Tampa Museum of Art — Tampa, Florida

The Tampa Museum of Art is the art museum on the east bank of the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa, set inside Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park at 120 W. Gasparilla Plaza. Its building, the Cornelia Corbett Center, covers 66,000 square feet. The museum states that it holds one of the most significant collections of Greek and Roman antiquities in the southeastern United States, shown alongside modern and contemporary sculpture, photography, painting, textiles and new media.

The institution counts its age from 1920, when the Tampa Museum of Fine Arts was organized, and it marked its 100th anniversary in 2020. The museum as a public building is younger: the City of Tampa built its first home, which opened on September 20, 1979, on a riverfront site at Doyle Carlton Drive. Since 2010 the museum has occupied its present building at the northern end of the Tampa Riverwalk, and since 2009 it has been governed by its own Board of Trustees rather than run jointly with City Hall.

The museum lists daily hours of 10am to 5pm, with Thursday hours extended to 8pm. Its neighbor in Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park is the Glazer Children's Museum, and the City of Tampa Parks and Recreation page for the park describes the art museum as balancing a growing collection with a yearly schedule of special exhibitions.

The museum timeline begins with a public meeting on August 18, 1920. On November 22, 1920, the new Tampa Museum of Fine Arts held its first exhibit at 8 p.m. in the Red Cross room on the second floor of City Hall. Three years later, in 1923, it merged with the Students' Art Club to form the Tampa Art Institute, which ran both exhibitions and studio classes until 1967.

For decades the Tampa Art Institute borrowed space. From 1926 it showed work in the new Municipal Auditorium, now part of the University of Tampa, and from 1937 in the Art Building at the South Florida Fair. The Students' Art Club threw the first Beaux Arts Ball in 1935, a fundraiser that was suspended in January 1942 because of World War II and resumed in 1951. In 1956 the institute finally had a home of its own, a building on the Florida State Fairgrounds at 320 North Boulevard that is today the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa.

In December 1966 the institute joined the University of Tampa campus as the Tampa Bay Art Center. A separate effort by elementary school teachers produced the Tampa Junior Museum, chartered in the spring of 1963. In 1977 the City of Tampa asked the two groups to merge under a municipal operation and broke ground for a city art museum. One year before it opened, in 1978, the estate of sculptor C. Paul Jennewein bequeathed nearly 2,600 objects from his studio to the Tampa Bay Art Center, a gift that remains one of the museum's largest single holdings.

On September 20, 1979, Tampa Mayor Bill Poe, Florida Governor Bob Graham and First Lady Rosalynn Carter cut the ribbon on the Tampa Museum before an estimated 900 people. The building was paid for by the City of Tampa. The City Clerk biography of Mayor Poe, who served from 1974 to 1979, records that he won City Council approval for $20 million in public works that included a city hall annex and a riverside cultural center.

The arrangement was a joint venture. The City of Tampa handled the physical plant, operations, administration, security and maintenance, while the nonprofit Tampa Museum of Art owned the collections and raised money for exhibitions and acquisitions. The board voted unanimously in 1985 to rename the institution the Tampa Museum of Art (the museum's narrative history dates the change to 1986). Director R. Andrew Maas began acquiring the Joseph Veach Noble collection of Greek antiquities, purchased for $1 million with money from a coalition of private and public sources.

The Tampa building was enlarged with modest additions in 1990 and 1994. In 1989 the museum was accredited by the American Association of Museums and designated a Major Cultural Institution by the State of Florida. The white-tie Pavilion ball, introduced in 1981, became one of its standing fundraisers in those riverfront years.

Talk of a new building began in 2000. In July of that year Mayor Dick Greco, in the third term the City Clerk dates from 1995 to 2003, announced a plan for a cultural arts district on the downtown Tampa waterfront that included a new art museum. In 2006 the City and the museum's trustees chose San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz to design a 66,000-square-foot facility, Phase I of a two-phase program, on a new site in Curtis Hixon Park.

The park carries the name of Curtis Hixon, Tampa's 45th mayor, who held office from 1943 until his death in 1956. According to his City Clerk biography, an auditorium and convention center beside the Hillsborough River were named in his honor, and the area is now known as Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. The city reports that the park draws over one million people a year to special events, with a great lawn, two splash pads, a dog run and a Pirate Water Taxi stop at its boat dock.

The first Tampa Museum of Art building closed its doors on December 16, 2007, and the staff moved into interim quarters at Centro Español. Groundbreaking for the new building followed on April 18, 2008. In 2009, before the move was finished, the museum reorganized as a private and independent 501c3, ending the joint operation with the City of Tampa. The new building opened in February 2010; the museum pages give both February 5 and February 6 as the date.

The museum describes the Saitowitz building as a shimmering pierced aluminum box with translucent gallery ceilings and polished concrete floors, seven interior galleries, one exterior sculpture gallery and 12,000 square feet of LED coverage on the south facade facing the Riverwalk. The Tampa design collected a 2010 Honor Award from the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a 2011 American Architecture award from the Chicago Athenaeum.

Antiquities came first. The collections page states that the first artwork purchased by the Tampa Museum of Art was an Attic black-figure column krater bought in 1981. Five years later came the Joseph Veach Noble Collection, more than 150 objects assembled mostly in the 1950s and 1960s and strongest in black-figure and red-figure pottery from Athens, Attica and South Italy. Two marble statues from that collection, a torso of Aphrodite and a nearly life-sized Poseidon, anchored Tampa exhibitions in 2014 and 2018. The antiquities now total more than 660 works dating from nearly 3000 BC to around AD 500.

The modern and contemporary side of the Tampa collection is broader. The museum counts about 350 paintings, most made after 1950, including works by Alma Thomas and Rockwell Kent and by Florida artists William Pachner, Syd Solomon and Theo Wujcik. It holds more than 950 photographs, about 1,000 prints, watercolors and drawings, and about 350 decorative arts objects. More than 150 of the prints, by artists such as James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, were produced in Tampa at Graphicstudio, USF. The Jennewein archive of more than 2,600 objects was formally transferred to the museum in 1983.

The collection also travels around Hillsborough County. The City Clerk archives page describes Gallery on the Avenue: Made in Florida, a poster exhibition of collection highlights shown across the county library system, with a curator talk at the Robert W. Saunders, Sr. Library on Nebraska Avenue about Pepe Mar, Mernet Larsen, Purvis Young and Theo Wujcik.

The museum launched its Centennial Campaign for Renovation and Expansion in 2020, a $100 million effort. Work on the Centennial Renovation began in June 2021, designed by New York firm WEISS/MANFREDI with Skanska USA's Tampa operation as general contractor. On April 25, 2022, the museum announced a $25 million donation from Dick Corbett as the campaign's lead gift.

The first finished piece was the Vinik Family Education Center, opened May 16, 2022, and named for a $5 million gift from Jeff and Penny Vinik. On April 26, 2023, the Tampa Museum of Art celebrated the completion of the renovation, with exhibitions open in seven new galleries and classrooms open in the education center. On August 8, 2024, it opened its first immersive multi-channel video exhibition, Jennifer Steinkamp: Madame Curie, in the renovated Bronson Thayer Gallery.

The next phase is larger. The museum announced in November 2021 a crystalline four-story addition for its downtown Tampa campus, and it now states that it is preparing an expansion that will more than double the size of the Cornelia Corbett Center. No construction date for that expansion appears in the museum's published timeline as of October 2026.