Imagine Museum - An Improbable Origin Story
Buying the Whole Family Tree - The Imagine Museum's Improbable Origin
Most museums assemble their collections over generations. Trish Duggan commissioned a curator to map the entire history of American studio glass — and then bought it, nearly all at once, for a former charter school building on Central Avenue.
Museums are usually accretions: a founding bequest, decades of acquisitions, committees, deaccession fights, slow growth. The Imagine Museum, at 1901 Central Avenue, was built more like a startup. Its founder decided St. Petersburg should have a definitive museum of contemporary glass art, hired the right expert, instructed him to locate every piece needed to tell the story of an entire artistic movement — and bought the collection, essentially whole, shipping it to Florida. The museum opened in January 2018. By its own current count, the collection has since grown from those founding 500 works to more than 2,500.
The founder is Trish Duggan, and hers is one of the more remarkable patron stories in American museum history — not least because, unlike most museum founders, she works in the medium herself.
From Guam to Glass
Born Patricia J. Hagerty in Arlington, Virginia, to a Navy family, Duggan spent her childhood in Guam, where an early enthrallment with Japanese art and culture set her artistic compass. She studied sociology, religion, and woodblock printmaking at a Jesuit university in Japan, then political science at UC Santa Barbara — where she met Robert Duggan, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist she would marry. Decades later, Robert Duggan's pharmaceutical company Pharmacyclics developed a breakthrough leukemia drug and sold in 2015 for $21 billion, with the Duggans' shares worth a reported $3.5 billion. (The couple, longtime residents of the Clearwater area, are also widely reported to rank among the most prominent donors to the Church of Scientology — a frequently noted piece of context in national coverage of the family's philanthropy.)
The glass conversion came by chance. After relocating to the Tampa Bay area, Duggan encountered a sand-cast glass piece by Clearwater artist Marlene Rose in a private home — lit from within, as she has recounted, looking alive — and was smitten. She began making glass art in earnest herself (alongside her lifelong woodblock printing) and collecting voraciously. The idea followed with unusual speed: a museum, as a gift to St. Petersburg, dedicated to the American Studio Glass Movement — the revolution begun in the early 1960s when Harvey Littleton and fellow pioneers pulled glass out of the factory and into the artist's studio. One of Littleton's early students, fittingly for this city, was Dale Chihuly.
Duggan bought the building at 1901 Central — the former home of the Imagine Charter School — formed a nonprofit, and recruited Corey Hampson, president of Michigan's Habatat Galleries and one of the country's foremost authorities on studio glass, as curator. Her brief to Hampson was audacious in its simplicity: construct a timeline of the American glass movement from the 1960s to the present, and find the works — historically significant, beautiful, or both — that tell it. He did. She bought them. The museum's founding collection amounted to what it calls the American Glass Family Tree: the movement's masters and their artistic descendants, room by room, generation by generation. Duggan, who chairs the museum's small board, paid for all of it herself.
What's Inside
The visitor experience begins with deep history — the museum's introductory displays reach back to ancient Egyptian glass — before opening into the main event: the American family tree, followed by the international galleries added as the collection exploded past its founding scope. Today the holdings span artists from the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and Australia, with roughly 400 works on display at any time and the museum billing the collection among the most significant assemblies of contemporary glass anywhere.
The highlights reward slow looking. Karen LaMonte's life-sized cast-glass dresses drape like fabric frozen mid-motion. Tim Tate's glass-and-mirror constructions open infinite illusory depths. A celebrated 2020–21 exhibition brought the sand-cast vessels and blown "super eggs" of Swedish master Bertil Vallien. And the third floor holds the museum's most personal galleries: Duggan's own work, including woodblock prints paired with the glass pieces that inspired them, and her installation Blue Madonna — built around a mask mold, purchased with provenance on eBay, taken from Michelangelo's Pietà, accompanied by vases bearing the word "mother" in many languages. Framed quotations line the walls throughout, none more mission-defining than Einstein's: imagination matters more than knowledge. Families should know about the daily scavenger hunt — tiny glass animals hidden throughout the galleries — which has quietly become the museum's best trick for converting restless children into careful lookers.
Longtime executive director Jane Buckman encourages a viewing habit rare in museums: leaning in. Most museumgoers, she notes, give an artwork three to seven seconds; Imagine's lighting, spacing, and barrier-free displays are engineered to make visitors linger over the optics that make glass unlike any other medium.
The Glass Coast's Keystone
The Imagine Museum did not invent St. Petersburg's glass identity — the Chihuly Collection, the Morean Glass Studio, Duncan McClellan's Warehouse Arts District campus, and Zen Glass were all working before its doors opened — but its arrival in 2018 supplied the thing the "Glass Coast" claim had been missing: a true museum, with collection depth measured in movements rather than names. Buckman has pointed to the underlying economics: Florida's Gulf Coast, from Naples to Clearwater, is where America's major glass collectors retire, bringing their collections and their buying power with them. The museum sits atop that demographic wave, and its stated goal — Duggan's gift becoming financially self-sufficient through attendance, membership, and legacy giving — is a live experiment in whether a single-patron museum can outgrow its patron.
Duggan, characteristically, is already imagining past it. She has spoken publicly of plans for a separate international museum built around her ever-expanding global collection — a project she describes in superlatives — and serves on the board of a planned Museum for Peace in Costa Rica. A fifth-anniversary coffee-table volume, Imagine Museum: Contemporary Glass Art, captures the collection at mid-stride.
For SaintPetersburg.org's purposes, the Imagine Museum is the institution that completes the city's glass circuit — the scholarly counterpart to the Chihuly Collection's spectacle, the collector's context for what the hot shops produce, and the reason a visitor can now trace the entire studio glass story, from Littleton's first experiments to tomorrow's innovations, without leaving a one-mile stretch of St. Petersburg. Not bad for a movement younger than the museum's own building.
Visit: Imagine Museum, 1901 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. Open Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday noon–5 p.m.; closed Monday. Admission charged (check current rates); museum store on site. Information: ImagineMuseum.com or (727) 300-1700.
Sources: Imagine Museum organizational materials and published features; St. Pete Catalyst; Atlas Obscura; Forbes and Rolling Stone council profiles of Trish Duggan; Politico (Duggan family background); Roadrunner Journeys museum tour account.
