Anyone that’s ever decided to move some art around in their home, knows it can be a daunting project—hang this here, or maybe over there, but that won’t work with that, etc etc.
Now imagine you don’t just have a few art objects to choose from and rearrange, but more than 20,000.
That’s the task that the Museum of Fine Arts has taken upon itself. When “Art Unbound,” the re-installation of its permanent collection, opens to the public on Nov. 21, visitors will discover the reason behind this massive change—it’s giving us a whole new way of seeing.
The MFA’s encyclopedic holdings range from objects thousands of years old to artworks of the present moment. Up till now, as in most museums of its kind, the works have been presented in more or less linear fashion, beginning with antiquity and moving on from there, era by art-historical era.
No more.
‘Art Unbound’: Art After Dark preview party
Time Thu., Nov. 19, 5-8 p.m.
Location Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, 255 Beach Dr NE, St. Petersburg
The difference is clear upon entering the first gallery. Where visitors once stepped immediately into the world of Roman Arts—mosaics, coins, a bust of Augustus—they’re now greeted by a golden Buddha, surrounded by objects you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with a Buddha, including contemporary artworks.
“Hopefully, the minute you step in,” says MFA Chief Curator Stanton Thomas, “the wheels start turning in your mind and you think about why these objects are combined, and you already get a sense of the visual conversations they’re having together.”
Moving on, the galleries have been grouped according to themes. “Picturing Belief,” for instance, explores spirituality and art. Traditional Christian iconography shares a wall with an installation by Paul Pfeiffer depicting a contemporary deity, Justin Bieber, crafted by Guatemalan wood-carvers. A much-loved mainstay of the MFA collection, Leon Berkowitz’s “Big Blue,” conjures an experience of secular spirituality, the moment of being mesmerized by a deep dive into a field of color.
Credit: Dave Decker/Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
Other themed rooms range from American Landscapes to Materials & Techniques, from Setting the Table to Death & The Spirit World.
In the Utterly Florida room, a James Rosenquist abstract shares space with a Mickey Mouse tea set designed by Michael Graves and a 19th-century St. Augustine landscape by Thomas Moran.
The Telling Stories gallery looks at the relationship between art and narrative through the lenses of myth, legend and folklore. A crest (or totem) pole by the Canadian First Nations artist Calvin Hunt has been moved inside from the museum’s sculpture garden and now gets to converse with a miniature Noah’s Ark, and there’s a conversation pit with comfy seating where patrons can share the stories they’re discovering.
And speaking of discovery, there’s even a Discovery Room, in which the objects have no labels, only QR codes, and visitors have to guess what they’re looking at. (Try to find the egg nippers.)
The impetus for the re-imagination came from MFA Executive Director and CEO Klaudio Rodriguez, the former ED of the Bronx Museum. He arrived in St. Pete two years ago between hurricanes Helene and Milton, so you might say the universe was sending him a message about shaking things up. But the idea wasn’t to move stuff around just to move it around, but to open up whole new avenues for the visitor experience.
“When I walked in,” he says, “the collection was presented in traditional fashion, which is ‘this follows this,’ and it really comes from the top down, right? Curatorially, art historically, whatever we’re telling you, where the themes are talking about more universal things that are more connected to our own human experience. And we want to make sure the museum is more connected to that personal human experience, right? So instead of telling you, well, this work is important in the context of art history… the conversation becomes a bit different, more interactive and engaged.”
Also, there’s an element of play involved. The re-installation, says Rodriguez, “allows us to play with things differently and bring things out that otherwise wouldn’t fit that linear narrative that we had. And because I’ve only been here for a little bit, I get to see things I had not seen before because I haven’t been, you know, through every single drawer, every single show. Wow, we have that?”
Only a small percentage of the museum’s 20,000 objects can be displayed at one time, a normal situation for most museums, because much of the work is light-sensitive.
“Before the reinstallation,” says Stanton Thomas, “we had 476 objects out, including tiny things like beads and coins. [The collection was last ‘refreshed’ six years ago.] This time there are about 350 works, which includes some things that have never been out or are out very rarely, and there’s quite a few loans. So it’s a big transformation.”
Even though the curators and collections teams were familiar with the museum’s holdings, they too found surprises.
“In many cases,” says Thomas, “I pulled together a list [for a gallery] and then I’d be going through storage and I’m like, ‘Ooh, look at that, I think that would work really well.”
The logistics behind such a re-imagination posed a challenge, to say the least.
“I set the wheels in motion,” says Rodriguez, “but the team made the engine go.”
The curators, including Thomas, Assistant Curator Noah Cox, and Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill, used the interior design software SketchUp to envision where objects could be placed. But they couldn’t make final decisions till they saw how the artworks actually fit with each other IRL in the galleries (17 in all).
“It’s a big circus that’s going on all the time,” says Rodriguez about the process of re-installation.”A lot of moving parts, between painters, and walls being installed and built and installations and all the other stuff. It’s quite a feat.”
Oversight of this logistics feat was the responsibility of Jennifer McKellar, the Manager of Collections & Exhibitions.
“I always joke that collections people are the best at Tetris,” says McKellar, whom Rodriguez describes as “organized to the Nth degree.”
Once the curators put their first ideas in SketchUp about where things go, says McKellar, “We’ll bring everything out, we’ll get them laid out, and then the curator will come in and be like, actually, change it all.”
She has shared Instagram videos showing the painstaking process of moving the museum’s priceless objects. The most important elements: planning and patience. “I think about the medium, how it’s mounted, where it’s going to go, and what other objects around it are going to impact it as we move it.”
Remarkably, the museum has succeeded in making these major changes in only two months (The collection closed for the re-installation in September, while the special exhibition galleries, gift shop and Cafe Clementine remained open throughout.)
And guess what? Not too long in the future, MFA St. Pete may do it all over again. New themes may emerge, new discoveries may be made, and the fact that the museum is no longer tied to a chronological display allows for almost infinite flexibility.
“My hope,” says Rodriguez, “is that every three or four years, everything has been switched around.”
To see the current transformation, head over to the MFA beginning Nov. 19. And don’t worry; if you don’t see your favorites where you expect to see them (say, Kehinde Wiley’s gorgeous “Leviathan Zodiac”), just look around; it might be around the next corner.
That goes for the museum’s famous Monet, too. Yes, the Milwaukee Art Museum won the World Series bet to take temporary custody of Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London, but it won’t be traveling to Wisconsin any time soon.
Credit: Dave Decker/Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | BlueSky
This article appears in Nov. 05 – 11, 2026.
