Morean Arts Center - Arts Since 1917
The Oldest Idea in Town: Morean Arts Center
St. Petersburg's arts renaissance is usually told as a twenty-first-century story. The Morean Arts Center has been making the same argument — that everyone deserves access to art — since 1917.
Every city that reinvents itself around the arts eventually develops a founding myth, and St. Petersburg's usually begins with the Dalí, the murals, or the galleries that filled Central Avenue in the 2010s. But the oldest arts organization in Tampa Bay predates all of it by the better part of a century. Before the Central Arts District had a name, before SHINE, before a single Chihuly chandelier hung over Central Avenue, there was a mother and daughter with an idea about art education — and the institution they founded in 1917 is still operating, 363 days a year, at 719 Central Avenue.
The Morean Arts Center has worn three names, occupied at least four homes, absorbed a world-famous glass collection, built the largest pottery operation in the Southeast, and is now planning to tear down its own building and start over. Its 109-year story is, in miniature, the story of how St. Petersburg became an arts city.
A Mother, a Daughter, and a Kapok Tree
The Morean traces its origin to J. Liberty Tadd, an art educator who founded the Florida Winter Art School in St. Petersburg in 1916. When Tadd died, his widow Margaret Tadd and his daughter Edith Tadd Little kept the school running year-round — and in 1917, wanting to carry his ideas about art education to a broader public, they gathered a group of artists and art lovers and founded the Art Club of St. Petersburg. It was the first organization of its kind on Florida's west coast, and by the Morean's own account, the first art gallery south of Atlanta. The original mission statement promised to stimulate an appreciation of art and "a love of the beautiful" in the young city.
The club's first home stood near the waterfront, on ground now marked by the kapok tree beside the Museum of Fine Arts — a quiet piece of geography connecting the city's oldest arts institution to the neighborhood that would much later become its museum row.
The Art Club endured there for over half a century. In 1972, a newer generation of local artists formed the Arts Center Association, and the two organizations soon merged into a single entity called, simply, The Arts Center, housed in a building on 7th Street for the next two decades. It was from that unassuming address that the organization ran what it describes as the city's first public mural competition — in 1972, with a $300 prize — planting a seed that would flower, four decades later, into the SHINE St. Petersburg Mural Festival and the street-art identity the city now exports worldwide.
The Furniture Store and the Morean Name
In the early 1990s, The Arts Center moved into a vacant old furniture store on the 700 block of Central Avenue — in reality a patchwork of two former hotels and three smaller buildings. A transformative gift from benefactor Beth Morean allowed the organization to connect the entire assemblage under one roof and one façade, creating the 27,000-square-foot facility that stands today. In 2009, in recognition of the Morean family's generosity, The Arts Center began doing business as the Morean Arts Center.
That same year, the organization made a move that reshaped a different neighborhood entirely: it relocated its ceramics program into the 1926 Seaboard freight depot at 420 22nd Street South — the only substantially unaltered example of railroad architecture left in St. Petersburg — in what was just beginning to be called the Warehouse Arts District. The Morean Center for Clay has since grown into the largest pottery in the Southeast and the third largest in the country, housing roughly 60 working artists, a nationally known artist-in-residence program, rotating galleries, and an outdoor kiln complex that includes four wood kilns, two gas kilns, and a soda kiln.
The Chihuly Bet
Then came the decision that changed the institution's economics. In 2010, Morean board members — again with financial backing from Beth Morean — persuaded Dale Chihuly, the Tacoma-born titan of the studio glass movement, to establish a permanent collection of his work in St. Petersburg. Chihuly's stated draw was educational: he saw in the Morean a partner that would put his collection to work for artists and the community, with net proceeds staying local to sustain the center's education programs. "I love St. Pete and always enjoy visiting," Chihuly said when the partnership later expanded.
The gamble paid off immediately. The Chihuly Collection drew more than 250,000 visitors in its first five months on Beach Drive, and the surge of interest in glass led directly to the opening of the Morean Glass Studio & Hot Shop, where visitors watch daily glassblowing demonstrations, take classes, and buy work by local and regional glass artists. In August 2016, the collection moved from Beach Drive into an 11,000-square-foot building at 720 Central Avenue, directly across from the Morean — the first installation of Chihuly's art in a building designed specifically for the purpose, anchored by a site-specific Ruby Red Icicle Chandelier and marked at the entrance by a 20-foot sculpture. According to Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, the collection now ranks among the top two most-visited cultural attractions in the county.
(The collection has also produced one of the stranger footnotes in St. Petersburg art history: in February 2016, a $25,000 Chihuly vessel was stolen from the gallery — and returned the next morning, bubble-wrapped in a box, left anonymously in the Morean's entryway.)
What the Morean Actually Does
The Chihuly Collection is the marquee, but the Morean's core business has never changed: it is an art school and community arts center wearing a gallery's clothes. The main galleries at 719 Central are free and open daily, mounting more than 25 exhibitions a year across virtually every visual medium; past shows have included work by Jasper Johns, Peter Max, Jun Kaneko, and Duncan McClellan alongside a heavy commitment to local and emerging artists. Behind the galleries runs a full curriculum — adult classes, children's and early-childhood programs, family workshops, summer camps — plus outreach programs like KidVentures and Word & Image that reach thousands of young people, many of them at risk.
One program deserves particular mention: Operation: Art of Valor, launched in 2018 in partnership with the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital, offers free classes in glassblowing, photography, and ceramics to veterans — using the studio arts to build creative skill, confidence, and camaraderie. In a county with one of Florida's largest veteran populations, it is among the quietest and most consequential things the organization does.
All told, the Morean's downtown campus welcomes more than 90,000 visitors a year, with the current leadership team headed by Executive Director Howayda Affan and Chief Curator Amanda Cooper.
Tearing It Down to Build It Up
The next chapter is already drafted. The Morean has announced plans to demolish its cramped, stitched-together facility at 719 Central and replace it with a new five-story, state-of-the-art building at the corner of Central Avenue and 8th Street — with expanded galleries, classrooms, offices, a café, parking, and, critically, the Chihuly Collection relocated under the same roof for the first time. Pitching the project to Pinellas County commissioners, Affan framed it as more than an arts project, telling them "it's about tourism impact." The county agreed to a point: after an initial request north of $15 million, commissioners voted 4–1 in 2025 to award roughly $2 million in tourist-development capital funding — nearly double the amount staff had recommended — with future funding cycles still ahead.
Whether the tower rises on schedule or not, the through-line is hard to miss. An institution that began under a kapok tree because two women believed ordinary people deserved art education is, more than a century later, still making that case — in glass, in clay, in classrooms, and now in concrete and steel. This summer, its walls will hold the Sugar High members show; a hundred and nine years in, the Morean is still, as its founders intended, a place where the community's artists hang their work.
Visit: Morean Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg; galleries free and open daily. Chihuly Collection, 720 Central Ave. (ticketed; admission includes a live glass demonstration at the Morean Glass Studio, 714 1st Ave. N.). Morean Center for Clay, 420 22nd St. S. Information: MoreanArtsCenter.org or (727) 822-7872.
Sources: Morean Arts Center organizational history and press materials; St. Pete Catalyst; St. Pete Rising; Visit St. Pete-Clearwater; Wikipedia (cross-checked against primary sources).
