In dialogue
Odeta Xheka, an artist, curator, and mother, has been an avid advocate for women in the fine arts. Her latest endeavor is an ambitious and exciting one, as she opened OXH Gallery in the heart of Tampa’s Ybor City Historic District just a few months ago. I’m sitting down with Odeta to discuss her new gallery, her mission, exciting collaborations, and the current two-person show Time Shards, which will be on view through March 20th, 2025.
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AS: As a newcomer to the Tampa art scene, what is your mission and ultimately what changes or better said awareness would you like to bring to the community?
OR: Given the recent Tampa Bay art scene expansion following the region’s rapid real estate development, currently one of the leading regions, establishing a venue as unique as OXH Gallery is either a harbinger of things to come or a one-off art sanctuary welcoming the impulse to jump off the hamster’s wheel and give in to the pampering of the senses, soul, mind and body alike in the presence of art.
The ultimate goal is to offer a dreamy space where artists, musicians, poets, the ones in need of silence and those looking for like-minded people, authors, art therapists, culture workers, those looking for the perfect first date, and those looking for the perfect art piece, art collectors, readers, dancers, and photographers can converge organically and form a multidimensional reality of their own. To this end, the gallery is actively reaching out and securing collaborations with a string of organizations and individuals such as Tampa City Ballet, Tampa Arts Alliance, Truist Foundation, and a sprinkle of art non-profits and commercial galleries, which, while differing in their core offerings, share a similar understanding of what is missing locally from a cultural viewpoint and how to go about bringing it to life.
AS: The conversation of motherhood is closely linked to your mission, what collaborations are you planning?
OR: Not shying away from the complexities of women working in the arts, OXH Gallery’s partnership with Florida’s first and only women’s museum, Museum of Motherhood, which highlights m/others and others in the arts, science and herstory making waves and changing narratives reflects the gallery’s intention to cultivate friendships and visibility beyond ideological and geographical limitations in order to create the nexus of women-inspired art and culture in our world today.
The We Build Tampa Bay initiative—creating culture beyond the bridges—focuses on MOM’s 2025 Academic & Arts 20th Anniversary Conference (March 14-16th) supported by a generous partnership with USF (St Pete & Tampa). The culmination of conference activities is presented by OXH Gallery, followed by the MoM Art Auction launch event in collaboration with the gallery and international artists, activists, and academics taking place on March 18th.
AS: How can artists get involved with your incredible initiative?
OR: What makes this initiative incredible, as you put it, is the emphasis on facilitating impactful and long lasting collaborations in order to create networks of joy. MoM fosters a compassionate, inclusive community that uplifts individual stories and celebrates women’s vital role in our cultural narrative and OXH Gallery is always open to consider any form of collaboration with regional, national and international women artists.
AS: Your current show Time Shards is a two person exhibition showcasing ceramic and glass conceptual work. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you came to curate the show?
OR: Deeply interested in shifting perspectives and the power of the imaginative act to reshape reality, even in its current broken state, into a luminous world offering endless possibilities, I felt simultaneously drawn to the work of Delaina Doshi and Rebeca Lopera. Doshi is an ex-vangelical Daughter of the American Revolution raised in the rural Midwest, now married to a first-generation Indian American, nurturing a daughter amidst the intersections of those worlds. Rebeca Lopera, a Madrid-born artist who moved to Miami without speaking a word of English, has succeeded in turning the fragility and vulnerability of her new reality into a source of personal and professional success.
What most interests me is how both these artists, under the guise of metaphors, investigate “the act of transformation” through a densely layered representation of their personal experiences.
Although Lopera’s Untitled Manifesto composed of thousands of small, smooth, pebble-like glass shards, each hand-marked with a marker to represent a letter of the Spanish alphabet from ‘a’ to ‘z’ . The work stands in clear contrast with Doshi’s larger, coarser pieces of shattered pottery which the artist smashes as a reclamation of her personhood and sexuality. There is an undeniable harmonious chemistry between the two projects on view which share not only a similar painterly sensibility but also an implicit representation of the psychological impact of an act of destruction. Harmony, after all, is the pleasing arrangement of different voices, not the combination of identical sounds.
AS: As a mother and an artist yourself, how is being a gallerist expand your horizons? (I may need to rephrase this question)
OR: In a world that too often overlooks the profound stories that women have to tell, OXH gallery elevates the voice of women artists. We provide time, space and financial support in staging gallery exhibitions as deliberate narratives – at times to be viewed as acts of defiance at others as proclamations of existence. We intend on fostering a lively dialogue centered around perceptions of identity, connection, and progress.
Because I am both an artist and a mother, the subject of motherhood is often explored, as with the recent Motherhood Mediated exhibition, the second in a series of group exhibitions that aim to give voice to the complexity of maternity and motherhood, recognizing that neither mothers nor artists are monolithic archetypes. While the preceding exhibition “Receptacle” examined the process of fictionalizing the self through art using the lens of social isolation, mental health, and emotional wavering, Motherhood Mediated digs deeper towards notions of interpretation, truth, and authenticity in order to fully capture “the amorphous entity of a mother.”
Working with women artists hailing from Albania, Denmark, Germany, India, Japan, Canada, and the U.S. (Miami, Ohio, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Cleveland) OXH Gallery aims to do more than simply highlight the fragility, resiliency, complexity, and spiritual clarity required to push against erasure fully cognizant of the fact that it is much harder for women artists to not only have access to art institutions but to have time, physical and psychological, devoted to making art, a fact that mirrors larger societal forces.
AS: What is your vision for the future of the gallery? Are you looking at any traveling shows? Collaborations with other galleries? Art fairs?
OR: Rather than sign artists like many traditional galleries do, I want to provide them with exciting professional collaborations, exposure to museum curators, critics and collectors, and opportunities to stage interdisciplinary exhibitions. While work is typically for sale online and in the gallery, artists are free to work with other galleries and explore opportunities and my ultimate goal is for OXH Gallery to become an oasis of humanity, a cultural venue as messy and unpredictable and creative and real as we all are.
Seeking to expand notionally to become a sure-footed behemoth, OXH Gallery is pushing boundaries with innovative partnerships such as the upcoming collaboration between the gallery and Tampa City Ballet presenting From Innocence to Innocence, a genre-bending experimental performance based on contemporary dance elements accompanied by a script, with music and theater by renown Albanian choreographer Julian Bulku. Under the curation of OXH Gallery and the stewardship of Tampa City Ballet founder and lead choreographer Paula Nunez, Bulku’s original theme of immigration and the resilience required to preserve an untainted innocence of the mind against the backdrop of memories and traumas of the past and the uncertainties of the future is revised to include a celebration of what brings us together despite the diversity of our experiences by creating meaningful interactions amongst the dancers on screen, the dancers on stage and the audience alike.
Additionally, Tampa Arts Alliance has invited OXH Gallery to be a part of the Artists Salon, a key-program furthering Tampa Arts Alliance foundational support to the local arts ecosystem. More broadly, TAA focuses on identifying community stakeholders, encouraging the development of spaces for artists to live, work and display, fostering commerce in the arts industry, and promoting Tampa as a vibrant city of the arts. As part of Kress Collective, spearheaded by Tempus Projects, OXH Gallery participated in Miami Art Fair ‘24 and plans to return. If nothing else, the Art Week is the perfect occasion to forge relationships with key people in various art markets, such as Julia Kushner of hARTfully Curated who has become a fast friend.
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About the writer: Anna Shukeylo is an artist, writer, educator, and curator working and living in the New York Metropolitan area. She has written for Artcritical, Painters on Painting, and Art Spiel. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kean University, NJ, Manchester University, IN, and in group shows at Auxier/Kline, Equity Gallery, Stay Home Gallery, among others. @annashukeylo