Florida Craft Art - 75 Year St. Pete Establishment

The Makers' House: Seventy-Five Years of Florida CraftArt

How a traveling exhibition founded by two Stetson professors in 1951 became the anchor of St. Petersburg's Central Arts District — and the only statewide organization devoted to Florida's fine craft artists.

Stand at the corner of Central Avenue and 5th Street on a weekday morning and you'll watch it happen: tourists drift in off the sidewalk, drawn by the high windows of a hundred-year-old building that once housed Rutland's Department Store and, in another life, the Golden Dragon Dance Hall. They come in for a look. They stay for an hour. Admission is free, and what waits inside — ceramics, blown glass, hand-forged jewelry, turned wood, fiber work — was made entirely by Florida hands.

This is Florida CraftArt, at 501 Central Avenue, and in 2026 it is celebrating its 75th year. That number deserves a moment of consideration. The organization is older than the Salvador Dalí Museum, older than the Morean Arts Center's current identity, older than nearly everything that now defines St. Petersburg as an arts city. For most of its history, it didn't even have a building. What it had was a conviction — that craft is art, that the people who make it deserve to earn a living from it, and that Florida's makers needed an institution of their own.

Two Professors and a Station Wagon Idea

The story begins in DeLand in 1951, with Louis and Elsa Freund, a husband-and-wife pair of professors at Stetson University. Elsa was a jeweler, and the couple believed fine craft was being treated as a second-class art form — decorative, domestic, somehow lesser than painting or sculpture. Their answer was to organize: an association of Florida makers, then called Florida Craftsmen, that would give craft a collective voice and put it in front of the public with the seriousness it deserved.

The first exhibition went up at Florida State University that same year. What followed was a quarter century of itinerancy. Long before anyone used the word "networking," the Freunds and the organization they built moved juried exhibitions through galleries, art centers, and colleges across the state, connecting makers in far-flung Florida towns to one another and to new audiences. The organization incorporated in 1977 but still owned no walls of its own — just an annual exhibition, an annual conference, and workshops led by craftspeople from Florida and beyond.

Landing in St. Petersburg

The organization's St. Petersburg chapter of the story opens in 1986, when Florida Power offered Florida Craftsmen space in its downtown building — the group's first permanent headquarters after 35 years on the road. It was in this era that Michele Tuegel, the organization's first executive director, began building what would become its Permanent Collection of Fine Craft, today numbering more than 200 objects by artists including Christine Federighi, Paul Eppling, Bonnie Seeman, and St. Petersburg's own Charlie Parker.

The early real estate history was unglamorous. When Florida Power reclaimed its space, the organization moved to the McNulty building in 1992 — another site with little walk-by traffic and none of the look or feel of a true gallery. The turning point came in 1995, when attorney George Rahdert offered a reasonable lease on the old Rutland's Department Store building at 501 Central. Suddenly the organization had what it had never had: high ceilings, generous street-facing windows, and a location where people actually walked. Sales took off.

In 2002, the nonprofit made what its own history calls a bold move and bought the building outright. It's worth remembering what downtown St. Petersburg looked like at that moment — quiet blocks, empty storefronts, an arts district that existed mostly as aspiration. Florida Craftsmen planted its flag anyway, and over the following two decades the neighborhood grew up around it. In 2014, the organization changed its name to Florida CraftArt, and today it sits at the center of the Central Arts District it helped will into existence.

What's Inside the Building

The operation today runs on two floors. At street level, the 2,500-square-foot Florida Artists Gallery presents work by more than 250 juried Florida artists across the fine craft disciplines — ceramics, fiber, glass, jewelry, metal, mixed media, sculpture, and wood — every piece vetted for quality, every piece for sale. Adjacent, a roughly 1,300-square-foot Exhibition Gallery mounts curated shows throughout the year, featuring local, national, and international artists.

Upstairs is ArtLofts: twenty working artists' studios plus the Creative Loft, a meeting space for workshops, lectures, and classes. The studios open by appointment, by chance, and reliably during the citywide ArtWalk on the second Saturday of each month. Between the gallery and its signature festival, the organization draws more than 56,000 visitors a year.

But the retail floor and the studios are the visible layer of a deeper mission. Florida CraftArt describes its purpose as growing the statewide creative economy, and it operates less like a shop than like an artist-development institution. Artists earn higher commissions on sales than commercial galleries typically offer. Staff and board members mentor makers on product development, pricing, marketing, and the unlovely-but-essential business of being a working artist — gallery etiquette, intellectual property, targeting new markets.

That philosophy is most visible at the CraftArt Festival, the two-day outdoor show held each November that brings roughly 100 fine craft artists from around the country to downtown St. Petersburg and attracts more than 12,000 visitors. Tucked inside the festival is its Emerging Artists Program, which takes makers who have never done a major outdoor show and hands them a tent, a table, professional photography, printed postcards, and business mentoring from glass artist Duncan McClellan — whose own Warehouse Arts District gallery is one of the city's craft landmarks. More than a few Florida craft careers trace their launch to that program.

The education programming runs in the other direction, too: Creative Discovery Workshops introduce children and families to craft techniques with curricula aligned to Florida's education standards, and Saturday-morning walking tours (plus first-Saturday bike tours) of the city's murals have made Florida CraftArt an interpreter of St. Petersburg's street art as well as its studio craft.

The 75th Year

The anniversary arrives under the leadership of Jorge Vidal, appointed chief executive in 2023 after a career that reads like a map of the St. Petersburg arts ecosystem: senior manager of special projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, director and curator at the Duncan McClellan Gallery, director of exhibitions and retail at the Morean Arts Center.

Florida CraftArt marked the milestone this spring with "The Makers Who Made Us," on view March 11 through April 22, co-curated by Vidal and Tuegel — the founding executive director returning to help tell the institution's own story. Drawn largely from the Permanent Collection and organized by era, the exhibition traced 75 years of Florida craft, from early figures like Charlie Brown, who hand-built vessels from clay he dug out of the St. Johns River, through the contemporary generation. Tuegel, speaking to FOX 13 about the featured artists, called them makers "that really know their medium." A March panel discussion reunited her with longtime artists Laura Bryant, Mary Klein, and McClellan for an evening of institutional memory.

The show carried national weight as well: Florida CraftArt is the only organization in the state participating in Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a nationwide program marking the country's 250th anniversary through the lens of its makers. A companion exhibition, "Florida NOW," co-curated by Vidal and Holly Hanessian, the recently retired head of ceramics at Florida State University, surveys how Florida artists are working in craft today — including Wendy Bruce, Jillian Mayer, Rob Stern, and Lauren Shapiro. The anniversary year culminates December 5 with "Crafting a Dream," a 75th-anniversary fundraiser on St. Pete Beach.

Why It Matters

Every arts city has institutions that benefited from a boom and institutions that built one. Florida CraftArt belongs to the second category. It bought its building when Central Avenue was quiet, kept its doors free when it could have charged admission, and spent seventy-five years making a stubborn argument — that the things Floridians make with their hands are worth exhibiting, collecting, and paying for. The Central Arts District now surrounding it is, in no small part, the argument won.

Visit: Florida CraftArt, 501 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. Open daily; Sundays from noon. Admission to both galleries is free. ArtLofts studios open during ArtWalk, second Saturdays, 5–9 p.m. Information: FloridaCraftArt.org or (727) 821-7391.

Sources: Florida CraftArt organizational history and exhibition records; FOX 13 Tampa Bay; Tampa Bay Newspapers; I Love the Burg; GuideStar nonprofit filings.