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] 

Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American History Museum (click on photo for larger image)

Saturday was the Arts Alive Free Museum day in St. Petersburg, and my wife and I decided to take advantage of the event to see at least one museum that we had not visited before.  What a breath of fresh air!  We visited the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American History Museum, located at 2240 Ninth Avenue South. 

This new home for the museum opened in April of 2006 in a 4,500 square foot building that used to be the management office for the Jordan Park housing complex.  The building itself is pretty enough from outside, but the real exterior beauty is in the gardens in the rear, which are used for a variety of events, including a ’Legacy Garden Music Series’.

The museum building’s interior includes exhibit space, classrooms, storage for museum collections, meeting rooms, and a reception area.  When the museum opened in this renovated building, there was a contest held to help come up with a great name for the museum.  And the winning entry was chosen to honor Dr. Carter G. Woodson, an African American who lived from 1875 to 1950 and who is known as the Father of Black history.    Dr. Woodson, only the second African American to have received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, founded an organization called the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, now known as The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).

My Wife With Our President (click on photo for larger image)

The current exhibit at the museum, a very timely one, is a photographic exhibit entitled “Obama: A Perspective in Photographs”.  The exhibit is made up of more than fifty top quality photos of President Obama taken over the past year or so by various news photographers and by his personal photographer.  There’s a great deal of variety in the perspectives of the photos, from the very serious to the very playful.  They are truly a delight to look at.  And, for anyone interested, every one of the photographs is going to be auctioned off after the exhibit closes down on November 20th!

For much more detail about the museum and about past exhibits and events, you can visit their web site.  The site also provides the operating hours, membership information, and more.

While I was conversing with one of the staff members at the museum, she said that they feel as though they are a ‘hidden gem’ of St. Petersburg, tucked away and not yet well-known throughout the city.  I hope that my post does just a little to change that, because this museum is worth learning about and visiting!

Exhibition Room (click on picture for larger image)

Participating St. Petersburg museums, in alphabetical order, are: 

• Dr. Carter G. Woodson Museum @ 2240 9th Avenue South  727.323.1104
• Florida Holocaust Museum @ 55 5th Street South  727.820.0100
• Florida International Museum at St. Petersburg College @ 244 2nd Avenue North  727.341-7900
• Great Explorations Children’s Museum @ 1925 4th Street North  727.821.8992
• Morean Arts Center @ 719 Central Avenue  727.822.7872
• Museum of Fine Arts @ 255 Beach Drive NE  727.896.2667
• Pier Aquarium @ 800 2nd Avenue NE  727.895.7437
• Salvador Dali Museum @ 1000 3rd Street South  727.823.3767
• St. Petersburg Museum of History @ 335 2nd Avenue NE  727.894.1052

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)

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.)