Tampa Museum of Art settles into temporary home

The museum gets finds space in West Tampa while awaiting construction of a new building.

By Lennie Bennett, Times art critic
Published March 6, 2008

With less space at its temporary home in the Centro Espanol building on N Howard Avenue, the Tampa Museum of Art expects to offer some exhibits, while continuing the museum's educational programs for adults and children, including the summer camp.
	[Melissa Lyttle | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Melissa Lyttle | Times] Works by high school art students are laid out in a space that will be used for educational purposes at the temporary museum.

If you go
Drawing Beyond the Plane
At the Tampa Museum of Art's interim location, 2306 N Howard Ave., beginning Friday through April 13. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Free admission. (813) 274-8130 or www.tampamuseum.com.
An opening reception is from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday. $10.
A community open house is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. March 15 with live music, perform-ances, hands-on activities and food by bay area restaurants. Free, including refreshments.

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TAMPA - These are hopeful days for the Tampa Museum of Art and the Centro Espanol de West Tampa building, urban survivors and improbable partners.

The museum reopens Friday in the historic space in the West Tampa neighborhood, an interim home until its new facility in downtown Tampa is constructed. "Drawing Beyond the Plane," with about 20 works by regional and national artists, will be featured in newly created galleries.

It is not an ideal, or even a good, fit as far as museum spaces go because it's small - only 1,600 square feet for the galleries - and lacks temperature and security systems needed for fine art.

But I like the location.

It's a beautiful building from 1912, loaded with provenance and history.

It's in an interesting and, yes, sometimes dicey neighborhood; what an opportunity for new outreach!

It's not the previous building, which had become more and more depressing with deferred maintenance and a grim aura of thwarted plans.

Its deficiencies guarantee that the museum won't be there any longer than necessary.

What we will have for the next 18 months or so will be exhibitions that maintain a minimal presence for the museum as an arts facility. For the duration, admission will be free with suggested donations. More important, much of its space will be devoted to continuing all its adult and youth education programs including the summer camp, Saturday drop-ins, Art for Lunch and (more fun than educational) Art After Dark, as well as outreach programs docents will take to Hillsborough County schools.

Now is the time for anyone remotely interested in having a first-rate fine art museum in Tampa to rally behind this spunky effort.

A good place to start is with the exhibition opening Friday. The drawing medium is wide open for interpretation, and offbeat as well as expected examples of it are gathered together here. The show wasn't installed in time for my deadline but the few works I'm aware of - Leslie Fry's graffiti on a ceramic torso, Marie Yoho Dorsey's gravured print overlaid with "drawings" in thread, and Maria Emilia's obsessively minute graphite work - are enough for me to want to see "Drawing Beyond the Plane" in its entirety.

Winding up at Centro Espanol is something of a soft landing for the museum, which thrashed about for almost a year searching for a foster home. Sad for the Tampa-Hillsborough Urban League, which lost the building to financial problems, but fortuitous for the museum. The timing was perfect for the city to reclaim and rehab it on behalf of the museum, which it owns.

But the museum is poised to become a separate entity within the next several months as soon as all the business of breaking ground on a new building is nailed down.

Steve Klindt, director of development and public affairs, says he hopes construction will begin in early April on the Stanley Saitowitz design along the Hillsborough River, near the museum's previous location off Ashley Drive. An opening is still expected in 2009 but probably closer to the end of the year rather than early fall as was previously announced.

The total cost of the project is about $33.5-million. The building itself is estimated to cost between $24-million and $26-million; the difference includes expenses for a capital campaign, architectural fees, estimates for outfitting the interior and a contingency fund. The city is giving $18.5-million but almost $1-million of that has been spent on demolishing the old building, now in progress. Klindt says the museum has the $9-million in pledges to cover the remaining balance of construction itself. After that, leaders will have to hustle for those additional dollars.

It hasn't been easy. Klindt says that "$13.5-million didn't return" in pledges when the bold but controversial Rafael Vinoly plan was scrapped in 2005. Some people are still on the fence about whether they'll contribute to the new museum. But he hopes that once it comes out of the ground, enthusiasm for a new Tampa Museum of Art will pick up steam.

At this point, all sniping about the lack of a large permanent collection to fill the museum should cease. There are lots of superior traveling shows out there that can come to Tampa (if people and businesses step forward to help underwrite them).

And the reality is that most locals visit museums only for those special exhibitions, rarely just to revisit a permanent collection. Ask experts at the Dali Museum, Ringling Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, all of which have superb permanent collections.

No one should feel guilty about not giving or going to the Tampa Museum of Art. Patronage should be a pleasure, not an obligation. But if you care, and I hope most people reading this do, come. Sooner or later, you'll be glad you did.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at lennie@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8293.

[Last modified March 5, 2008, 17:41:55]