Museum Collection

The Tampa Museum of Art's collection of contemporary art is in storage while TMA is housed in its temporary location at 2306 N. Howard Avenue in Tampa. Construction of the new museum facility in downtown Tampa's Curtis Hixon Park will begin in early 2008, with the opening of the new building expected in the fall of 2009.

Photography

The Museum has over 1000 photographs representing a wide variety of photographic techniques and formats: daguerreotype, albumen print, salt print, photogravure, stereograph, collotype, gelatin silver print, and chromogenic print. Strength in the photography collection include nineteenth-century photographs, especially expeditionary images related to Greece and Rome, and photography since 1970. Twentieth-century photographers represented in the collection include Berenice Abbott, Adam Fuss, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sandy Skoglund, Andres Serrano, and Cindy Sherman.

Acropolis, Athens: Temple of Wingless Victory

Dimitris Constantin (Greek, active 1860's)
Acropolis, Athens : Erectheum with Figure ,1860's
Albumen print from collodion negative
11 X 15 1/4 inches
Collection of the Tampa Museum of Art
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Knight Zewadski
93.33.02

Sandy Skoglund
(American, born 1946)
Germs are Everywhere, 1986
Dye destruction print, 271/4 x 32 3/4 inches
Collection of the Tampa Museum of Art
Bequest of Edward W. Lowman by exchange 89.21

Happy Man
Eldest Man in Town, 1990

Valdir Cruz
The Guarapuava Series

A recipient of a 1996 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Brazilian-born photographer Valdir Cruz is internationally recognized as a humanistic photographer who has focused on Brazilian themes in his work.

The Guarapuava Series was begun in 1982 and is an on-going photographic documentary depicting the people and landscape of Guarapuava, Brazil. These images introduce us to a part of the world that is still relatively untouched by modern technology. Although the subjects and scenery may appear exotic to us, this community obviously trusted Cruz in its midst and reacted with genuine ease in his presence. The images vary from portraits to panoramas, but mainly focus on the Tropeirism or Brazilian cattle herding tradition, a profession that died out in the late 1930s due to modern transportation means. Cruz has captured the lifestyle and attendant vocational aspects of these cowboys in these images which were taken at the bi-annual Tropeirism revivals that occur.

Cruz has produced two other major bodies of work: Faces of the Rainforest, which focuses on the life and dying culture of a number of indigenous tribes from Brazil, Venezuela, and Peru, and Catedral Basilica de Nossa Senhora da Luz dos Pinhais, a portrait essay of the architectural beauty of a neo-Gothic cathedral in Curitiba, Brazil. His photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

All work included in the collectiom are selenium toned gelatin silver prints from the Guarapuava Series. They are the recent gift of Paulette and Kurt Olden.