The great indoors: PAVA’s Cool Art Show returns

For the 35^th consecutive year, the Pinellas-based Professional Association of Visual Artists – get to know the group by its easy-to-remember acronym, PAVA – is holding a multi-artist, multi-discipline indoor show and sale.

Close to 70 artists will be inside the St. Petersburg Coliseum Saturday and Sunday – hence the event’s title, the Cool Art Show. Founded in 1988, PAVA’s organizational model included, from day one, a big summertime group show that didn’t make everybody sweat buckets. Hence, Cool Art.

The 99-year-old Coliseum is itself pretty cool, with its expansive curved ceiling and expansive, slick-wood floor space. The air conditioning sure doesn’t hurt.

Painting by Allen Pettigrew.

The official media run-down for Cool Art 2024: Paintings, woodwork, ceramics, photography, metalwork, glass art, fiber art, digital art, mixed media and jewelry.

“We have everything from painting to people making papier-mâché animals out of recycled material,” said PAVA President Linda Stump. “This year, we’ve got quite a bit of wood in the show. Which I love – I come from a family of carpenters, so I’m partial to the wood art.

“It’s a group that cares about having high-end fine art and find craft, and being professional. We’re not a Saturday market, we’re not a flea market … we try to raise the bar and get the best people we can from the local art community.”

Mixed Media3D by Jeannie Papadopoulos.

The organization is not directly connected with the local umbrella support organizations, Creative Pinellas and the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance. To be considered for the Cool Art show, artists are required to join the organization. “I would say 95 percent of our membership comes from the Tampa Bay area,” Stump reported. “And most of them are in Pinellas.”

PAVA was formed by a group of artist friends who were bored during the long, hot summer. It was, of course, much too humid and steamy to set out the tried-and-true outdoor art show.

Then there was this: “We decided the Pinellas County Arts Council wasn’t doing enough for the artists so we wanted to change things,” co-founder Lisa Glaser remembered on the organization’s website.

The first show was held in Eckerd College’s Fox Hall, and PAVA then moved things to the University of South Florida Activity Center (on the Bayboro campus), where it remained until 2005. That’s when everybody moved to the Coliseum.

Stump, a photographer, joined PAVA in 2011. “I’ve been coordinating and hanging many of their shows,” she explains. “Because they do a bunch of what I would call public space shows – library shows, that sort of thing – throughout the year. I enjoy the curating part.”

PAVA’s patron list runs to 2,200 people, and the Cool Art Show is always well-attended. “There are people who have been coming for years and years and years,” Stump said.

“As we’ve grown, and as St. Pete has grown, the population downtown is much younger, younger to middle-age and working. We’ve gained a lot of audience there.

“And we started doing what we call the Interactive Art series, focused just on kids. Where kids come in and make things to take away. That drew in a lot of families, and a lot of younger people.

“This year, we’ve actually expanded that area to include adults. Because we’ve heard, for the last couple of years, ‘It shouldn’t be just the kids. Adults should be able to make things to take away.’”

The St. Petersburg Coliseum is located at 535 4th Avenue N. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday.

Visit the PAVA website here.

Photography by Eric Dodds.