According to their website, the new museum will open in 211 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes, and 34 seconds.  I, for one, am very excited about it!

[for a larger, high resolution photo, click on the picture below] 

But, after years of delays and evolution, the Chihuly gallery is being built even as I type!  The new gallery will be located downtown, at 400 Beach Drive, easily accessed by visitors and residents alike.  The gallery is the creation of the Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg, and it is scheduled to open on July 4th.  With the opening of the Chihuly gallery, downtown will have, within a few blocks, the Museum of Fine Arts, the new Dali Museum, and the Chihuly Collection.

For anyone who is not familiary with Dale Chihuly’s work, there are dozens of sites where you can peruse his creations.  One of my favorite venues for his work is the lobby of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas… 

Held on the waterfront in downtown St. Petersburg, this year’s Mainsail will be the 35th instance of this show!  That’s pretty remarkable, but you can be certain that it’s no accident.  I’ve been attending the show since the very first one, and I can tell you that the planning that goes into this event is phenomenal, as are the artists who exhibit in this venue. It’s a juried art show, so there is intense competition just to be allowed to exhibit in the show.  That means that the public gets a chance to see the best of the best, all in one place, and in a gorgeous outdoor St. Petersburg setting!

This year’s show will take place this Saturday and Sunday, April 17th and 18th, at Vinoy Park, located just east of the Vinoy Hotel on the Tampa Bay waterfront.  There will be over 200 artists, covering a wide range of media, including Ceramics, Fibers, Glass, Jewelry, Metal, Mixed Media, Oil/Acrylic, Photography, Sculpture, Watercolor and Wood.

The show is free to attend, and you can go just to enjoy, or you can go with the idea of finding your next treasure.  Mainsail is truly a wonderland of creative energy, and it shows in the works that are exhibited.  If you have kids, you can bring them by the children’s art tent, where they’ll have a chance to do interactive activities and get in touch with their inner artist.

One final note – a new Mainsail Arts Festival poster is created each year for the show.  This year, the poster is the work of Duncan McClellan, an amazing glass artist who I have the good fortune to know.  (And, even more good fortune, I have one of his beautiful creations at home, and I get to enjoy it every day!)  Duncan’s work is well-known and very highly regarded throughout the country.  He will be exhibiting his glass works at the show this weekend.  And he is a great example of the caliber of art and craft work that you can expect to see at the show from over 200 artists.

If you need more information, please check out the Mainsail Website.  Then, get out and enjoy our beautiful weekend!

Botero, a world-renowned Colombian born painter and sculptor, is known for creating works of art that are united by their proportionally exaggerated, or “fat” figures, as he once referred to them.  Botero graduated from Medellin University in Colombia in 1950, and in following years, studied in Madrid, Florence, New York, and Paris, where he moved in 1973 and where he lives today.

As one can see from the two sculptures that are in temporary residence outside the museum, Botero appears to have fun with his craft, and this theme can be see throughout much of his work.  If you’d like to get a little of the ‘flavor’ of Botero’s work, you can check out this link at Google Images.

For information about the Museum of Fine Arts, including location, direction, hours of operation, and more, check out their website.

Rear View (Click on Photo for Larger Image)

Work from Botero Exhibition (click on photo for larger image)

If you’ve never paid a visit to the Dali Museum, you really should! It’s a fantastic land of the surreal, and walking through the museum and really taking time to absorb what you see there can create entirely new neural pathways in your brain! Dali’s works are amazing, over the top explosions of color and shape and reality gone wild, and they are nothing but fun to see. Fans who live in the area or who visit here are very lucky – the St. Petersburg Dali museum holds the largest collection of Dali works in the United States and the largest collection outside of Europe.

For anyone who does not know Salvador Dali’s works, you can get a pretty good idea of what they’re about by checking out this Google Images site.  And for those that do know Dali’s work, but are not familiar with all of the great things about the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, you should check out the Museum’s web site.  It’s worth looking at – aside from information about the exhibitions at the Museum, you can also learn about special events like the Saturday Family Fun Day and the S’Real Friday Happy Hour, with live music and half price admissions after 5:30 PM.  Think about it – go to Happy Hour, have a couple of drinks, then walk around and take a look at some of the most mind-bending depictions of non-reality imaginable.  Guaranteed to make your Happy Hour even happier.  And, while you’re at it, you might make a new connection with someone else who’s attending – it’s a popular Friday evening event!

The Salvador Dali Museum is located at 1000 3rd Street South, just to the south of the University of South Florida’s Bayboro campus.  For now. 

And that leads us to the photograph below, and the really exciting news that I’m posting about.  The Dali Museum will be moving, probably in 2011, if all goes according to plan.  The new Dali home will be a 35 million dollar, 66,450 square foot structure – that’s twice the size of the existing museum!  Included in the layout will be 50% more gallery space than the current museum has, which means that there will be a lot more of Dali’s work on display at any given time.  The museum will feature a huge, futuristic looking glass geodesic structure, giving it a unique look and feel that should provide incredible visual impact in its setting on the waterfront and adjacent to the Mahaffey Theater.

As the building progresses, I’ll update this blog with new photos and more details.  In the meantime, give yourself a treat and plan to spend some time at the existing Museum.  I’m sure you’ll be glad you did…

New Dali Museum (Click for larger image)

St. Petersburg is a fantastic venue for outdoor art shows and festivals – most of the time!  As a case in point, the very popular Mainsail Arts Festival, held in downtown St. Petersburg each Spring, just had its 34th annual event a few months ago!  Clearly, the 34 year history shows that Mainsail is a great success – it draws artists from all over the country and art lovers from all over the west coast of Florida.  The climate, the picturesque setting, and the wonderful works of art are an unbeatable combination.  And Mainsail does not stand alone.  St. Petersburg and nearby surrounding cities make up a very popular area for art festivals.  Some of the most noteworthy and highly regarded shows each year are noted in this list:  

•  Tarpon Springs Arts Festival, held each Spring in Tarpon Springs
•  Mainsail Arts Festival, held each Spring in downtown St. Petersburg
•  Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, held each Spring in downtown Tampa
•  Dunedin Art Harvest, held each Fall in Dunedin
•  CraftArt, held each October in various locations around the Bay area 

One thing that you may have noticed is that, of the five big shows that I mentioned, three of them are held in the Spring and two of them in the Fall.  Clearly, this is no accident.  Our Spring and Fall climates are perfect for this sort of outdoor event, and the shows are held in gorgeous settings – beautiful parks, views of the bay or of lakes, just very scenic venues. 

But none of those shows take place in the Summer – as much as we love our weather here, festival organizers know all too well that it would be difficult to attract either the artists or the crowds to an outdoor Summer art show – just a little too hot for comfort!

But, if you’re an art lover and you’d really love to attend a great show without enduring the hot summer days, you are in luck!  Several years ago, a group of Pinellas artists formed an association called PAVA – Pinellas Association of Visual Artists – a nonprofit group run by and for local artists to help them support each other and to foster art in Pinellas County.  PAVA helps member artists, but they also help the community at large, via volunteer efforts to support art related activities in the area.  One of their major events was first conceived of over twenty years ago – members came up with the idea that if they could host a top quality art show in the Summertime in a cool, indoor venue, people would love to attend.

The St. Petersburg Coliseum

And so, they put together the concept of the Cool Art Show.  The actual venue has changed over the years – I remember attending Cool Art several years ago in the gym at the USF St. Petersburg campus.  I’m not sure where else it was held over the past twenty years.  But I do know that last year, and again this year, it’s being held at the Coliseum, at 535 4th Avenue North, in downtown St. Petersburg.  For those who aren’t familiar with the Coliseum, it’s a great old historic dance hall, built in 1926, with huge, open spaces inside and gorgeous hardwood floors.  It’s a very cool building (no pun intended, really), and I will do a post on the Coliseum, complete with photos of the interior, at some future date.

But for now, just know that it’s icy cool inside, and that there will be lots of Cool Artworks, along with the artists, and that the show will be held this weekend, Saturday, July 18th and Sunday, July 19th.   And if, by chance, you read this post after the show date has passed, watch for it next year.  It happens every summer, at just about this same time.  For more details on PAVA, you can check out PAVA’s web site.   For more on the Cool Art show, go directly to the Cool Art web site.

This is a great place to go to see some wonderful creations from some highly talented local artists working in a variety of different media.  And a great chance to check out the Coliseum itself!  Stop by sometime over the weekend – I think you’ll enjoy the show…

Andy Mouse

Museum of Fine Arts

But his work is.  Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life and Legends is being presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in downtown St. Petersburg.  The show opened in mid-May, and it will continue until August 16th.   It’s a great exhibition that features over 70 prints of some of Warhol’s best known works, including the famous Campbell’s soup can, portraits of Marilyn Monroe, his Flowers series, and Muhammad Ali, to name a few.  There are also prints from the Andy Mouse series, a tribute to Warhol by an artist/friend of his, Keith Haring.  And there’s a portrait of Warhol himself, done by the superb American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. 

For those who might have forgotten, Andy Warhol, aside from being a huge force in the Pop Art movement, also foresaw the current state of our media-based-short-span-of-attention culture with his 1968 quote, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” 

I went to the museum last Saturday, and it was just great fun to see these works.  And it was especially nice that we were able to see them in St. Petersburg!  In addition to its permanent collections, the Museum of Fine Arts always has traveling, temporary exhibitions of artwork from a wide range of artists.  Now that the museum opened its new wing, there’s a lot more space for exhibits, so give yourself plenty of time when you go.  And don’t worry if you get hungry – there’s an excellent cafe in the museum, where you can grab a drink, have a treat (like the triple fudge cake that I had!), or get a delicious lunch, all while looking out of the huge windows facing the waters of the Vinoy Basin. 

For more information about the Museum of Fine Arts, visit their website.  (And for a look at some of Andy Warhol’s works, check out this page.)