Category: Past Exhibitions

On view August 7 – November 30, 2025

Discover the rich story of how American artists adapted and transformed Impressionism in In a New Light: American Impressionism 1870–1940. This major exhibition traces the movement’s journey from its French origins to its dynamic reinterpretation across the United States, revealing how artists blended European influences with American landscapes, cities, and everyday life.

Featuring more than 100 paintings and works on paper from the Bank of America Collection, In a New Light offers a vibrant look at the evolution of American art during a time of national reflection and renewal. Many artists featured in the exhibition studied abroad—particularly in France—where they embraced plein air painting and the bold color and light of Impressionism. Upon returning home, they helped shape a new artistic language rooted in American identity and place.

Organized geographically, the exhibition highlights artists working in key American art colonies, from the coasts of California and New England to the deserts of New Mexico and the streets of Chicago. Visitors will encounter panoramic landscapes by Hudson River School artists, tonal works influenced by the Barbizon School, and expressive paintings by renowned Impressionists like Childe Hassam, Daniel Garber, and Guy Carleton Wiggins.

The gallery installation follows a salon-style presentation, immersing guests in the diversity and energy of the era. Alongside iconic Impressionist scenes are works by American Realists and Tonalists, offering insight into the wide range of artistic voices that helped define the American experience at the turn of the 20th century.

Focal Point: The David Hall Photography Collection presents 40 works from the holdings of Tampa-based collector and photographer David Hall. With over 400 works in the collection, the pictures on view present a sample of the photographers and images David admired as a lifelong photo enthusiast. The collection shares the story of photography in the 20^th century as the medium evolved from historical documentation to an admired form of visual art. David was interested in the history of photography and held a special passion for photographs made between World War One and World War Two, a transformative period in art.

This intimate exhibition is loosely organized by the themes prevalent in the David Hall Collection. Many of the images on view represent iconic works from the photographers’ oeuvre, such as Ruth Orkin’s American Girl in Italy, Young Farmers by August Sander, and Ansel Adams’ Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Print publications, such as LIFE magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, employed and championed trailblazing photographers such as Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Philippe Halsman, who shot memorable moments of the 20^th century.

The David Hall Collection also includes important works by Group f/64, the California collective of photographers who forged a new aesthetic in opposition to the dominant photographic trends in New York. Pictures by Adams, Ruth Bernhard, and Edward Weston represent the “pure photography” style of Group f/64. A small group of works by David’s San Francisco-based photographer friends—such as Judy Dater, Richard Hartman, Polly Gaillard, and Lisa Law—allude to his own time spent in California.

Women, either as the photographer or subject, represent a significant number of works in the collection. As highlighted by the works on view in Focal Point, women photographers created groundbreaking bodies of work. Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, and Lillian Bassman were at the forefront of artistic innovation at a time when women did not receive the same recognition or support as their male counterparts. Portraits of women—ranging from the muse, the nude, the artist, or the sister—reveal the sitters’ sense of confidence, resilience, joy, and grace, as well as their ease in the
company of the photographer.

About David Hall

David Hall (1944 – 2024) was an arts advocate, philanthropist, music enthusiast, photographer, and collector. A Tampa native, David graduated from Plant High School and the University of South Florida. The San Francisco Bay Area was a second home to David, who spent numerous years living between California and Florida with his partner Judy Tampa. David loved cameras from an early age and studied photography at UC Berkeley with Judy Dater. He simultaneously took pictures and collected photography, but focused on the latter more intently when he returned to Tampa permanently. David was one of the co-founders of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA) and a supporter of arts organizations, including the Tampa Museum of Art. Focal Point: The David Hall Photography Collection pays tribute to David, his legacy, and contributions to Tampa’s arts community.

Exhibition Sponsored in part by:

The Frank E. Duckwall Fund at the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay

Supporting Sponsor:

Anderson Bucklew Charitable Foundation

Paintings from Tampa Bay Collections

On view May 15, 2025 – February 1, 2026

In the 1880s, Impressionism made its way to America from Europe and became a national style of painting in the United States that remains widely beloved to this day. With roots in France, Impressionism launched in 1874 with an avant-garde exhibition by Parisian painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and others—who challenged traditional painting styles of the time. Although Impressionism in France experienced a period of popularity for only a decade, it captivated young American artists abroad who were inspired by the painters’ ability to capture light and color through observation and plein air painting.

In the 19th-century, Paris was the center of the art world and artists flocked to the city to study art in its esteemed academies and famous museums. The École des Beaux-Arts, the oldest and most admired art academy in France, was highly selective of its students. Many Americans studied at Académie Julian where the language requirement was less strict and more significantly, open to accepting female artists. American painters were initially bewildered by and then beguiled by the Impressionist movement. They adapted to this new direction and in turn inspired other artists, art dealers, and American collectors, including Industrialists Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon, to embrace Impressionist art. Artists featured in American Gaze, such as Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, and Theodore Robinson, helped introduce this new approach to painting to American audiences.

The modern age was upon America. Like their European counterparts, the American Impressionists were inspired by the philosophy that painting what they knew and what they experienced firsthand was more truthful and thus more meaningful. Rather than capturing the past or historical moments on canvas, the artists were more interested in painting fleeting moments in the untouched landscape and the modernization of cities in the young nation. Artist colonies on the eastern seaboard, such as Shinnecock Hills in Long Island, founded by William Merrit Chase, and Childe Hassam, who taught off the New Hampshire coast, created a stronghold for Impressionism in the United States.

American Impressionism developed its own identity—one deeply intertwined with the country’s social, cultural, and historical shifts. American Gaze: Impressionism, Paintings from Tampa Bay Collections celebrates the contributions of American Impressionists from the late 1800s to the 1930s, a period of great transformation in the United States. The exhibition features six sections with over 60 paintings on view: Impression, French Influencers; Light Shifts; Figures and Flora; Countryside; and American Gaze. Together, the paintings highlight how American Impressionists captured the beauty of their surroundings and reveals a broader story of artistic evolution in the United States.

Community Sponsor:

Anonymous Foundation

Exhibition Sponsor:

Supporting Sponsor:

Anderson Bucklew Charitable Foundation

When it comes to art, the Rice Family’s first visit to Cuba in 2013 was as memorable as it was pivotal to their vocation as collectors. Cuban art became a gateway to embrace the heart and mind of a fascinating culture and its people. Collecting was no longer a hobby, but a passion, and over time the Rices would fall completely “under the spell” of Cuban art. For a decade, Susie and Mitchell’s Cuban Art Collection has been growing consistently in scope and quality, now treasuring the works of more than seventy artists from different generations and aesthetics.

The exhibition deviates from a traditional historical narrative and is presented as a compass rather than a timeline―a map for a journey through the varying themes, genres, and styles that align with the sensibilities of two generations of collectors in the Rice family. This first of six sections, The Language of Forms and the Forms of Language includes early works that demonstrate an affinity for abstraction among some Cuban pioneers of modernism in the late 1940s. The works in The Prophet’s Dream delineate both political and social awareness and the critical communal identity present in Cuban art through generations subsequent to the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

Cuba is described as an island-nation, a term that refers not only to its physical and geographic properties―the cluster of islands, islets and keys that form the biggest archipelago in the Antilles―but also the people who inhabit it. The works in The Great Journey: Archives express the trauma of national exile and the artists’ relationship to Cuba. The section Sensory Landscapes of Memory and Desire delineates the more hedonistic and whimsical imagery that percolates through Cuban contemporary art. These works exude eroticism, playfulness, intimate longings, and explorations into the depths of memory.

The Musings of Narcissus: Through the Looking Glass and What the Artist Found There, the fifth thematic section, examines a range of self-referential works of art and offers a glimpse into the process and philosophy of Cuban artists exploring self-representation and the body. Lastly, The Spirit of the Real, the Reality of the Spirit presents work born of the artists’ spiritual experiences. In most of the works in this section, mythological and symbolic elements from African-Cuban religions underlie or are at the foreground of both the narrative and the visual structure of the artworks.

Under the Spell of the Palm Tree: The Rice Collection of Cuban Art features the work of:

Abel Barroso
Adrián Fernandez
Alberto Lago
Alex Hernández
Alexi Torres
Alfredo Sosabravo
Ángel Ramírez & Jacqueline Maggi
Antonio Vidal
Belkis Ayón
Carlos Enríquez
Carlos Garaicoa
Cundo Bermúdez
Duo Ponjuán (René Francisco & Eduardo Ponjuán)

Emilio Sánchez
Enrique Riverón
Ernesto Javier Fernández
Ernesto Leal
Esterio Segura
Frank Mujica
Glenda León
Inti Hernández
Iván Capote
Jesús Hernández-Güero
Jorge Lavoy
José Alberto Figueroa
José Ángel Toirac
José Ángel Vincench

José Bedia
José Rosabal
Juan Roberto Diago Querol
Kádir López
Lázaro Saavedra
Liset Castillo
Mabel Poblet
Manuel Mendive
Marco Castillo
Mario Carreño
Pedro de Oraá
Pedro Pablo Oliva
Rafael Soriano

René Francisco Rodríguez
Rene Portocarrero
Reynier Leyva Novo (Chino Novo)
Ricardo Miguel Hernández
Roberto Diago
Roberto Fabelo
Salvador Corratgé
Sandra Ramos
Tania Bruguera
Tomás Sánchez
Waldo Díaz-Balart
Wifredo Lam