ArtsXchange/WADA- A District That Organized
The District That Organized Itself - WADA and the ArtsXchange
Most arts districts are eventually lost to their own success. In 2012, St. Petersburg's warehouse artists gathered at a clay studio and decided theirs wouldn't be — then bought three acres to make sure. The ArtsXchange is what a neighborhood's immune system looks like.
There is a pattern every artist in America knows by heart. Artists move into a cheap, forgotten district. Their studios make it interesting; galleries follow; the neighborhood becomes "cool"; rents rise; the artists who created the value are priced out of it, and the district that bears their name no longer contains them. It happened in SoHo. It happened in Wynwood. In early 2012, a group of St. Petersburg artists met at the Morean Center for Clay — itself housed in a rescued 1926 train depot among the tomato-packing plants and seafood warehouses south of Central — specifically to prevent it from happening here.
The organization that came out of that meeting is the Warehouse Arts District Association, and its campus at 515 22nd Street South — the ArtsXchange — is the physical form of the promise made that day: that in this district, affordability wouldn't be a phase. It would be infrastructure.
Buying the Future
WADA organized as a 501(c)(3) membership nonprofit — artists, galleries, art suppliers, and supporters — with a mission written in unusually concrete terms: furnish affordable studio space in every medium, create interaction between artists and the public, promote the district's cultural growth, and provide arts education. The district it represents is substantial: roughly 1st Avenue North to 10th Avenue South, 16th to 31st Streets, home today to more than 300 artists, arts businesses, and organizations working out of the former packing plants, a onetime commercial laundry, a sewer-equipment factory, and the old railway buildings that give the neighborhood its name.
The decisive move came in late 2014. With public and private donations, WADA purchased 2.7 acres on the 22nd Street South corridor — the Deuces, the historic main street of Black St. Petersburg — where the district meets the Pinellas Trail. The logic was radical in its simplicity: the one gentrification-proof way to guarantee artists a place in a rising neighborhood is for the artists' organization to own the land. More than 50,000 square feet of warehouse space came with it, and WADA began renovating in phases, building what it named the ArtsXchange.
The Campus
Today the ArtsXchange is the district's town square. The campus houses 28 affordable working studios occupied by resident artists across virtually every medium, an artist incubator for those just launching a practice, classrooms, an outdoor courtyard and accessible open-air theatre, and more than 2,500 square feet of exhibition space anchored by the Tully-Levine Gallery, the campus's curated showcase. (The gallery keeps public hours Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; individual studios open by the artists' own rhythms.) Soft Water Gallery, profiled separately in this directory, operates from the campus as well — one of several independent art businesses the property hosts.
The monthly high tide is Second Saturday ArtWalk, when the ArtsXchange becomes, by common consent, the "go-to" stop on the citywide circuit: studios thrown open, special exhibitions in the galleries, performances in the courtyard, trolleys running from the Central Avenue districts. Recent programming gives the flavor — exhibitions like "The Muse of Music," celebrating Pinellas musicians, drew a tour from Mayor Ken Welch himself. And the whole campus is built to be entered: ground-level access throughout, an elevator to the second-floor studios and classroom, and galleries and theatre seating designed for disabled patrons — the kind of unglamorous detail that reveals an institution's actual values.
The leadership is half the story. WADA's board president is sculptor Mark Aeling of MGA Sculpture Studio — a district pioneer, and readers of our Duncan McClellan profile will recognize him as one of the two artists who first tipped McClellan to his packing-plant property in 2009. The professional operation runs under executive director Markus Gottschlich. Between them, the organization has managed something rare: an artist-founded nonprofit that grew into a credible land-owning institution without shedding its founders.
The Wynwood Test
The comparison that stalks every warehouse arts district is Miami's Wynwood — transformed from industrial obscurity into a global brand, and in the process from artists' haven into a rent zone few artists can touch. The comparison arrived in St. Petersburg personally: in 2019, Joe Furst — the Miami developer whose Place Projects grew out of Wynwood's redevelopment — bought roughly nine acres along 22nd Street South, inside the district's borders. It was exactly the scenario WADA was founded to face.
The result, so far, has confounded the script. Furst approached the association directly, saying he wanted the community's goals built into his plans so the inevitable development would benefit everyone. Years into the relationship, Aeling's assessment to the Tampa Bay Times was blunt: "Joe had our back." Whether that holds is the district's live experiment — but the fact that a Wynwood developer negotiates with an artists' association at all is the direct payoff of the 2014 land purchase. WADA has standing because WADA has acreage.
And the association keeps raising its ambition. Its current frontier is the one every arts district eventually reaches: not just where artists work, but where they live. WADA has announced plans for 40 to 60 units of artist housing on property it owns at 2275 6th Avenue South, backing the Pinellas Trail — roughly half designed as live/work units with attached studios — a project estimated around $15 million, to be assembled with city, state, and philanthropic partners. Gottschlich has framed it as the logical next step after a decade of affordable studios: sustainable housing where the district's artists can both live and work. If it's built, St. Petersburg's warehouse district will have done what almost no American arts district has managed — closed the loop before the loop closed on it.
Reading the District Whole
Pair this profile with the Duncan McClellan story and the Warehouse Arts District's founding reads like a two-part invention: McClellan's porch supplied the name and the proof of concept; the 2012 Morean Center for Clay meeting supplied the institution; the 2014 land purchase supplied the permanence. Every other Warehouse District entry in this directory — the clay centers, the glass studios, the galleries, the two hundred–plus working artists — operates inside the shelter those two events built.
Visit on a Second Saturday for the full spectacle, or on a quiet Friday for the truer one: working artists at their benches, in studios they can afford, on land their own association owns, in a district that watched what happened everywhere else and decided to write a different ending.
Visit: The ArtsXchange, campus of the Warehouse Arts District Association, 515 22nd St. S., St. Petersburg (Deuces corridor at the Pinellas Trail). Tully-Levine Gallery open Friday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; full campus open for Second Saturday ArtWalk, 5–9 p.m. Free admission. Information: WADAstpete.org or (727) 826-7211.
Sources: Warehouse Arts District Association organizational history; Tampa Bay Times; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance; Visit St. Pete-Clearwater; St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce.
