St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District is a treasure trove of creative connectivity. If you haven’t discovered this juicy mix of studios, galleries and murals, treat yourself to a trip — sort of a visual staycation.
Just blocks south of Central Avenue’s buzz, on 22nd Street, the Morean Center for Clay is your first stop. The carefully preserved Historic Seaboard Train Station, a red brick classic from 1926, is now a mecca for ceramic artists, offering classes, artists-in-residence programs, kilns and gallery space. It’s a “haven for pottery enthusiasts.”
In 2015, Beth Morean donated the station to the not-for-profit that runs the programs and oversees the building. The large exhibition space is full of tempting objects for sale, varying widely in style, scale and price. The adjacent work area hums with artists and students focused on their projects.
And there’s a restaurant on the premises, too: the CA Cafe, which serves tasty homemade soups, salads, sandwiches and desserts. During a recent lunch, the clientele was a wonderful cross-section of ceramic artists, government employees, neighborhood residents and businesspeople.
A scant two blocks away, at 24th Street and Emerson Avenue, is Duncan McClellan’s arts oasis. This abandoned industrial area was mostly below the radar of redevelopment when the talented and hardworking glass artist opened his live/work space there in 2010. He had tried for years to secure a historic building in north Ybor City to no avail, thanks to the intransigence of Tampa’s government bureaucracy.
Savvy St. Pete bureaucrats, on the other hand, welcomed him warmly. McClellan purchased an abandoned Tasti-Lee tomato-packing plant and transformed the empty space into an elegant, well-appointed gallery representing over 50 international glass artists — a visual feast of glass sculpture, objects and jewelry.
Ever inventive, he built patios and gardens and a hot shop, too. McClellan realized that educating students about glass-making would be a boon to the area and initiated a program, the DMG School Project, through which thousands of students visit the hot shop and learn the process of glass-blowing. Additionally, he developed a mobile hot shop to visit schools where transportation was unavailable. He also offers artists’ residencies, classes for the public in glass-blowing and etching, lectures and demonstrations.
A very social person, McClellan immediately began hosting openings and jazz concerts at his space. By inviting arts lovers to an area almost completely unknown to them, he opened new horizons to artists on the lookout for studio space.
Read the full article at cltampa.com
