Depicting dove in temple architecture, inscribed in Greek
Painted limestone relief, Egypt, early Christian, n.d.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF DR. ROBERT STEVEN BIANCHI (99.03.1.1)
The Art of Coptic Egypt
From the Collection of Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi
On view September 20, 2024, through May 2025
The word “Copt” refers to the native population of Egypt, many of whom converted to Christianity in the early centuries of the Roman period. Tradition maintains that the Holy Family sojourned in Egypt and that Saint Mark, the Evangelist, established the first Christian church in Egypt in Alexandria in the first century. The Copts shared a common material culture with their polytheistic neighbors. Imperial edicts established Christianity as the religion of the empire in the late 4th century, which allowed the Coptic community to flourish.
The Art of Coptic Egypt showcases over fifty artifacts from a local private collection dating from early centuries of the Roman Imperial to the Middle Ages, although special attention is given to objects specifically associated with the Coptic church. Today, there is still a thriving, vibrant Coptic community in Egypt and beyond, including in Tampa.
Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration
On view August 28, 2024, through January 5, 2025
Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration is a celebration of artistic practices in the Tampa Bay region, as it is a collaboration between five institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design; the Tampa Museum of Art; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. Working together, curators from each institution offer context for the diversity of art being made in Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota counties.
Jennifer Steinkamp:
Madame Curie
On view now through August 10, 2025
Jennifer Steinkamp: Madame Curie, a multi-channel video installation, nods to the achievements and life of scientist and Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. Eve Curie, Marie and Pierre Curie’s daughter, wrote the definitive biography on the scientist and noted her mother’s passion for gardening. Steinkamp, a pioneer in video art and animation, depicts in Madame Curie over 40 flowers and plants described in Curie’s biography. In this room-sized installation, entangled and intertwined flora appear to swirl and sway as the branches and flowers slowly move across the projection. Animations of apple blossoms, daisies, eucalyptus, passion flowers, periwinkle, and wisteria are amongst the flowers featured in Madame Curie. Originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2011, Madame Curie will be presented as a site-specific installation at the new Bronson Thayer Gallery at the Tampa Museum of Art.
Suchitra Mattai:
Bodies and Souls
On view now through March 16, 2025
The exhibition Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls explores migration, matriarchy, and materiality. Mattai uses found objects, such as vintage saris, to create colorful monumental installations. She wraps, braids, stitches, and weaves fabrics together as allegories for historical and personal narratives. For her first museum exhibition in Florida and the Southeast, Mattai will premier new installations in conversation with recent works, highlighting the artist’s ongoing investigations of the past and present.
Hybrid of a Chrysler, 2016
Vintage automobile and mixed media installation
Collection of Susie and Mitchell Rice
Esterio Segura: Hybrid of a Chrysler
On view now
Esterio Segura highlights the complexity of everyday life in Cuba in artworks exploring the socio-political, cultural, and spiritual landscape of the island nation. Different manifestations of winged animals and machines, airplanes, and submarines appear in his art and represent themes of freedom, isolation, immigration, desire, and exile. Hybrid of a Chrysler, features Segura’s signature use of wings attached to the roof of a 1953 Chrysler Windsor. The car, like the classic autos used daily in Cuba, appears ready for flight. Hybrid of a Chrysler premiered at the Tampa Museum of Art in 2016 and has traveled across the globe to Venice, Italy and Washington DC, to Gainesville, Florida, and has now returned to Tampa.
Portrait by Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-Canadian, 1908-2002). Black-figure Attic pseudo-Panathenaic amphora, Athens, ca. 540 BCE. Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Collection, Museum Purchase, 1986.024
Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector
On view now through February 19, 2026
In 1986, the Tampa Museum of Art acquired some 175 ancient objects from the eminent collection of Joseph Veach Noble (1920-2007). This acquisition became the cornerstone of the museum’s burgeoning permanent collection of antiquities that has since grown to about 875 objects (and counting). After nearly four decades, it is high time to place the Noble collection in the spotlight once more.
The superb Noble collection of Greek and Italian vases is of international renown for its breath of themes and styles, forms and techniques. The Noble vases are therefore of superior educational value to illuminate aspects of ancient Greek myth and religion, warfare and athletics, wine culture and cosmetics, daily life and entertainment. Many vases of Noble’s collection have been on display in the past decades, but no dedicated presentation of the collection has been on view since the inaugural exhibition at the TMA in 1986. The two-year exhibition Through the Eye of a Collector will also showcase fascinating curiosities and beautiful sculpture in the TMA’s Noble Collection.
Vaughn Spann: Allegories
On view now
Abstraction and figuration converge in Vaughn Spann’s monumental paintings. Marked Men, an ongoing series, features a prominent X at the center of the canvas. Rendered in vibrant paint swaths—from sapphire to sky blue, crimson red and marigold yellow, to blush pink and emerald green—the X creates grids of kaleidoscopic colors. A stand-in for the body, unknown, or the anonymous, Spann’s X signifies both individual and collective experiences. The suite of four large-scale paintings on view demonstrates Spann’s exploration of personal, political, and art historical narratives.
Sequin Arts: The Flagmakers of Haiti
On view now
The second presentation of the Tampa Museum of Art’s Haitian flag collection highlights Erzulie, one of the most powerful and beloved Lwas or gods of the Vodou pantheon. Erzulie represents a family of goddesses who are also referred to as Ezili or Ézili. Erzulie Freida and Erzulie Dantor symbolize the two most recognizable forms of Erzulie. Considered sisters and rivals, Erzulie Freida and Erzulie Dantor both embody love but show it in different ways. Erzulie Freida exudes love through passion and sensuality, whereas Erzulie Danthor guards and defends the people she loves. Both manifestations of Erzulie are represented by hearts pierced with daggers. As demonstrated by the fifteen flags on view, Erzulie continues to captivate and inspire the artists of Haiti.
C. Paul Jennewein
On view now
C. Paul Jennewein’s (German-American, 1890-1978) artwork reveals the inspiration of the ancient world while also engaging with the new sculptural styles of his time, merging Art Deco with the neo-classical tradition. In 1978, the Tampa Bay Art Center, predecessor of the Tampa Museum of Art, received a bequest of 2,600 objects including finished artworks, as well as preparatory drawings, plaster casts, and molds for the numerous commissions Jennewein received during his prolific career. Starting in Fall 2022, the Museum will present Jennewein’s early sculptures for an extended two-year display.
In his Ninth Labor, Heracles was ordered to retrieve the girdle of the Amazonian princess Hippolyta.
Ceramic wine vessel (black-figure neck amphora with added white; attributed to the Leagros Group); Attica, Greece; late Archaic period, ca. 520-500 BCE. Museum Purchase, 1982.011
Identity in the Ancient World
On view now through March 23, 2025
This two-year presentation centers around the theme of identity in the ancient world. Across the ancient Mediterranean, people will have felt some sense of group identity such as belonging to a tribe, race, culture or civilization. They will have recognized differences between men and women, and will have experienced desires and moral constraints. Feelings of identity could also be expressed in opposition to other groups, such as Greeks vs. Persians or Scythians, Romans vs. Gauls or Germans, men vs. women. In our modern society, many more expressions of identity are recognized that may invoke a sense of belonging or form exclusive alliances. In the ancient world, expressions of identity could not always be articulated explicitly because the terminology for voicing thoughts about personal, cultural and national frames of identity did not exist. Identity in the Ancient World will illustrate some of these aspects based predominantly on the Museum’s own Antiquities Collection, supplemented with some prominent long-term loans from other museums and private collections.
Identity in the Ancient World is one of several new exhibitions dedicated to the Museum’s permanent collection that will be on view for long-term displays over the next five years.
Esterio Segura: Goodbye My Love
On view now
A new acquisition to the Museum’s permanent collection, Goodbye My Love represents Esterio Segura’s (Cuban, b. 1970) ongoing exploration of the meaning of airplanes and flight. Produced in multiple editions at different scales, this version is nearly the largest. In describing the series, Segura explained, “In this work, the reference to the airplane hybridizes with a reference to another well-known universal symbol: a simplified image of the heart…With this work, I reference the experience of uprooting, nostalgia, memory, loss—how we experience the breakdown of everything we love.”
attended by four figures on grave.
Monumental funerary vessel (red-figure volute krater with added red and white); Apulia, Italy; early Hellenistic period, ca. 330 320 BCE. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Knight Zewadski, 1986.225.
Life & Death in the Ancient World
Introduction to the Antiquities Collection
On view now
The Tampa Museum of Art purchased its first ancient artwork in 1981, a black-figure column krater, perhaps depicting the wedding procession of Peleus and Thetis. Five years later, the Museum’s antiquities collection quadrupled in size with the single acquisition of the prominent collection of Joseph Veach Noble. The permanent collection currently holds about 575 ancient artifacts, in addition to over 100 long-term loans from private collections. More than three-quarters of the Museum’s antiquities are representative of ancient Greece and Italy, particularly Athens and Rome. The ancient world encompassed a much wider diversity of traditions, however, of which some can be encountered in this introduction to the Museum’s Antiquities Collection. The gallery display will highlight aspects of daily life and death, as well as human and animal figures, beauty ideals and eroticism, athletics and theater, wine consumption and vase production, religion and mythology, trade and politics.
Life & Death in the Ancient World is one of several new exhibitions dedicated to the Museum’s permanent collection that will be on view for long-term displays over the next five years.
Purvis Young: Redux
On view now through June 29, 2025
Inspired by the success of the exhibition Purvis Young: 91 in 2019, the Tampa Museum of Art will remount its Purvis Young collection as one of the first of several long-term displays of the permanent collection. In 2004, the Rubell Family Foundation gifted 91 artworks to the Tampa Museum of Art by Young (American, 1943-2010). Based in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida, Young’s paintings reflect his observations of daily life and the fight for social justice, hope for his community, immigration and otherness, as well as the fragile balance between life and death. He rendered his work from found objects—items he discovered in his neighborhood. Discarded wood, windows, furniture fragments, cabinets, doors, carpet, fabric, string, and cables. Although his means were limited, Young was recognized throughout Miami, and now across the globe, for his remarkable painting practice and his contributions to the cultural landscape of South Florida.
Jacob Hashimoto: This Particle of Dust
On view now through 2025
The Tampa Museum of Art’s atrium is transformed by Jacob Hashimoto’s site-specific installation This Particle of Dust. Hundreds of white and navy blue kite-like disks is suspended from the Museum’s ceiling. Installed at various heights, viewers will experience Hashimoto’s sculptural installation at different vantage points from the lobby to the 2nd floor galleries.
Prelude: An Introduction to the Permanent Collection
On view now
Prelude: An Introduction to the Permanent Collection presents the Tampa Museum of Art’s main collecting areas in ancient, modern, and contemporary art. The exhibition features artworks exploring themes of site, power, and the body in ancient vessels, tools, and jewelry, as well as sculptures, painting, and photography. Viewed together in dialogue with each other, the objects speak to shared experiences across time and place. An ongoing exhibition, Prelude includes both familiar works and recent additions to the permanent collection.
© Jaume Plensa. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
Laura with Bun
On view now
Jaume Plensa is an internationally acclaimed artist who has exhibited his sculptures in museums all over the world. In locations as diverse as Seoul, Paris, Chicago, Bordeaux and London, Plensa’s monumental sculptures have reaffirmed the power of art to transform a public space into a community.