click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Photos by Megan Voeller

The new Tampa Museum of Art, now slated to open to the public in early 2010, inches closer toward completion each day on downtown Tampa’s riverfront. Close observers will note that the building’s distinctive cladding—a double layer of perforated metal sheets offset to create a moiré pattern on the structure’s surface—has begun to be installed. Within days, the building’s air conditioning system should be active; museum staff may begin to move in as soon as November.

click to enlarge

Now that more than the building’s skeleton is in place, TMA director Todd Smith leads three or four hardhat tours of the structure each week (one reason why he’s looking forward to the imminent addition of air conditioning). At 66,000 sq. ft., the new museum is the right size for the community, Smith explains as we stand in the sky-lighted atrium. (That square footage, roughly on par with the expanded Museum of Fine Arts and the proposed new Dali Museum, which is expected to weigh in at 75,000 sq. ft., seems to be a sweet spot for the region.)

From the atrium, a grand staircase leads up to a 5,200 sq. ft. gallery for traveling exhibitions and several 1,742 sq. ft. galleries pegged for the museum’s contemporary art, photography and antiquities collections. With 18-foot ceilings draped with white fabric and white concrete floors (neither of which is in place yet), the Stanley Saitowitz-designed space promises visitors a clean, subdued setting ripe for contemplation.

click to enlarge

“Some museums want to be loud and boisterous,” Smith says, calling the TMA “elegant and precise.”

But the new museum wants to be as fun and accessible as it is serious. Along our tour, Smith rattles off some of his favorite features of the building: its proximity to a boat dock and dog park, both part of the new Thomas Balsley-designed Curtis Hixon Park outside the museum (also under construction); an overhang (the area under the building’s cantilevered second floor) where outdoor café seating will be located; and vistas of the Hillsborough River, University of Tampa and downtown skyline. The new TMA will likely offer visitors more flexibility in planning a visit by remaining open into the early evening seven days a week, Smith says.

Announcements regarding the museum’s 2010 exhibition schedule and the fate of its café—will TMA, like the Tampa Bay History Center, partner with a beloved local restaurant?—should come later this summer. Earlier this month, the museum announced that Getty curator Seth Pevnick would join the staff as Richard E. Perry curator of Greek and Roman art; thanks to a 1998 gift, the endowed position is immune to city budget cuts, which forced the museum to lay off two full-time staffers earlier this year. TMA will not be hiring a curator of contemporary art, Smith says. Instead, the director himself, whose background encompasses 19th, 20th and 21st century art, will serve in that capacity.

click to enlarge

In the meantime, the museum is “feverishly working” to ensure that the best possible works will be showcased at the opening, Smith says. Though TMA isn’t planning any purchases of art in advance of its re-opening, the negotiation of artwork loans may help do justice to a couple of the building’s dramatic architectural features—an outdoor sculpture ‘garden’ nestled into a void on the building’s west, second-floor façade, and the soaring atrium, where mobile sculpture can be displayed.

The TMA remains open at its interim location in West Tampa through July 11. Now on view: BIT, BYTE, DOT, SPOT: postdigital art.

Megan Voeller is Creative Loafing’s visual art critic. She teaches at the University of Tampa and blogs at Artsqueeze.com.