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 world-class 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.
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.
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.
“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.”
“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 40 | INNOVATIONS MAGAZINE
Harbor Hall now contains five studio spaces along with a public gallery.
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 ran from October 6 through November 22, is 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.
