Studio@620 - Two Friends with a Mission
The House Where the Answer Is Always Yes: The Studio@620
Two friends, a derelict blueprint building, and a one-word mission built the incubator that hatched half of St. Petersburg's creative institutions. Twenty-one years on, The Studio@620 owns its home — and is writing its second act.
Every arts city has one room where everything seems to have started. In St. Petersburg, that room sits behind an unassuming storefront at 620 1st Avenue South — a former blueprint company building whose ceiling was collapsing when two friends took it over in 2004. In the two decades since, the room has been a theater, a gallery, a jazz club, a lecture hall, a dance studio, a film house, a poetry venue, a gospel brunch, and a town square. It has been, by design, whatever anyone asked it to be. That was the whole idea.
The Studio@620 was co-founded by Bob Devin Jones and G. David Ellis, two artistic directors who cut the ribbon in 2004 on a conviction that art and diversity belong at the center of civic life. Its opening program, "Grand Ma's Hands: One Hundred Years of African American Quilting," debuted on December 31, 2004, as part of the city's First Night celebration — and set the template for everything after: heritage and fine art, presented without pretense, in a room where the community was the point.
The Studio's mission eventually compressed itself into a single word. A fan once remarked that 620 had become the place where the answer is always yes — and Jones adopted it as motto, mission, and programming philosophy. Established artist, emerging artist, not-yet artist: yes. As Jones put it in a 2025 WUSF interview looking back on the founding, the founders simply wanted "a place for the community to gather without hurt, harm or danger." Everything else grew from there.
The Man in the Hat
It is impossible to write about The Studio@620 without writing about Bob Devin Jones, the actor, director, playwright, and — in his trademark hat and scarf — one of the most recognizable figures in St. Petersburg's cultural life. Born in Los Angeles in 1954, Jones trained at Loyola Marymount University, the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, then spent decades working nationally as an actor and director. His plays, many centered on civil rights and Black history, include Uncle Bends: A Home-Cooked Negro Narrative — performed from Sacramento to Ireland — and Manhattan Casino (2001), a musical about the historic St. Petersburg music hall where Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie once played.
Jones first came to St. Petersburg in 1997 to direct a Harlem Renaissance–styled production of Strindberg's Miss Julie for American Stage. He met his life partner here and stayed. Seven years later, he and Ellis — backed by an unconventional funding model built on community-purchased shares — opened the Studio in a part of downtown that, in 2004, felt like the hinterlands: BayWalk was new, Beach Drive had a handful of restaurants, and parking on the surrounding blocks was, as one local account later put it, abundant. The Studio didn't wait for the neighborhood to arrive. It became the reason people came.
The Incubator
The Studio@620's résumé reads less like a venue's and more like a city's. It served as an early home or launching pad for freeFall Theatre Company, Your Real Stories Productions, the Sunscreen Film Festival, Keep St. Pete Lit, and Tombolo Books — a roll call of institutions that now define St. Petersburg's literary, theatrical, and film culture. In 2005 it became one of the first galleries in Tampa Bay to exhibit the Florida Highwaymen, the Black landscape painters whose roadside canvases are now Florida icons — a tradition it has continued through recent exhibitions like "The Florida Highwaymen: La Florida, Re-Found." Its stages have platformed talents from Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris to painter Jake Troyli.
Then there are the long-running series that regulars can set their calendars by. The Radio Theatre Project — live staged radio plays, begun by Mimi Rice and carried on by actor Bonnie Agan — has run monthly for the better part of two decades. "Through Our Eyes," the annual Journeys in Journalism exhibition, has showcased photography and reporting by students from Melrose Elementary, John Hopkins Middle, and Lakewood High — Title I schools in St. Petersburg's historically Black south side — for eighteen years and counting. Add Poetry Open Mic, Shakespeare in the City, gospel brunches celebrating veteran Black performers, the Social Justice Initiative's roundtables, and the annual Studio Honors, and the picture resolves: a community arts organization in the fullest sense, with particular and deliberate room for the city's Black and brown artists and audiences.
The recognition followed. Jones collected a shelf of honors — the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance's MUSE Award in 2014, the Tampa Bay Lightning Community Hero Award in 2018, and in 2024 the national Tanne Foundation Award recognizing fifty years in the theater — along with a key to the city that sits in the office above the gallery.
The Twentieth Year: An Ending and Two Beginnings
2024 was the hinge year. As the Studio turned twenty, Jones announced his retirement as artistic director — effective, with characteristic wit, on 6/20. His farewell production was a Hamlet staged in the round, cast non-traditionally, dressed all in white, rehearsed in the open, and led by John Bambery, a St. Petersburg native who came up through the city's public schools before training at Juilliard and the Moscow Art Theatre. It was a fitting last statement: a classic, made local, made accessible, made new.
The same year brought the milestone that may matter even more to the institution's future: The Studio@620 purchased its building. In a downtown where rising rents have scattered arts organizations and swallowed venues whole, ownership of 620 1st Avenue South — celebrated with a ribbon-cutting and rededication alongside board chair Amber Brinkley and lender BayFirst Financial — converts a twenty-year cultural legacy into a permanent address. The organization that watched its once-quiet block become prime real estate will not be priced off of it.
Leadership passed to Erica Sutherlin, recruited by the board in consultation with Jones as executive artistic director. Sutherlin arrived with nine years as an instructor at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts and a working résumé spanning dance, performance, film directing, and theater administration; her stated aim, as she told St. Pete Life, is "to reflect the communities as a whole, and to grow" — professionally produced signature events, artist residencies, and a bridge between arts graduates and working professional practice. Jones, for his part, blessed the succession in terms that doubled as a mission statement: however the place grows artistically, the mission remains a "yes" in the community. He remains a presence — writing, directing on occasion, working on a memoir with St. Petersburg Press — while studio manager Marcus Wehby keeps the day-to-day humming.
Why It Matters
The Studio@620 never had the Chihuly Collection's tourists, the Morean's campus, or Florida CraftArt's statewide reach. What it had was earlier convictions: that downtown St. Petersburg could be an arts city before the evidence existed; that a venue's job is to say yes; and that a cultural renaissance which doesn't include the whole city isn't one. It is not an overstatement — local historians have made the claim outright — that the Studio was the beating heart of the renaissance that followed. Twenty-one years later, with the deed in hand and a new director in the chair, the city's original yes is positioned to keep answering for another generation.
Visit: The Studio@620, 620 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg. Gallery and event hours vary by programming; evening events most nights. Schedule, membership, and volunteer information: TheStudioAt620.org or (727) 895-6620.
Sources: The Studio@620 organizational history; WUSF; St. Pete Catalyst; St. Pete Life magazine; Creative Pinellas; I Love the Burg; USF Digital Collections; Wikipedia (cross-checked against primary sources).
