and a strong passion for fine art. Caiazzo often got in trouble in high school for drawing instead of taking notes in class. When he was eighteen he moved to the Tampa Bay Area. Soon after relocating Christian began to explore the local fine art museums. He became a member of the Dali Museum and spent many afternoons drawing in the garden. When he turned twenty, he decided to teach himself how to oil paint. In five years, Caiazzo has begun to master his skills and create emotionally riveting pieces that deliver a look into his mind.