Ybor City
Once the cigar capital of the world, Ybor City's hand-rolled cigar industry employed thousands of Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrant workers whose labor made Tampa one of the wealthiest cities in the early 20th-century South. The murals here honor that labor movement history — the lectores who read aloud while workers rolled, the mutual aid societies that provided healthcare before the government would, and the street culture that made 7th Avenue one of America's great immigrant main streets.
Featured Artists
All artists →David Levi
"Cigar City" depicts a lectoress — the woman hired to read aloud novels and political tracts while workers rolled — as a heroic central figure surrounded by the implements of the cigar trade and portraits of union organizers whose work made Ybor City a center of early American labor activism.
Fabian Williams
"La Huelga" (The Strike) honors the 1901 cigar workers' strike in which Cuban, Spanish, and Italian workers shut down the entire industry for six months to establish the right to organize — depicting the strike leaders in Fabian Williams' bold liberation-art style against a background of the protest banners of mutual aid societies.
Curiot
"Café Cubano" transforms the Cuban coffee ritual into Curiot's folk-mythology universe — the espresso machine as a sacred vessel, the coffee beans as totemic objects surrounded by the folk-masked figures that populate Curiot's cosmology, a comic-sacred tribute to the beverage that has fueled Ybor City's social life since the first cafés opened in the 1880s.