Soft Water Gallery - An Engineer’s Gallery
Named for a Laundry, Run by an Engineer - Soft Water Gallery
In the warehouse that once housed the Southeast's largest commercial laundry, a radio-frequency engineer turned painter built a studio, then a gallery — and along the way painted the district's most beloved mural and the ArtsXchange's own birth announcement.
Every name in the Warehouse Arts District is a fossil if you dig at it. Soft Water Gallery, in Unit F of the ArtsXchange campus at 515 22nd Street South, takes its name from the building's first life: the Soft Water Laundry, incorporated in Florida more than a century ago and, in its day, the largest commercial laundry in the Southeast — one of the very industrial ghosts (alongside the tomato packers and the train depot) that gave the district its bones and its name. Where industrial washers once churned, a contemporary fine art gallery now hangs monthly exhibitions under the original warehouse skin. The district's whole story, in one unit.
But the better story at Soft Water is the person upstairs.
The Engineer Who Defected
Carrie Jadus was born in Tampa in 1976 and raised in St. Petersburg, in a family thick with artists. She came up through the Pinellas County Center for the Arts magnet program at Gibbs High School, and a post-graduation trip to Europe converted her to Impressionism — the loose, momentary light she still chases in paint. Then, in a very St. Pete plot twist, the young artist did the practical thing: she earned an electrical engineering degree from USF and spent years as a radio-frequency engineer.
The defection came when it had to. Dissatisfied with a career that paid well and fed nothing, Jadus — by then a newly single mother of two young sons — left engineering for full-time fine art, and approached the leap like the engineer she was: with a business plan (modeled, she has said, on a toymaker's), multiple working styles to sustain income, and relentless output. It worked. Since going full-time in 2006, Jadus has become one of St. Petersburg's most recognized painters, her work in galleries and collections worldwide, her illustrations a longtime fixture of St. Pete Preservation's campaigns.
And, of course, there's the mural. For the 2015 SHINE festival, Jadus painted "Resonance" — the towering sepia portrait of Nikola Tesla at 2232 5th Avenue South that became, for years, arguably the most photographed mural in the city. The symmetry was almost too perfect: the electrical engineer who left the profession, painting the patron saint of electrical engineering, 78 feet wide, at the Pinellas Trail's edge. (Mural fans note: the Tesla wall has not been visible since 2019 — but the district still holds her work. More on that in a moment.) Both "Resonance" and its companion "Little Miss Sisyphus" were painted entirely by female crews, a quiet landmark in a mural scene then dominated by men.
From Studios to Gallery
Jadus put down roots at 515 22nd Street South early, establishing Soft Water Studios in 2013 — working artist spaces in the old laundry, years before the Warehouse Arts District Association's ArtsXchange renovation transformed the campus around it. When the ArtsXchange celebrated its grand opening in 2017, it was Jadus who painted its birth announcement: "Are You My Mother?", the thought-provoking mural still visible from the Pinellas Trail behind the campus, born from her contribution to The Motherhood Project. Her artist statement about the piece doubles as her whole philosophy — that "art has a way of revealing more about the viewer's perspective than the artist's."
The formal gallery came in 2022, when Soft Water Studios opened its exhibition wing as Soft Water Gallery — a thoughtfully curated contemporary space showcasing original work by emerging, mid-career, and established artists drawn primarily from the Southeastern United States, with a deliberate emphasis on larger-scale work (a luxury the warehouse ceilings make possible and downtown storefronts can't match). The program turns over monthly, typically running two exhibitions at once alongside a standing selection from represented artists — Jadus among them, her studio open upstairs, where a recent renovation added a collectors' lounge while keeping the industrial architecture honest.
Day to day, the floor belongs to gallery director Lisa Lippencot, whom visitors praise with unusual consistency for knowledge and warmth — the reviews read like a fan club, including one collector's giddy account of finally buying his first gallery piece from Jadus's "Blue Nudes III" series after a year of ArtWalk visits. The gallery is free, family-friendly, has its own parking, and backs directly onto the Pinellas Trail, making it one of the few galleries in Florida you can browse mid-bike-ride.
The District in Miniature
Soft Water rewards being read as the Warehouse Arts District compressed to a single address: an industrial building's name preserved rather than erased; an artist who arrived before the polish and helped create it; studios first, gallery second, community throughout; and a curatorial identity — serious regional contemporary art, hung big, sold warmly — that one memorable visitor review contrasted against "flashy art with no soul." The gallery sits a short walk from Duncan McClellan's campus and inside WADA's, threading this directory's Warehouse District profiles together; visit on a Second Saturday, when the whole ArtsXchange opens around it, and finish upstairs at the studio of the engineer who chose paint. The soft water is long gone. The name never needed changing — the place still exists to wash the week off people.
Visit: Soft Water Gallery, 515 22nd St. S., Unit F (ArtsXchange campus), St. Petersburg. Generally open Thursday–Saturday afternoons (roughly noon–6 p.m.; check current hours), until 9 p.m. on Second Saturday ArtWalk. Free admission; free on-site parking; direct Pinellas Trail access. Information: SoftWaterGallery.com or (727) 318-3223.
Sources: Soft Water Gallery materials; CarrieJadus.com; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance (SHINE mural archive); Creative Pinellas "Arts In" podcast; Visit St. Pete-Clearwater; Tampa Bay Times; TripAdvisor and public listings.
