ARTicles Gallery & Fine Arts - The Framer Who Helped Frame The City
The Framer Who Helped Frame the City: ARTicles Gallery & Fine Art Services
Leslie Curran spent sixteen years on City Council helping build St. Petersburg's arts economy. On the MLK corridor, her gallery — part exhibition space, part master frame shop, part art infrastructure — is where she practices what she legislated.
Most gallery owners can tell you about the arts district. Leslie Curran can tell you about the votes. Before she was the proprietor of ARTicles Gallery & Fine Art Services at 1234 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street North, Curran served four terms — sixteen years — on the St. Petersburg City Council, through the very stretch when the city transformed itself into an arts destination. She is likely the only gallerist in Florida who spent a decade and a half approving the civic scaffolding of an arts economy and then went back to her frame shop to participate in it.
And she is, unmistakably, a framer first. That's the origin story, and it's a good one.
The Furniture on the Painting
Curran is St. Petersburg-born and raised — the daughter of a native, a childhood regular at Munch's, the old-school 6th Street South diner whose candy stand, she likes to note, hasn't changed since she was a kid. The family's artistic streak ran through her uncle, Graham Ingels, a fine artist far better known by another résumé: he was one of the celebrated illustrators of EC Comics, the man behind the macabre pages of Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear. It was Ingels who planted the seed of her trade with an offhand line he'd deliver when finishing a painting — as Curran recounted to The Artisan Magazine, he'd say, "Wait 'til you get the furniture on it. The frame."
The furniture became the career. At 23, Curran saved her money, asked someone in the business what it took to open a frame shop, bought everything on the list along with a how-to book, and taught herself custom framing — working, at first, out of her house. The self-education gave way to a proper apprenticeship under Homer Schwartz of Homer's Picture Framing & Gallery, a master craftsman from whom she says she truly learned the trade. It was while framing with Homer that she decided to run for City Council — beginning a public career she balanced against the workbench for years.
That trajectory — from an EC Comics uncle's studio to a self-taught frame shop to the council dais — is worth dwelling on, because it explains what ARTicles is. This is not a gallery that added framing as a sideline. It is a craftsman's shop that grew a gallery, run by someone who understands that the unglamorous services — the framing, the hanging, the conservation — are what the art world actually runs on.
Two Galleries and a Workbench
Today the business occupies a small compound on the MLK corridor: ARTicles Gallery & Fine Art Services in Suite A and the adjoining Leslie Curran Gallery in Suite B, both free and open to the public Monday through Saturday. (The building has quietly become a gallery node of its own — d-gallerie, the Latin American-focused contemporary gallery, occupies Unit C — making 1234 Dr. MLK Jr. Street North one of the denser art addresses outside the established districts.)
The exhibition program is serious and current. ARTicles curates with Robin Perry, whom Curran credits as a great curator; their stated criteria are artists who are different, carry a real résumé, maintain a genuine body of work, and are dedicated to the trade. Recent years have brought shows by public-art star Cecilia Lueza — timed as a SHINE Mural Festival kickoff, a fitting pairing for a gallery whose owner's council tenure overlapped the city's mural-culture rise — alongside exhibitions like David McKirdy's "Book of Days" and 2024's "The Moment of Inertia," with a represented roster including Woody Patterson, Lesley Tinnaro, Ashley Burke, and Alli Arnold. Artist submissions are welcomed through a briskly professional process (résumé, five to ten images, full details, no drop-ins) that tells emerging artists exactly what league they're auditioning for.
Around the exhibitions runs the fine art services practice: custom frame design — Curran's own craft of more than 25 years — plus the white-glove trades that come with it. Clients describe the crew uncrating, measuring, and hanging new acquisitions, and restoring family heirlooms to displayable life. Interior designers are a core clientele, and Curran has developed a standing sermon for them, telling The Artisan Magazine that the million-dollar condos filling downtown don't automatically have million-dollar art on the walls — her advice is to write art into the budget as a line item from the start, as essential as the furniture, rather than the thing that gets squeezed when the project runs over. It is the framer's-eye view of the city's building boom: all those new walls are either an opportunity or a tragedy.
The Council Member's Long Game
Curran's civic chapter deserves more than a biographical footnote, because it frames (there is no other word) the whole enterprise. Her sixteen years on council spanned the period when St. Petersburg made its decisive investments in downtown revitalization and arts identity — and she has remained one of the community's persistent advocates for treating the arts as economic development rather than decoration. Ask her what she's proudest of and the answer, characteristically, is simply her work in and for the city — ongoing.
The gallery's location extends that logic. Rather than Beach Drive or Central Avenue, ARTicles sits on Dr. MLK Jr. Street North, in the city's Uptown reaches — a corridor still becoming, the way Central Avenue was becoming when the pioneers planted galleries there decades ago. A former council member choosing to anchor an emerging corridor with a free public gallery is either good business instinct or civic strategy. With Curran, the honest answer is that there has never been a difference.
For visitors, the practical takeaway is simpler: this is the stop where St. Petersburg's art scene shows its working machinery. Come for the exhibitions; stay to watch a master framer talk a client out of the wrong molding. The furniture, as Uncle Graham said, matters.
Visit: ARTicles Gallery & Fine Art Services and the Leslie Curran Gallery, 1234 Dr. MLK Jr. St. N., Suites A & B, St. Petersburg. Open Monday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; galleries free and open to the public. Information: ARTiclesStPete.com, articlesstpete@gmail.com, or (727) 898-6061.
Sources: ARTicles Gallery materials; The Artisan Magazine; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance; Creative Loafing Tampa Bay event listings; public business records.
