New museum exhibit chronicles St. Pete art history

Visual artists have found inspiration and public support in St. Petersburg for well over a century, as a new exhibit documents through words, pictures and original works of art.

Beautiful Beginnings, at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, traces the artists, and art educators, who first brought the creative process to the Sunshine City. And those who continue to do so in the modern age.

“Everybody has the concept that in the ‘80s and ‘90s we become this huge arts mecca in the southeast,” said museum director Rui Farias. “When I do our little trolley tours, I ask who’s lived here fewer than five years. And most people raise their hand. People who live here now think that this whole art scene is fairly new. But it’s really not.”

“St. Petersburg City Hall” by Robert Sprague (1904-1969), an art faculty member at St. Petersburg Junior College and proprietor of the Sprague Art School. This original oil on board is part of the exhibit.

There was always art, framed and unframed, in the museum’s expansive archive, along with posters, fliers, advertisements and other documentation. Until now, Farias explained, it had not been extensively researched or catalogued.

“We knew there was a building downtown, next to where the Museum of Fine Arts is now, called the Winter Art School,” he said. “We’d seen pictures of it. We knew that was there. Didn’t think much about it.”

The lightbulb moment arrived when the archives of artists George Snow Hill and his wife, Polly Knipp Hill, were donated to the museum in 2021. He was a painter and muralist for the Works Progress Administration, she was an etcher and printmaker, and they lived part-time in St. Petersburg in the 1930s and ‘40s.

And they had opened an art school here.

Exhibit photos by Bill DeYoung.

Farias was discussing this info with fine art consultant and exhibit designer Ashley Burke, a one-time member of the museum board. “We were talking about the fact that we’re the city’s archival depository,” he recalled, “and that no one’s done (a museum exhibit) for the art world.

“We proclaim to be the City of the Arts, yet no one’s ever recorded the whole history of how it started.”

And that was all it took. “Ashley dug into all this. She came back and said ‘You know, there were art schools here since 1907.’ All these famous artists would come to St. Petersburg in the wintertime, like every snowbird did. Why not make some money? Start an art school, teach people how to paint, and then head back up north in the summertime.”

Alongside Museum of History archivist Jessy Breckenridge, Burke researched and curated Beautiful Beginnings, creating a pictorial timeline that stretches from the Miss M. Frances Williams School of Art to the Shine Mural Festival and the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art.

Also featured in the exhibit: The St. Petersburg High School Fine Arts Department (1927), The Mark Dixon Dodd/Pinellas Point School of Art (1951), The Contemporary Art School & Gallery, a.k.a. Beaux Arts (1952), Eckerd College’s Visual Arts Department (1961) and many more.

The museum is also launching the St. Petersburg Arts Archives project, which will catalog, contextualize and – ideally – display (in rotating exhibits) works by vintage as well as contemporary artists.

Faias said he and the museum staff take seriously the notion that they are the “caretakers of the city’s history.” And that, of course, includes artists.

“The idea is to work with the entire arts community here in St. Pete,” he explained. “We’ve got pieces here from Eckerd, from St. Pete College, from the Morean … “we are creating an arts committee to decide which artists’ work will be archived.”

Beautiful Beginnings will remain on view through July 27. “This is different from what we’re used to doing here, as far as exhibits are concerned,” said Farias. “But it’s turned out to be fantastic.”

St. Petersburg Museum of History website.