Duncan McClellan Gallery - The Gallery That Sparked It All
The Eden in the Packing Plant - Duncan McClellan and the Gallery That Sparked a District
A glassblower bought a derelict fish-and-tomato plant on a gravel lot in 2009. What grew there — a gallery, a hot shop, a garden, a school, and arguably the Warehouse Arts District itself — is now rated America's best free attraction.
Origin stories in the arts are usually embellished. This one has a porch, a mayor, and a sentence you can date the neighborhood to. Around 2009 or 2010, former St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker stood on the back porch of a half-renovated packing plant at 2342 Emerson Avenue South, talking with the glass artist who had just bought it, surveying the industrial blocks around them. "We need to call this the Warehouse Arts District," Baker said — as Duncan McClellan recalls it — and the name stuck. McClellan's gallery went on to fund the contest that created the district's logo, and the district went on to become one of the defining art neighborhoods in the American South. It began, in a real sense, on Duncan's porch.
Sixteen years later, the Duncan McClellan Gallery is the Warehouse Arts District's founding anchor, the beating heart of Florida's Glass Coast, and — per a national study of TripAdvisor data published this January — the number one rated free attraction in the United States. Not in Florida. In the country.
Five Years Old at the Furnace Door
McClellan's own story starts long before the porch. Born in 1952 on Long Island, he traces his obsession to age five, when he visited a glass factory in West Virginia and watched a craftsman shape a glowing, molten mass — an image, he has said, he never forgot. The road back to that furnace was long: he worked successfully in leather and then clay before finally getting his hands on a blowpipe in 1987, at a studio in Ybor City. He studied large-form work with Fred Kahl and John Brekke of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop, and earned one of American glass's rarer honors — becoming only the second American invited to study and work at the ARS Studio in Murano, Italy, the ancestral home of the craft.
The work that emerged is unmistakable: voluptuous, large-scale vessels carrying intricately etched imagery inside and outside the glass, built on the demanding internal graal and overlay techniques — hand cutting, photo resist, and computer graphics layered into the hot process, then finished with acid etching, fire polishing, and a six-stage grinding and polishing regimen. The recurring themes, in his own description, are family, personal growth, and the spiritual connections between people. A permanent display of his vessels anchors the gallery; the rest of his output travels to museums, collections, and exhibitions worldwide.
The Lot on the Pinellas Trail
In 2009, sculptor Mark Aeling and artist Catherine Woods — themselves Warehouse District pioneers — tipped McClellan to an off-market property beside the Pinellas Trail: a 7,800-square-foot former fish- and tomato-packing plant on a barren, weed-cracked lot in a part of town real estate agents avoided mentioning. McClellan, then working in Tampa, saw a tropical oasis where glass art would live among living things. He bought it, moved in — literally; he lives, works, and entertains on the property to this day, with his wife Irene and a cat named Vladimir #4 — and began the transformation.
What visitors find now justifies every superlative in the guest reviews: a light-flooded fine art gallery inside the old plant; a sculpture garden threaded with more than seventy varieties of vegetation, fruit trees shading outdoor glass installations; a patio that has hosted everything from collector dinners to nonprofit galas; and, at the heart of the campus, a state-of-the-art hot shop where weekend glassblowing demonstrations run free to the public. The gallery represents McClellan alongside dozens of nationally and internationally recognized glass artists — rotating exhibitions have made Emerson Avenue a mandatory stop on the world glass circuit — and its visiting-artist residencies regularly put world-class blowers at the furnace in front of whoever wanders in. Admission is free. It has always been free. That policy, compounded by sixteen years of five-star reviews, is what topped the national rankings.
The School on Wheels
Ask McClellan what matters most on the property and the answer isn't the gallery — it's the classroom. The DMG School Project, the campus's education arm, brings glass art to the community through master classes, demonstrations, lectures, and school programs, with a particular focus on students who would never otherwise stand near a furnace. Public and private school kids learn the fundamentals on site; for everyone else, there's the Mobile Glass Studio parked out back — a fully equipped hot shop on wheels that takes the molten spectacle directly to schools and events around the region. By the gallery's own accounting, its events have generated more than half a million dollars for local charities and cultural institutions over the years.
The mentoring extends artist by artist. McClellan personally guides the Emerging Artists Program at Florida CraftArt's annual festival — tent, table, photography, business coaching for makers doing their first major show — a role that has made him, functionally, the godfather to a generation of Tampa Bay craft careers. The through-line is consistent: a man who waited thirty-five years to touch a blowpipe seems determined that nobody else should have to.
Diplomat of the Glass Coast
McClellan's largest canvas, though, is the city itself. As the Chihuly Collection, the Morean Glass Studio, the Imagine Museum, Zen Glass, and others coalesced around his early outpost, a regional identity took shape — the Glass Coast, a term likely coined by gallerist Mary Childs around 2011, identifying St. Petersburg as the epicenter of a genuine glass-art region. McClellan became the idea's tireless evangelist: he built glasscoast.com to link every glass venue in the area, and has spent years traveling nationally, personally recruiting glass artists and collectors to come see the city — the diplomat, as one profile put it, connecting St. Petersburg's furnaces to the wider world. He is equally blunt about the economics, telling the St. Pete Catalyst years ago what he still argues today: "Art is an economic driver, we all know that" — usually followed by a pointed comparison of how much harder other cities market their arts than Florida markets its own.
He is generous with the credit, consistently naming the coalition that built the district: Aeling and Woods, early council champions Leslie Curran and Jeff Danner, and fellow pioneer Bob Devin Jones of the Studio@620. But the comparison observers keep reaching for — Miami's Wynwood, minus the mega-developer, grown instead from one artist's property outward — captures what happened on Emerson Avenue. The gallery marked its fifteenth anniversary in 2024 by announcing a new chapter ahead; whatever it holds, the pattern of the first fifteen years suggests it won't stay contained to 7,800 square feet.
Why It's the Anchor
Nearly every profile in this directory eventually routes through this one. The Morean's clay center sits blocks away in the district this gallery sparked. Florida CraftArt's emerging artists get their start under McClellan's mentorship. The Imagine Museum and Chihuly Collection share the Glass Coast he promotes. Even the ArtsXchange and the district's two hundred working artists inhabit a neighborhood whose name was spoken first on his porch. St. Petersburg's art story has several founders, but only one of them lives inside his founding act — among the fruit trees, beside the furnace, in the packing plant that became an Eden. Go on a weekend, when the hot shop is roaring. It's free. That's the whole point.
Visit: Duncan McClellan Gallery, 2342 Emerson Ave. S., St. Petersburg (Warehouse Arts District, on the Pinellas Trail). Free admission; weekend glassblowing demonstrations; check the calendar for visiting artist exhibitions and events. Information: DMGlass.com or (855) 436-4527.
Sources: The Artisan Magazine; St. Pete Catalyst; Florida CraftArt; Burchfield Penney Art Center artist profile; I Love the Burg; Duncan McClellan Gallery materials.
