Energy, power and survival leap out of the 2025 Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts featured image “The Fight” by Ashli Harper
Story by Sarah Worth
Photos by Ashli Harper and Will Staples
Thick, raised paint to create movement and energy, along with choice of color, may take your mind to current headlines, but the motivation for these is not from today’s news.
In “The Fight” – the featured image for this year’s Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts (GFA) – the powerful message conveyed by artist Ashli Harper was one she was telling only to herself, and it wasn’t political, at least not most of it.
As with symbolism in much of art across millennia, the messages in “The Fight” go in a different direction than what viewers might interpret. When she first put brush to canvas, Ashli was having a very private conversation in her mind, telling herself to take the next step in her health journey.
This directive wasn’t about the dismantling of Roe v Wade, it wasn’t the election, nor was it Florida’s Amendment 4. It was about her own mental and physical health – she was urging herself to get past her recent cancer diagnosis and to get on with surviving.
That honesty, fully to herself, is in Ashli’s whole portfolio, and she approaches each project and piece with little preconceived notion of what the final image will be. In her work “Pain” – a closeup face of a Black woman seeming to scream in agony – the image came to Ashli when she was first diagnosed with cancer.
“It was all my pent-up angst,” she said.
Her no-firm-plan approach should not be construed as free styling, but more likely true emotion coming to life, perhaps an outlet, a pathway, for pushing off the burden she’s carried for too long.
“I paint what I’m feeling in the moment,” Ashli said. “For ‘The Fight’ I went into the studio and told myself I’ve been down and out long enough. I rallied myself. It was a big turning point for me. Through that painting, I changed from my ‘why me?’ phase to my ‘get down to business’ phase.”
The fact that the image is a woman – a strong Black woman – brandishing fists inside pink boxing gloves and preparing to throw a powerful punch to some unseen, but perhaps well-known, foe is the additional message Ashli doesn’t mind viewers interpreting out of her work.
Every woman has faced a battle when she’s had to decide if it’s fight or flight, so this goes beyond what I am personally facing. It’s about battles that every woman faces, daily.
~Ashli Harper
Ashli came to art early, enjoying it and seeing it as inspirational.
“I’ve always been creative,” she said, recalling the time in early high school when she drew a mural on the wall in her bedroom. “I was inspired! My mom, not so much. But she came around.”
Feedback on her drawing wasn’t always positive and a hypercritical teacher in Ashli’s senior year put doubt in her mind. This sidelined her art for over a decade. Then, in 2022, when her health took a turn, she felt the need to create again, as well as the need to release her pent- up emotions. So she reawakened her inner artist, shifting from her earlier focus on pencil sketching over to painting in full-color acrylics.
“I love texture, so I started with standard acrylics but quickly moved to thick acrylics to get the volume and layering I was looking for,” she said.
Her work was noticed quickly. In the 2024 Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, she was named an Emerging Artist. And this year, her recent work “The Fight” made the top of the list for the GFA Featured Image, meaning it will be used on promotional materials for next March’s event. This designation certainly gives Ashli even greater exposure for her current work, but it also indicates there’s more to come from her.
In “The Fight”, her subject seems to be preparing to hit an opponent, her right gloved fist about to come forward in a powerful strike. To Ashli, the stance is not the closing hit or the knockout blow it looks to be. Because it’s not the end of her fight.
“I hope people can see and feel my genuine passion for life and empathy for others,” she said. “But it’s not a final punch; there may be more.”
Save the date:
View more of Ashli’s work at the 55th Annual Raymond James Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, March 1-2, 2025. Held at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park, downtown Tampa, it’s a celebration of art, diversity, and community that continues to evolve and captivate audiences year after year.
Visit gasparillaarts.com for additional festival details
