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The Arts Come Alive at USF St. Petersburg
BY MATTHEW CIMITILE
The city of St. Petersburg has long enjoyed a reputation as a center for creativity and is home to a wide variety of worldclass museums, galleries and performing arts centers. Now the University of South Florida is adding to the movement by expanding arts programming on its St. Petersburg campus.
Beginning in the fall of 2021, several courses focused on the arts industry and architecture were offered for the first time on campus. The arts industry course highlighted the role the arts play as an economic engine, connecting students with the local arts community by partnering with the Dali Museum and the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The graduate architecture class brought together practitioners from St. Petersburg and its sister city of Aberdeen, Scotland to collaborate with students in developing urban design solutions.
“Offering these new courses was the low-hanging fruit we wanted to get done in the first year of consolidation as we build up partnerships and opportunities among campuses and with the City of St. Petersburg,” Chris Garvin, dean of USF’s College of The Arts, said at the time. “Our strategy is to spread offerings across all the campuses and give students the best of both worlds, providing as much of the arts curriculum and allowing flexibility.”
What these new courses signified was the start of a sustained increase in arts programming and opportunities at USF’s St. Petersburg campus.
An International Exhibition In A New Gallery
Around the same time the new art courses were being offered, Harbor Hall, the home of the USF St. Petersburg graphic arts program, was undergoing a transformation. Previously the home of the original Dali Museum, the building underwent a massive interior redesign. The renovations were made possible by a generous $1 million gift from the estate of Josephine Hall, a longtime supporter of the campus.
When the newly renovated doors opened, it featured greater gallery and studio spaces and an aesthetically modern environment for students to showcase their work. Renovations included the incorporation of magnetic display panels in classroom studios and the main corridor to provide a durable, reconfigurable area for two-dimensional art, new monitors with Apple TV connectivity that enhanced teaching methods and sustainable LED fixtures to create better white light for display and production of graphic art.
Harbor Hall now contains five studio spaces along with a public gallery.
“One of the big things our community was asking for was a gallery space so the campus could participate in activities such as art walks,” said Jennifer Yucus, USF St. Petersburg associate professor of Graphic Design. “Seniors now have a facility to exhibit their final projects, visitors can come in and see what students are working on and we can host the work of nationally-known artists.”
The first wave of renowned artists to display their work in the new gallery arrived on October 6, 2023. The USF College of The Art’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) presented SUPERFLEX: This Is the Tip Of The Iceberg, an exhibition by internationally renowned Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX. Founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen, SUPERFLEX is known for blurring the lines of art, science and activism to offer creative perspectives on challenging global problems and have had installations displayed in prominent public and private collections in Europe, North America and Australia.
The SUPERFLEX: This Is The Tip Of The Iceberg exhibition explored a world where human life depends on coexistence with other species. It featured the viewer responsive animation Vertical Migration, first exhibited in a 500-foot-high projection on the United Nations (U.N.) Secretariat Building in New York City during the 76th U.N. General Assembly. Highlighting the role of biodiversity in the health of oceans, the installation invites an intimate encounter with a siphonophore (a relative of the jellyfish) whose complex organisms function collectively. The exhibition, which closed November 22, was part of USFCAM’s GENERATOR, which seeks to be an incubator of new ideas and a place for expanded artistic experimentation.
“GENERATOR will offer a new cultural dimension to St. Petersburg’s prominence as an arts destination, offering free public access to an inclusive space for creative exploration, research and dialogue,” said Sarah Howard, the curator of social practice at USFCAM.
When the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library (NPML) underwent a renovation to modernize its space for 21st century learning, it also created a rejuvenated area to host art. The gallery in the library now hosts diverse exhibitions ranging from curated art by the USF Graphic Arts classes to a collaboration with the Dali Museum and works by recognized national artists.
SHINE Murals Inspire Creativity
For nine years, the SHINE Mural Festival has added creativity, vibrancy and color to the city’s landscape. The festival brings together a collection of artists to paint diverse murals on buildings and streets to showcase the power of art in revitalizing public spaces and creating dialogue. For the third time, USF St Petersburg was one of the festival’s sites in 2023.
Jay Giroux, a visiting faculty member in USF’s Graphic Arts Program, and 10 Graphic Design students painted a street mural at the intersection of 2nd Street and 6th Avenue South outside of the University Student Center. Titled “Fluid Structures,” the mural melds geometric figures with an imaginative marine ecosystem setting to evoke the allure of the oceans. The project was sponsored by David and Rebecca Ramsey.
“The mural is a modernist motif. Simple and easy on the eyes, with big shapes,” Giroux explained. “One benefit of street murals is that it calms traffic. It not only creates beautiful art but helps reduce pedestrian accidents.”
The previous year, Miami-based artist Reginald O’Neal used the west wall of the Piano Man building to depict both the Mundari tribe of South Sudan and historian John Henrik Clark. Clark was a pioneer in the creation of Africana Studies, establishing one of the first and most influential Africana departments in the country at Hunter College in New York City.
And in 2020, Harbor Hall became the site of the first mural on campus, with a colorful depiction of coastal wetlands and mangroves in an urban environment created by USF alums Kenny Coil and Marc Berenguer.
“St. Petersburg is an art mecca, with so many great museums, galleries and artists that create such a vibrant culture,” said Christian Hardigree, regional chancellor of USF St. Petersburg. “It is only natural for our campus to not only provide a stellar arts education to students, but foster events and programming that contribute to the growing art scene in our city.”
This article is published with permission by the USF-St. Petersburg Communications Dept. It originally appeared in the 2024 issue of Innovations Magazine.
