Focal Point: The David Hall Photography Collection
June 12, 2025 -April 19, 2026
The Tampa Museum of Art is the proud recipient of the David Hall Collection. A prolific collector of photographs, Hall became enamored with photography during childhood and later shared his passion with the Tampa community as one of the founding members of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA). He collected 20th-century masters such as Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, and Edward Weston, and specialized in photography between World War I and World War II. An avid photographer himself, Hall collected works by contemporary photographers including Judy Dater and Robert Hartman. Focal Point: The David Hall Photography Collection takes an intimate look at the collector’s eye and traces major developments in 20th-century photography.
American Gaze: Impressionism
Paintings from Tampa Bay Collections
May 15, 2025 – February 1, 2026
Impressionism made its way to America from Europe by the end of the 19th-century through artists, dealers, and collectors. It soon became a national style of painting that evoked the growth of a modern nation with unrivaled natural beauty. For a short period in France, from 1870 to the 1880s, the modern art movement known as “Impressionism,” captivated young American painters who were studying abroad at the École des Beaux Art and Académie Julian. Their engagement with fellow artists, museums, and gallery exhibitions in Paris and throughout France inspired their creative pursuits in the States. Impressionism, with its bold brushstrokes and attention to light, shadow, and color, gained in popularity throughout the early years of the 20th-century. American Gaze: Impressionism features a selection of paintings from local collections that highlight the emergence of Impressionism in the United States and the succeeding generation of artists who championed the genre. Featured artists include Mary Cassatt, William Merrit Chase, Childe Hassam, George Inness, Theodore Robinson, Maurice Prendergast, Guy Wiggins, John Twachtman, and others including such inspirational European works by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Francis Picabia and Édouard Vuillard.
Terracotta sculpture; Caere (?), Etruria, Italy; Archaic period, ca. 525-500 ʙᴄᴇ
TAMPA MUSEUM OF ART, BEQUEST FROM THE ESTATE OF DR. RICHARD E. AND MRS. MARY B. PERRY, 2022.011
Photography by Philip LaDeau
The Etruscans: A Mysterious Italian People
On view April 10, 2025, through Spring 2027
The Etruscans are a fascinating ancient Italian people about whom much remains a mystery. They inhabited an area of central Italy – present-day Tuscany and beyond – immediately north of Latium where the city Rome later rose to power. Emerging from the Iron Age “Villanovan” culture (ca. 900-700 ʙᴄᴇ), the Etruscans reached their zenith in the second quarter of the first millennium ʙᴄᴇ. Over the centuries, Etruscan art and culture retained its distinct identity. Yet, they were variously influenced by Celtic and Central European, Roman and Greek, Punic and Phoenician civilizations. The Etruscans were gradually subsumed by Rome over the course of a long process of acculturation (ca. 5th-1st cent. ʙᴄᴇ).
The permanent antiquities collection of the Tampa Museum of Art holds some 70 Etruscan objects covering a period of about 750 years (ca. 9th-1st cent. ʙᴄᴇ). This ensemble, the largest public collection of its kinds in the southeastern United States, has never been displayed together before. Comprising jewelry and cosmetics, bronze statuettes and metalware, terracotta figurines and earthenware, including cinerary urns, these objects illustrate aspects of everyday life and death, pottery production, myth and religion. The presentation of the Etruscan Collection is part of a series of long-term exhibitions highlighting the Museum’s permanent collection.
Under the Spell of the Palm Tree: The Rice Collection of Cuban Art
On view February 6, 2025, through July 6, 2025
Under the Spell of the Palm Tree: The Rice Collection of Cuban Art traces Susie and Mitchell Rice’s decade-long path of discovering the art and artists of Cuba. An extensive intergenerational exhibition of modern and contemporary Cuban art presents 79 paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, mixed media, art books, and sculptures by 53 artists selected and organized along six themes: The Language of Forms and the Forms of Language; The Prophet’s Dream; The Great Journey; Sensory Landscapes of Memory and Desire; The Musings of Narcissus; and The Spirit of the Real, the Reality of the Spirit.
Sequin Arts: The Flagmakers of Haiti
On view now
Myrlande Constant: Early Works is the third presentation in the series Sequin Arts: The Flagmakers of Haiti. It features an intimate selection of Constant’s flags made over a fifteen-year period, from the mid-1990s to the end of the aughts. The textiles on view include works from the Heller Collection, who gifted the first Haitian objects to the Museum’s permanent collection, as well as the Gessen Collection, recognized as one of the largest collections of drapo Vodou in the country. The eight beaded works reveal the evolution of Constant’s early work, from singular imagery Vodou deities to narrative tableaux depicting both spiritual and everyday life in Haiti. This presentation also includes two flags by Mireille Delice, one of the many artists Constant mentored in her atelier. Viewed together, Myrlande Constant: Early Works offers insight into the transformative years of Constant’s creative practice, as she emerged from local heroine to global phenom.
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 13, 2024, through September 28, 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.
Jennifer Steinkamp:
Madame Curie
On view August 8, 2024, 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.
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 April 18, 2024, through February 22, 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 breadth 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 sculptures 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.
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.
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.
© 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.