While most graduating high school seniors hope mom and dad will spring for a car or European vacation as a parting gift, Christine Renc-Carter clearly remembers a more unconventional present, one that reflected her family's commitment to creativity. The prize — to select any artwork she wished from the studio of Dunedin artist Denis Gaston — could have been almost as costly a proposition (if she had, say, chosen a large-scale painting), but Carter ultimately picked a brush-and-ink drawing that has become one of her most treasured possessions.
When Carter arrived at Maryland Institute College of Art as an art student, the Gaston drawing was the first item she hung on her dorm room wall. Later, she salvaged a discarded frame while working at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and framed the drawing to give it museum-grade gravitas. And when she moved back to Florida with her husband, Carter was able to tell Gaston how much she had cherished his artwork during her passage to adulthood as an artist and arts administrator.
Earlier this year, in her latest endeavor as associate curator and registrar at St. Petersburg College's Florida International Museum, Carter found herself thinking of Gaston — and of several others from a crew of regional artists who often cropped up as friends and colleagues of her parents, Bill and Linda Renc, artists and owners of the Painted Fish Gallery in downtown Dunedin. She came to the Florida International post following a stint at Largo's Gulf Coast Museum of Art, which closed in February after running aground on financial troubles. Essentially the only remaining staff member of the museum (except a facilities manager who oversees the now defunct building), Carter serves as steward of the GCMA's permanent collection of artworks, recently acquired by the college.
The collection, with its focus on contemporary Florida art and Southeastern fine craft, spotlights many artists who have worked in the greater Tampa Bay area over the past five decades. Notwithstanding some obvious gaps (the collection lacks a James Rosenquist, for example), many longtime practitioners with lengthy resumes as well as some of the region's most dedicated arts educators are represented: from Syd Solomon and William Pachner — both masters, the former deceased, the latter in his 90s, of abstract painting whose reputations extend beyond west central Florida — to Rocky Bridges, Betsy Orbe Lester, Thomas Murray, Richard Beckman, Russ Gustafson-Hilton, Joyce Ely-Walker, Jack Breit, Jeff Whipple, Leslie Lerner and Theo Wujcik (all current or former artist-educators in Tampa Bay; Beckman died in 2004, Lerner in 2005). Likewise several internationally known artists who have alighted in the Bay area on printmaking excursions at Graphicstudio or Berghoff-Cowden Editions are included, among them Sam Gilliam, Miriam Schapiro and Richard Anuszkiewicz.
Thankfully, when talk of the GCMA collection being split up and distributed to museums around the state began last year following the Largo museum's announcement that it would close, SPC stepped in and offered the collection a home at Florida International Museum. In turn, the GCMA board of directors gave the collection to the college, Carter says. The up-and-coming curator's job — accomplished in the unusually brief span of three months earlier this year — has been to organize an exhibition selected from the collection, which includes a watercolor painting by her father as well as work by Gaston, James Michaels, Christopher Still and other artists she recalls looking up to as a kid.
In a New Light: Selections from the Gulf Coast Museum of Art Collection, which remains on view into October, offers just that — a never-before-attempted arrangement of approximately one third of the collection, selected according to overall quality and themes including landscape, figure and art-and-everyday-life. Though the collection is more eclectic than comprehensive — featuring a mix of paintings, sculptures, prints and crafts and aesthetic approaches that run the gamut from realism to pop art — at its best moments it functions a bit like a roll call of the crème de la crème of the area's artists. What would a showcase of regional landscape painting be without a canvas by Bruce Marsh? How could we talk about pop art in the Bay area without a painting by David Williams? Or local glass without a sculpture by Susan Gott? (While the endeavor may be somewhat literally a family affair for Carter, viewers familiar with the region's artistic community may also feel as though they are among friends while perusing the exhibition.)
Of course, the acquisition is also a boon for downtown St. Petersburg, thanks to SPC and the leadership of president Carl Kuttler (whose resignation took the college by surprise last week). The college has become a kind of knight in shining armor for downtown arts organizations, including the Palladium Theater, American Stage Theatre Company, the FIM and, now, GCMA. Former GCMA director Ken Rollins oversaw the acquisition of many works in the collection during his highly regarded tenure at the museum (1994-2005); contacted via email last week, he described the 11-year overhaul that transformed the museum from a local arts center into a nationally-accredited institution with a focused mission — a mission clearly evidenced by what it bought.
"I am extremely gratified that president Kuttler had the vision the keep the collection intact here in Pinellas County," Rollins says.
So should we all be.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2009.
