Leslie Curran Gallery - The Sister Gallery
The Sister Gallery: Leslie Curran Gallery and the Making of Uptown's Art Block
Next door to ARTicles, the exhibition space bearing the founder's name gives emerging and mid-career artists their monthly turn on the wall — and anchors a deliberate bet that Historic Uptown is St. Petersburg's next art destination.
Walk the short block of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street North at 12th Avenue and you'll pass three gallery doors in a row: ARTicles Fine Art Services, d-gallerie, and — between them, in Suite B — the Leslie Curran Gallery. Visitors sometimes assume the middle door is a separate business trading on a familiar local name. The truth is more interesting: it is the exhibition heart of the ARTicles operation, the room where the frame shop's founder hangs the shows.
The Leslie Curran Gallery is, in its own description, the sister gallery of ARTicles — same ownership, same address, same free admission — with a distinct job. Where the flagship carries the represented roster and runs the fine art services practice, the Curran gallery is dedicated to monthly solo and small-group exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists: the fresh-hung, opening-reception, meet-the-painter side of the enterprise. Together the two rooms hold what the gallery bills as one of the largest arrays of fine art in Central Florida, spanning its represented artists — names like Dylan Strzynski, John Taormina, Lesley Tinnaro, Copper Tritscheller, Angela Warren, and Rebecca Zweibel — alongside a secondary-market selection for collectors hunting established work. (For the full story of proprietor Leslie Curran — the self-taught framer, EC Comics lineage, and sixteen years on City Council — see our companion profile of ARTicles Gallery & Fine Art Services.)
Born on Central, Rebuilt on MLK
The gallery's history maps two chapters of St. Petersburg's art geography. In its first incarnation, the Leslie Curran Gallery operated at 1431 Central Avenue, a few steps from the ARTicles flagship — one more storefront in the Central corridor's gallery boom. But the same boom that made Central Avenue an arts destination eventually made it expensive, and in 2021 the operation made a decisive move: out of its longtime Central Avenue home and into larger quarters at 1234 Dr. MLK Jr. Street North, in the MLK Business District of Historic Uptown.
The move came with company, and that's the part worth remembering. d-gallerie — the contemporary gallery run by Alejandro Quintero Reina, which had been forced out of the Sundial complex by redevelopment and survived online-only in the interim — relocated into the space next door at the same time, and the two galleries threw a joint grand opening on June 18, 2021. Reina framed the pairing as a mission statement, telling the Tampa Bay Times the galleries were "committed to making Uptown St. Pete a new art destination." That opening night also carried a signal about the block's curatorial ambitions: d-gallerie debuted with a solo show by iBOMS (Jabari Reed-Diop), the young St. Petersburg artist whose star has since risen citywide.
Four years on, the bet reads prescient. The 1200 block of MLK now functions as a compact gallery row — three exhibition spaces plus a working frame shop under two ownerships — in a neighborhood with the unpolished, still-becoming character Central Avenue had when its own pioneers arrived. Galleries displaced or priced out of the established districts didn't disappear; they founded a new one. The Leslie Curran Gallery, hanging a new show every month in Suite B, is that experiment's steady metronome.
Visiting
The practical experience is refreshingly unfussy. The galleries are free, open Monday through Saturday, and staffed by people — frequently including Curran herself — who will talk you through the current exhibition and then, if you've bought something anywhere at all, offer to frame it properly next door. Recent programming has ranged from group shows like 2024's "Common Elements" to the exhibition calendar shared with the flagship, including headline events like Cecilia Lueza's SHINE-timed show. For artists, the door in is the same disciplined submission process ARTicles runs — résumé, images, full details, no drop-ins — with the monthly solo slots in the Curran gallery as the visible prize.
In a directory full of galleries named for districts, movements, and metaphors, the plainest name on the list belongs to the woman who spent decades — on the council dais and at the workbench — arguing that art is infrastructure. The room that bears it makes the argument monthly.
Visit: Leslie Curran Gallery, 1234 Dr. MLK Jr. St. N., Suite B, St. Petersburg (adjacent to ARTicles Fine Art Services). Open Monday–Saturday; free and open to the public. Information: ARTiclesStPete.com, articlesstpete@gmail.com, or (727) 898-6061.
Sources: ARTicles, Inc. gallery materials; Tampa Bay Times; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance; gallery social media and public listings.
