Plans unfold for huge art museum in downtown St. Petersburg

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http://www.tampabay.com/features/plans-unfolding-for-huge-new-art-museum-in-downtown-st-petersburg/2186247

Plans unfold for huge art museum in downtown St. Petersburg

Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic

Friday, June 27, 2014 11:07am
   
ST. PETERSBURG — It was an astonishing announcement, made in November 2013, that for some reason didn't draw the astonishment it should have.

The Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement would rise on a downtown St. Petersburg site with a multimillion-dollar permanent collection in a four-story, 90,000-square-foot building designed at a cost of more than $35 million by Alfonso Architects of Tampa. It would also have a two-story parking garage.

Since that first announcement, collector Rudy Ciccarello, the museum's founder, has increased the size to a five-story museum with 110,000 square feet and a four-story, 300-car garage.

"We wanted to have enough space from the beginning," he said this month of the enlargement.

To put this museum's size in context: None of the three biggest Tampa Bay area art museums — the Dalí Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and the Tampa Museum of Art — has more than 70,000 square feet. Gallery space at the new museum is expected to total more than 60,000 square feet. None of the three existing museums has more than 20,000.

To add to the astonishment, this museum, unlike most, doesn't have financial conditions attached to its creation, such as a fundraising campaign with a minimum goal or the expectation of public money.

There is no "if" for Ciccarello. Only "when."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_American_Arts_and_Crafts_Movement

Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement

Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement (MAACM) is a 110,000-square-foot museum under development in St. Petersburg, Florida. Designed by Alfonso Architects, the museum, which completed construction on its parking garage facility in late 2015, is scheduled to open in 2018.[1][2][3][4][5] The Two Red Roses Foundation, endowed by art collector, businessman and philanthropist Rudy Ciccarello is funding the Museum, which will display the Foundation's collection of fine and decorative arts of the Arts and Crafts Movement period.[1] The building is reported to cost $40 million.[1][2]

. . .

The collection includes work by Gustav Stickley, Charles Rohlfs, Frank Lloyd Wright, the artists of Byrdcliffe Colony, Greene and Greene, Dirk van Erp, Roycroft, William Grueby, Newcomb Pottery, and Arthur Wesley Dow.[1] Images and descriptions of some of the work to be displayed in the museum can be found on the website of the Two Red Roses Foundation.[1]

Kent Lydecker, director of the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida), describes the Ciccarello collection as, "one of the most important collections of American Arts and Crafts, in all media, in private hands."[6]