Tampa Museum of Art

The Tampa Museum of Art is the art museum inside Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park in downtown Tampa, housed in the 66,000-square-foot Cornelia Corbett Center designed by Stanley Saitowitz.

The museum gives its address as the Cornelia Corbett Center, 120 W. Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa, FL 33602, and states on its About page that it holds one of the most significant collections of Greek and Roman antiquities in the southeastern United States, shown alongside modern and contemporary sculpture, photography, painting, textiles and new media. The City of Tampa Parks and Recreation page for the park describes the art museum as balancing a growing collection with a dynamic annual schedule of special exhibitions, and lists the Glazer Children's Museum as its neighbor in Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.

The institution counts its age from 1920, when the Tampa Museum of Fine Arts was organized, and it celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2020 (museum history). The museum as a public building is younger: the City of Tampa built its first home, which opened on September 20, 1979, on a riverfront site at Doyle Carlton Drive. Since 2010 the museum has occupied its present building beside the Tampa Riverwalk, and since its 2009 reorganization as a private, independent 501c3 its own Board of Trustees has governed the facility.

The museum's own timeline traces it to a public meeting on August 18, 1920, followed on November 22, 1920, by the first exhibit of the new Tampa Museum of Fine Arts in the Red Cross room on the second floor of Tampa City Hall.

That first exhibit opened at 8 p.m., and in 1923 the Tampa Museum of Fine Arts combined with the Students' Art Club to form the Tampa Art Institute, which presented both exhibitions and studio art classes (museum timeline). From 1926 the institute showed work in the new Municipal Auditorium, now part of the University of Tampa, and from 1937 in the Art Building at the South Florida Fair. The Students' Art Club threw the first Beaux Arts Ball in 1935, a fundraiser postponed in January 1942 because of World War II and resumed in 1951. In 1956 the institute finally had a home of its own, a building on the Florida State Fairgrounds at 320 North Boulevard that is today the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa.

The museum's pages give two dates for the next step: the timeline says that in December 1966 the institute became part of the University of Tampa campus as the Tampa Bay Art Center, while the brief history says the Tampa Art Institute remained active until 1967 and reorganized that year (About the museum). A separate effort by elementary school teachers, begun in 1958, produced the Tampa Junior Museum, chartered in the spring of 1963. In 1977 the City of Tampa asked the two groups to merge under a municipal operation and broke ground for a city art museum. In 1978 sculptor C. Paul Jennewein bequeathed all the work in his studio, which the timeline counts as nearly 2,600 objects, to the Tampa Bay Art Center.

The city-built Tampa Museum opened on September 20, 1979, on a riverfront site at Doyle Carlton Drive, with Mayor Bill Poe, Governor Bob Graham and First Lady Rosalynn Carter cutting the ribbon before an estimated 900 people.

The building was funded by the City of Tampa, according to the museum history. The City Clerk biography of Mayor Poe, whose term ran from October 3, 1974, to October 3, 1979, records that he won City Council approval for $20 million in public works that included a city hall annex and a riverside cultural center.

The arrangement was a joint venture. The City of Tampa handled the physical plant, operations, administration, security and maintenance, while the nonprofit Tampa Museum of Art owned the collections and raised money for exhibitions, programs and acquisitions (museum history). The timeline says the board voted unanimously in 1985 to rename the institution the Tampa Museum of Art, while the narrative history on the same page dates the name change to 1986. Executive Director R. Andrew Maas began acquiring the Joseph Veach Noble collection of Greek antiquities for a $1 million purchase price, raised through a coalition of private and public sources.

The Tampa building was enlarged with modest additions in 1990 and 1994. In 1989 the museum was accredited by the American Association of Museums and designated a Major Cultural Institution by the State of Florida, and the white-tie Pavilion ball, introduced in 1981 by director John Nozynski, became one of its fundraisers in those riverfront years (museum timeline).

The museum moved because, after modest additions in 1990 and 1994, its board and the City of Tampa decided to expand and relocate, and in 2006 they chose a new site in Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.

Discussions of a new building began in 2000, and in July of that year Mayor Dick Greco, in the third term the City Clerk dates from April 1, 1995, to April 1, 2003, announced a plan for a cultural arts district on the downtown Tampa waterfront that included a new art museum building (museum timeline). In 2006 the City and the museum's trustees chose architect Stanley Saitowitz to design a 66,000-square-foot facility, Phase I of a two-phase program, on the Curtis Hixon site.

The park carries the name of Curtis Hixon, Tampa's 45th mayor, who held office from November 3, 1943, until his death on May 21, 1956. According to his City Clerk biography, an auditorium and convention center beside the Hillsborough River were named in his honor, and the area is now known as Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. The city reports that the park attracts over one million people a year to its special events, with a great lawn, two splash pads, a dog run and a Pirate Water Taxi stop at its boat dock.

The first Tampa Museum of Art building closed its doors on December 16, 2007, and the museum planned a move into interim quarters at Centro Español (museum timeline). Groundbreaking for the new building followed on April 18, 2008. In 2009 the museum reorganized as a private and independent 501c3. The new building opened in February 2010, and the About page gives two dates for it: February 5, 2010, in the timeline and February 6, 2010, in the brief history.

The museum describes the Saitowitz building as having a shimmering pierced aluminum exterior, translucent gallery ceilings and polished concrete floors, seven interior galleries, one exterior sculpture gallery and 12,000 square feet of LED coverage on the south facade. The Tampa design collected a 2010 Honor Award from the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a 2011 American Architecture award from the Chicago Athenaeum, both listed on that page.

The Tampa Museum of Art collects classical antiquities, now more than 660 works, alongside modern and contemporary painting, photography, works on paper, decorative arts and new media.

Antiquities came first. The collections page states that the first artwork purchased by the Tampa Museum of Art was an Attic black-figure column krater bought in 1981. Five years later came the Joseph Veach Noble Collection, more than 150 objects assembled mostly in the 1950s and 1960s and especially strong in black-figure and red-figure pottery from Athens, Attica and South Italy. Two marble statues from that collection inspired Tampa exhibitions: a nearly life-sized Poseidon was the centerpiece of Poseidon and the Sea in 2014 and 2015, and a life-sized torso of Aphrodite was part of a 2018 Conversations with the Collection show. The antiquities span nearly 3000 BC to around AD 500.

The modern and contemporary side of the Tampa collection is broader. Most of the paintings were made after 1950 and include works by Alma Thomas and Rockwell Kent and by artists associated with Florida and the Tampa Bay region such as William Pachner, Syd Solomon and Theo Wujcik (Tampa Museum of Art collections). More than 150 of the prints, by artists such as James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, were produced in Tampa at Graphicstudio, USF. The Jennewein bequest went to the Tampa Bay Art Center in 1978 and was formally transferred to the museum in 1983; the collections page counts it as more than 2,600 objects, while the timeline on the About page says nearly 2,600.

The collection has also traveled around Hillsborough County. The City Clerk archives page records a past program, Gallery on the Avenue: Made in Florida, a poster exhibition of Tampa Museum of Art collection highlights shown across the Hillsborough County Library system, with a curator talk on Pepe Mar, Mernet Larsen, Purvis Young and Theo Wujcik at the Saunders library at 1501 N. Nebraska Avenue; the page gives a Friday, July 17 date but no year.

The Tampa Museum of Art's Centennial Campaign for Renovation and Expansion, launched in 2020 as a $100 million effort, has so far renovated the existing building, finished on April 26, 2023, and is now aimed at an expansion.

The museum unveiled plans for the Centennial Renovation on January 14, 2021, and work began in June 2021, designed by New York firm WEISS/MANFREDI with Skanska USA's Tampa operation as general contractor (museum timeline). On April 25, 2022, the museum announced a $25 million donation from Dick Corbett as the lead gift to the campaign.

The first finished piece was the Vinik Family Education Center, opened May 16, 2022, and named for a $5 million gift from Jeff and Penny Vinik. On April 26, 2023, the Tampa Museum of Art celebrated the completion of the renovation, with exhibitions open in seven new galleries and classrooms open in the education center. On August 8, 2024, it opened its first immersive multi-channel video exhibition, Jennifer Steinkamp: Madame Curie, in the renovated Bronson Thayer Gallery.

The next phase is larger. On November 8, 2021, the museum announced an expansion plan that would add a crystalline four-story structure to its downtown Tampa campus, and its About page now states that it is preparing an expansion that will more than double the building's size (About the museum). No construction date for that expansion appears in the museum's published timeline as of October 18, 2026.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Tampa Museum of Art About, The Space and Collections pages, the City of Tampa Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park page, the City Clerk archives page on the museum, and the City Clerk biographies of mayors Poe, Hixon and Greco.