The Museum of Fine Arts at 255 Beach Dr. NE, St. Petersburg is closing its permanent collection galleries for several months this fall as the opening phase of Art Unbound, a multi-phase institutional initiative that will reorganize the entire permanent collection around universal human themes rather than chronology or geography.
The shift departs from the encyclopedic logic most collecting institutions have maintained for generations. Instead of grouping works by region or date, the museum plans to hang the collection so that pieces from different centuries and cultures are placed in direct conversation with each other. Per the museum, the new framework is built around what it describes as universal human themes—categories that cut across the chronological and geographic divisions that have traditionally governed what hangs next to what.
The scope of the project is total: the entire permanent collection comes off the walls simultaneously, which accounts for the multi-month closure window.
Running in parallel is the launch of The Great Hall Project, a new series of contemporary installations commissioned for the museum's 1965 entrance hall. The inaugural work is Yvette Mayorga's Goddesses of the Great Hall, which fills the entrance hall during the galleries' closure. The museum positions Mayorga's commission as the first in an ongoing run—contemporary works tied specifically to that founding hall, staged alongside whatever transformation is underway in the collection galleries behind it.
During the closure, Café Clementine and the MFA Shop remain open Tuesday through Sunday. The café runs 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; the shop stays open until 5 p.m.
The museum has not announced a specific reopening date for the permanent collection galleries beyond characterizing the closure as lasting a few months this fall. Art Unbound is framed as multi-phase, meaning the thematic rehang is a beginning, not a conclusion. What subsequent phases involve—further reconfigurations, expanded programming, additional Great Hall commissions—has not been detailed. Which artist follows Mayorga into the entrance hall, and when visitors can first walk the newly organized permanent collection, are the two things to watch as the project moves through fall.
