Arts Alive! podcast: Trish Duggan, Imagine Museum

Artist, designer, entrepreneur and philanthropist Trish Duggan has never been shy about expressing her love for humanity – and her love for art, particularly glass. In fact, the Clearwater globetrotter has one of the largest, if not the largest, private collections of contemporary art glass in the United States.

Duggan doesn’t merely set it all up in one of her homes and stare at it – she shares the svelte, seductive, stylish beauty of glass with the world via the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, which she opened in 2018. It is the second most popular arts destination in the city, she beams, after the Dali.

On this edition of our Arts Alive! podcast, the effervescent Duggan is excited and enthusiastic about the things she cares most about, specifically glass art.

“It’s absolutely a magical medium,” she says. “In Buddhism, there’s something called the Diamond Sutra, and it talks about the impermanence of different things that you can see, like a flash of lightning in a summer storm, or a bubble in a stream. And glass represents that medium to me. It’s so fragile, yet it’s so strong.

“We wouldn’t have the internet without the fiberglass cables going under the Atlantic Ocean. So it’s incredibly strong, but it’s incredibly fragile.”

She was, she explains, hoping to buy the vacated former City Hall property from the City of Clearwater, to put in a second Imagine location. The proposed deal fell through. “I didn’t give up on the idea, I just needed a couple months to have a breather on that bad news,” she says.

Duggan owns almost the entire Central Avenue block upon which the St. Pete museum sits, and expects to start an expansion – both horizontally and vertically – perhaps as soon as this year, to keep up with her ever-expanding collection. “I certainly have enough pieces that I built a whole warehouse in the meantime.”

Imagine Museum website

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