Staff and volunteers reflect on 50 years of relationships that built Dunedin Fine Arts Center

The Dunedin Fine Art Center was a community project from the beginning. Before there was an art center in the town that covers just over 10 square miles of land, there was just Meta Brown’s love of art and the support of her friends at the Junior Service League of Dunedin. When Brown passed, her legacy fell to Syd Entel.

“I was in the Junior Service League of Dunedin, and my dearest friend was president,” Entel recollects. “I was fine arts chairman. I remember seeing her ill, and she said, ‘Dunedin needs art and culture in the community.’ And then it did not take long before she passed on. She never saw it.’”

In the wake of her friend’s passing, Entel teamed up with fellow Junior League members Gladys Douglas, Elizabeth S. Searles, Patricia Grills, and Jewel Andrews to make Brown’s dream a reality.

“We decided that we were going to build an art facility for the community,” says Entel. “And we, of course, had women in our Junior Service League whose husbands were architects and contractors. And they said they could build something for $20,000 if we could raise it.”

The city offered a plot of land in Highland Park, and the Junior League hosted a series of evening fundraisers for the capital to build. 

“By the time we had all the events, we needed $40,000,” Entel recollects, a large sum of money in 1970 (about $300,000 now, adjusted for inflation). There were two banks in Dunedin at the time. Entel reached out to both, and both agreed to help finance the art center. They broke ground in June 1974.

“The first art center that they built was like a small house,” Syd’s husband, Irwin Entel recalls. “This is how it started.”

“We hired our first director, and of course, we had to pay her” Syd recalls. “And subsequently, when one left, we hired another. And it came to a point where we needed to have staff, art and people who could teach classes.”

The second director, Nancy McIntyre, spearheaded early Dunedin Fine Art Center (DFAC) growth with a tile wall fundraising campaign in the early-1990s.

“The wall was constructed during an expansion/renovation project with Creative Contractors,” McIntyre’s husband and past DFAC curator David Shankweiler told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “Its purpose was to block the smoke, hazards and unattractive view of the outdoor raku firing area. Nancy McIntyre decided to cover it with hand-made tiles instead of stucco.”

DFAC resident artist and board member Susan Gehring directed the project, whereby schoolchildren and community members painted and drew on 3,000 tiles to form the Florida Treasures Art Mural which still stands outside the outdoor raku ceramic firing area. “I glazed all 3,000 of them,” Shankweiler told CL.

Individuals, businesses, and other groups were asked to underwrite the tiles, raising $50,000 for the center’s expansion campaign. The tile wall remains a symbol of the community’s support for the art center to this day.

Growing up together
When DFAC expanded in 1997, McIntyre hired Todd Still to run the youth camp and DFAC curator Catherine Bergmann as a weekend manager. For DFAC, McIntyre was foundational.

“She gave the art center its love of art— art for everyone, art for all,” McIntyre’s successor, George Ann Bissett, told CL.

But, according to multiple sources, McIntrye wasn’t great with budgets. When George Ann Bissett took the reins in 2005, DFAC was almost bankrupt. Still, Bergmann and Bissett were the art center’s only full-time staff. Bissett completed the core team by hiring Ken Hannon to do the marketing.

Although she loves art, Bissett doesn’t consider herself to be a creative person like Bergmann, Hannon, and Still. She came to the DFAC with a different kind of expertise—fundraising.

“Catherine made all those galleries a haven—they’re better than many museums,” says Bissett. “And Ken’s talent was supreme. I was good at asking people for money.”

She’d get to know them first, then she’d share her vision for DFAC.

“It doesn’t have to be one tiny room with one little gallery,” she’d say. “It could be so much more.”

“And people bought into it because Todd, Catherine and Ken were just so passionate, so devoted, and it was our life,” Bissett told CL. During her 19 years at DFAC, Bissett spearheaded four major capital campaigns that raised about $7 million, increased the staff from three to 17 full-time employees, and grew the center’s physical footprint from 18,000 to 40,000 square-feet.

How’d she do it? Some of it was luck—the center received two large legacy donations during her tenure. The rest sprouted from Bissett’s dogged determination to be the best.

“She has this fierce competitive spirit,” Bergmann told CL. “She wanted to be the best. First, it would be, ‘We want to be the best in the region. Then, ‘We want to be the best in the state of Florida.’ Then, ‘We want to be the best in the southeast.’

“Like galactic domination,” Bergmann says, laughing.

“Who wants to be mediocre?” says Bissett.

“It doesn’t have to be one tiny room with one little gallery…It could be so much more.”

Passing the baton
DFAC enters its 50th year without the core team that helped define it. Bissett and Hannon both retired in 2023 after 19 and 18 years of service, respectively. Current CEO Andrea Nalls came on in September 2023. Still resigned a year later. And Bergmann, who’s worked at the art center for 25 years, announced her resignation, to take effect on Feb. 14.

Before retiring, Bissett gave the board one year’s notice, hoping she’d have an opportunity to guide the art center’s new leadership, but the board had another idea.

“They [the board] wanted this new person to come up with their whole new ideas and all that, which, to this day, in my opinion, was not a good choice to do,” Bissett told CL. “They’ve had a lot of upheaval there.”

In light of this, we asked DFAC’s core team to tell us what they think has contributed to the the art center’s success and what they think it will take to get to 100 years.

• Don’t change a thing “My quick response is, ‘Don’t change a thing,’” says Hannon. “What do you do with a brand everyone loves? You don’t change it.”
• Art for all The Dunedin Fine Art Center is known for its educational programming, its support of local artists, and being a welcome place for all members of the community.

“Community accessibility is everything,” Bergmann told CL. “Community support, engagement, and accessibility are everything. That translates to accessibility and maintaining the art center as an inclusive, safe, welcoming, diverse space that honors all age levels.”

Part of that accessibility is keeping DFAC programs affordable through fundraising. One of the things Bergmann found valuable in Bissett’s leadership was how she roped everyone into fundraising.

“We’re all part of this fundraising effort,” is what she said, Bergmann told CL. “And she would educate everyone.”

• Be a community art center, not a museum Hannon presents the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center at Bellair as a cautionary tale.

“They were a very successful art center, and then they decided they would be a museum,” says Hannon, “and you know where that story ends up.”

The Gulf Coast Museum of Art, which occupied the space where Creative Pinellas Galleries currently lives, lasted ten years in Largo, from 1999 to 2009. Before that, the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center at Bellair had thrived for 49 years, from 1950 to 1999.

“The people who are there really need to stop, look at the organization, and say, ‘what a wonderful thing,’” Bissett told CL. “This is considering what life can be like today. It’s an area where people respect each other. They listen. It’s a sense of community. It will never be a Dalí. Sorry, but it never will be. If they think they’re going to turn it into a museum, well, you’d have to turn the studios into a vault. It doesn’t have a collection.”

• Continue DFAC’s support of local artists “You’re nothing without the artists,” says Bergmann. DFAC’s commitment to the community is built into every exhibition cycle. There’s a call to artists with each passing season, ensuring that the community gets to see their local artists on each and every visit to DFAC.

“I think that’s just such an important part of building and maintaining that community,” Hannon told CL.

Listen Bergmann and Bissett both stressed the importance of listening to the community that helped build the place. The art center’s success was built on its relationship with the community. As Bergmann puts it, success comes in embracing the community as “joyful collaborators.”

“Leadership, in my mind, is listening to what the people tell you,” says Bissett. “Then you try and figure out what’s going to work.”

“Remember that this art center was built by the people, for the people,” Bissett continues. “It was a home-grown organization by a very determined, bright woman, Syd Entel, and her friends in the Junior League. It’s kind of like, don’t forget where you come from. Because if you do, you’re probably not going to know where you’re heading.”

Moving forward
In a phone call with CL, Nalls expressed gratitude for the insights shared by DFAC’s original crew and said she plans to keep the signature fundraising events, especially Trashy Treasures (The fate of the Garden Party will depend on how well February’s gala goes.) Nalls added that by definition, DFAC is already a museum.

“A museum would be a place that exhibits culturally significant material,” Nalls told CL. “We’re showing in seven galleries every day, so I feel like we already kind of are.”

What’s the difference? It’s a matter of focus. An art museum focuses on collecting, preserving and displaying art, while a community art center focuses on making the arts accessible to everyone in their community. A museum has a permanent collection (DFAC does not). A community art center showcases work by local artists (DFAC does this regularly). Nalls describes DFAC as though it’s both a museum and a community art center.

Nalls said DFAC prides itself on being many things depending on who’s asking.

“So we’re an arts education center—we’re the largest in the southeast U.S. We are a place where working artists can exhibit their works. We have a children’s gallery and a children’s museum. We’ve got our seven gallery spaces where we do exhibit cultural material. We’ve got a cafe. We’re a gallery shop [that] only carries handmade artist items,” she added. “So we’re kind of a lot of different things.”

At the center of all these things, Nalls added, is support for the arts in our community. Everything else, like being a museum, is just an offshoot of that.

Nalls has a background in both museums and history—her last job was Director of Experience and Operations at the Tampa Bay History Center. As such, she recognizes the significance of an institution like DFAC surviving for so long.

“That means not only that the people that come to the art center really care about it, but the people who have worked at the art center, the people who have taught at the art center, people who have taken classes at the art center, the community that the art center is within,” she said. “These entities are what the art center is.”

Like Bergmann, Bissett and Hannon, Nalls said the things she loves most about DFAC are its welcoming nature, its commitment to encouraging creativity and participation in the arts, and its status as a community gathering place.

“It’s just so much more than a place where classes are taught or where culturally significant materials are exhibited,” Nalls concludes. “It’s really about expressing yourself, being yourself, and having some fun.”

What does Nalls think it will take to go another 50 years?

“Keeping what works, which is a lot,” says Nalls. “The formula that the Art Center has had in place for the last 50 years is a winning formula. Remaining at our core, who we have always been while breeding some innovative ways to keep people’s interest and further their involvement with the visual arts.”

Tickets to Dunedin Fine Arts Center’s 50th anniversary gala on Friday, Feb. 15 are still available and start at $250.
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This article appears in Jan 23-29, 2025.