Art Beat St. Pete – Florida Artists Group Celebrates 75th Annual Exhibit

St. Petersburg, FL – The Florida Artists Group, aka FLAG, marks its 75th anniversary with this year’s exhibition at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL, from June 23 through August 8, 2025. The exhibition features 2D and 3D artwork from more than sixty-five artist members of this premier professional artist organization. Aaron Collier, Associate Professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, will be the juror and honored speaker for the event.

With membership from across the State of Florida, FLAG meets annually for a weekend symposium to hear presentations by noted arts professionals, network, and discuss and celebrate the visual arts. This year, FLAG members will meet in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Opening Reception is July 11, 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., and the symposium presentations are on Saturday, July 12, beginning at 10:00 a.m. in the art galleries at The Helmar and Enole Nielsen Center for Visual Arts, Eckerd College, 4200 54th Ave. South, St. Petersburg, FL 33711. All events are free and open to the public. Saturday, starting at 10 a.m., our judge, Aaron Collier, will present “Traces of the Hand, Witness to the Body,” and at 10:45 a.m., Eckerd College’s own Professor of Visual Arts, Arthur Skinner, will present “Visual Arts at Eckerd College: An Extraordinary History.”

Established in 1949, the Florida Artists Group comprises artists with national or state-wide recognition. It is the state’s premier professional-level artist organization that inspires, celebrates, and promotes the excellence of the state’s finest visual artists. FLAG President Margaret Schnebly Hodge expressed, “We are excited to be in St. Petersburg, which is known for its thriving contemporary art scene. Eckerd College provides a wonderfully immersive and engaging experience for artists and art enthusiasts.”

With its high bar for artistic excellence and focus on inclusiveness, FLAG champions creative work in all visual disciplines. FLAG enhances the visibility and livelihoods of its artists through its prestigious Annual Symposium and Exhibition, regional member exhibitions, and networking events. FLAG continues to expand its mission through ongoing promotion and alliances with complementary arts organizations.

Our Judge: Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Associate Professor. Solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at the New Gallery, Octavia Gallery, Cole Pratt Gallery, and Staple Goods, an artist-run gallery in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District of New Orleans where he is a member. Aaron has participated in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Additionally, his work has been featured in New American Paintings and is represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. He has been awarded artist residencies by the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, ISCP in Brooklyn, and Open Ateliers Zuidoost in Amsterdam. While his paintings are mostly composed of varying expanses of color and little recognizable imagery, Collier does not claim to be a purely abstract artist; in other words, he does not wish there to be a complete divorce between his imagery and the world. Aaron has taught drawing and painting at Tulane since the fall of 2006. His classes are aimed at providing the drawing and painting students with an expansive vocabulary in communicating their concerns, posing formal elements as the gateway to conceptual considerations of the work. Aaron’s work traffics more in glimpse, suggestion, or fragment than in chronicle, consonant with daily experience and our understanding of the world. His paintings aim to communicate the beauty found in what is incomplete.