As the Tampa Museum of Art’s centennial approached, the museum wrestled with a common problem: Turnover.
Seth Pevnick, TMA’s curator of Greek and Roman art since 2009, left the museum earlier this year and TMA hasn’t replaced him. Director Michael Tomor didn’t come on staff until April 2015. And Joanna Robotham, TMA’s curator of modern and contemporary art, didn’t join until 2016.
How do you assemble 100 years of history after the major players have departed?
For TMA, the answer was to hire long-time reporter Linda Goldstein.
“We engaged with [Goldstein] and eight members of our community who were either on our board or had been involved in our museum going all the way back to the 1950s,” Tomor told CL. Several of these community members were volunteers, including Pat Carter, 85, who started volunteering for the museum in 1965.
“Everything back then was volunteer,” said Carter, “so you really were involved.” While going through old records, Carter noticed that volunteer committees hung the shows and unpacked the exhibits. Now museum professionals do these things.
Around 1966, Lee Leavengood assembled a group of volunteers at TMA called The Guilders. “The Guilders were like a support staff,” Carter told us. “We raised money and helped with all the things that were needed for the day to day operation.”
Before Tomor arrived at TMA, an earlier director asked The Guilders to form a committee to research the Museum’s history.
“As fate has it, that director left and the project was dropped,” said committee member, Barbara Romano, 81. “So when Michael Tomor came aboard and I got to meet him for the first time, I said, ‘Michael, we really should resurrect this history project that was started years ago.’”
Tomor was already considering the Museum’s history upon his arrival, but he thought he’d be celebrating the museum’s 40th anniversary in 2019, not its 100th anniversary in 2020. The reason is simple: the Tampa Museum of Art didn’t move into its first building until 1979.
Then the book committee shared an interesting discovery.
“Linda Goldstein did a lot of research and discovered “The Artists of Old Florida, 1840-1960,” a book written by Dr. Fred Frankel on Florida artists some years ago,” Romano told us. “[the book] pointed us to our beginnings, which started in about 1920.”
For the 59 years prior to 1979, the Tampa Museum of Art existed as an organization in search of a building.
Using the website newspapers.com, a searchable archive of historical newspapers, the book committee traced the museum’s history from 1920 up to 1979.
Now, the TMA is wrapping up a 200 page history book — The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works — which its expects to release in January 2020. In it, authors tell the museum’s story through a combination of interviews and works from the collection.
Tomor told CL that “over 100 people were interviewed for [the history book] — members, former mayors, city employees who were involved with the museum, former board members and volunteers, former staff, former directors.”
The artwork reveals the other half of the story. “I spent a lot of time in the past two years focusing on our collection, and it tells a very interesting story about the institution,” Robotham told us.
The first item TMA bought was an ancient Greek vase in 1981. Five years later, in 1986, the museum acquired the Joseph Veach Noble Collection, a collection of 150 antiquities — mostly ancient Greek pottery painted with scenes from ancient Greek Mythology and everyday life.
“[Our] collection was truly anchored or founded with the collection [of Greek painted pottery] that Joseph Veach Noble gifted to the museum,” said Robotham. “This [early acquisition] was really what the collection and the museum grew out of.”
Now the museum has a collection of over 660 works produced between 3000 B.C. and A.D. 500. According to the museum’s website, it’s one of the largest collections of Greek and Roman antiquities in the southeastern United States.
“We’ve got an extraordinary collection of works that tell great stories about ancient history — Greek, Roman, Etruscan history,” said Tomor. “The fundamental development of Western civilization is at your fingertips in our galleries dedicated to Greek and Roman art.”
The museum started collecting modern and contemporary art around the same time, focusing on photography and printmaking.
“Our collection is unique in that there’s a distinct branch focused on antiquities and then we shift all the way up to modern and contemporary art,” Robotham told us.
“When I started, Michael [Tomor] was really interested in bridging the gap between the two collections,” said Robotham. This prompted the 2018 exhibition “Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection” in which Cronin created original art inspired by TMA’s antiquities collection. Her sculpture of Aphrodite is now part of the museum’s permanent collection.
This month, TMA kicks off its centennial celebrations with an exhibition of 100 items from its permanent collections. Robotham told us that about 85% of the items selected for “The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works” exhibition are the same as those in the book. The other 15% are recent acquisitions.
Like the museum’s permanent collections, the exhibition will be about half antiquities plus half modern and contemporary art, including several regional artists. Then there will be those pieces bridging the gap, where you can see classical influences on contemporary art.
“For people who’ve been in the community a long time, I think it will be an interesting way for them to see how we’re pulling this history together through 100 artworks,” Robotham told us. For people who’ve never been to the Tampa Museum of Art, I can’t imagine a better introduction than “The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works.”
“The Making of a Museum: 100 Years, 100 Works." Nov. 8—March 15. Mon.-Sun.10 a.m.-4 p.m. (except Thursdays, open until 7 p.m.) $15 and up.Tampa Museum of Art, 120 W. Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa. tampamuseum.org
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This article appears in Nov 14-21, 2019.