Fall Lineup To Feature Jeff Whipple’s 50-Year Journey and Interactive Art
Fall is here — and the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art (LRMA) is kicking things off in style with three exhibitions and programs for all ages. LRMA’s Fall season includes a 50-year retrospective of Florida-based artist Jeff Whipple, live theater programs, artist talks, and creative inspiration around every corner. The Abraham Rattner permanent collection gallery also got a major glow-up with its debut as the newly named Helen and Donald Gilbart Gallery, featuring a new exhibition of Rattner’s early works, including early portrait drawings and French watercolors, and the launch of two digital interactive projects in augmented reality and a large touch screen. LRMA has a lot to celebrate including being recently named “Best Museum (Regional)” by the Guide to Florida’s Best of Florida 2025.
Jeff Whipple: Past, Present, Future
August 9 – December 7, 2025
James W. Mitchell, Jr., Center, and Interactive Galleries
The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art proudly presents Jeff Whipple: Past, Present, Future, a retrospective celebrating five decades of provocative, concept-driven work by Florida-based artist Jeff Whipple. Known for his signature three-line motif known as the “spanasm” and a razor-sharp wit, Whipple’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, video, performance, and installation, exploring themes of mortality, identity, and the absurdity of modern life.
Over the past fifty years, he has built a unique style that includes drawing, painting, sculpture, theater, digital media, and public art, often blurring the lines between them. His work reflects a lifelong investigation of what it means to perceive, interpret, and inhabit the world, filtered through a lens that is at once skeptical, incisive, and marked by a wry, understated humor.
This exhibition traces the evolution of his singular visual language—from early existential compositions to recent works that invite viewers to consider how imagination shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. At turns engaging, irreverent, and delightfully bizarre, Whipple’s work offers a poignant, and at times humorous reflection on what it means to be human in an ever-shifting world.
Past, Present, Future, on view August 9 through December 7, 2025, is Whipple’s first major retrospective since 2001 when the former Gulf Coast Museum of Art organized his 25-year retrospective which traveled throughout the state of Florida. Past, Present, Future showcases eighty works by Whipple created over the course of 50 years and includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and four interactive stations showcasing a selection of his multi-media films and digital installations. Visitors can also try their hand at Whipple’s interactive miniature golf course in the museum’s Interactive Gallery.
Image: Jeff Whipple, The Patron is Moved by Culture, 2007, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist.
A Legacy of Her Own: Women of the Gulf Coast
August 9 – December 7, 2025
Lothar and Mildred Uhl Works on Paper Gallery
As part of an ongoing exploration of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art Collection, A Legacy of Her Own: Women of the Gulf Coast brings renewed attention to the creative vision and enduring contributions of six women artists whose work shaped—and was shaped by—the cultural landscape of the region.
Spanning five decades of collecting, this exhibition features rarely seen works that trace the evolution of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art from its origins as the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center in the 1950s to its later role as a leading contemporary art institution in Largo. From Isabel Bishop’s refined mid-century drawing to Ethelyn Hurd Woodlock’s bold mixed media experimentation of the 1970s, and on to the evocative photographic practices of Barbara Beeler, Victoria Hirt, Virginia Beth Shields, and Anna Tomczak, A Legacy of Her Own illuminates the breadth of media and expression that women artists brought to the Gulf Coast’s cultural scene.
Image: Virginia Beth Shields, Kathy, From the Flesh and Blood Series, 1995, Ektacolor print, 27 x 33 in., Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg College, from the Gulf Coast Museum of Art Collection.
Abraham Rattner: French Watercolors
September 10, 2025 – September 13, 2026
Helen and Donald Gilbart Gallery
The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art recently unveiled the newly named Helen and Donald Gilbart Gallery with a major reinstallation of the Abraham Rattner “early years” permanent collection. A newly designed gallery entrance introduces visitors to a bright and airy space highlighting charcoal portrait drawings from Rattner’s formative years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, vibrant watercolors created during his travels across France, and early oil paintings as he honed his style as a surrealist in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. This new installation includes the debut of two new innovative technology displays including a web-based augmented reality wall label app and a large interactive touchscreen that draws from the museum’s collection and archives to put Abraham Rattner’s life and prolific career into context within a historical timeline of events, cultural influences and inventions.
Throughout his career, Abraham Rattner (1893-1978) was driven by an inner need to create. He was rarely without art-making materials and often worked in the medium of watercolor because of its ease and immediacy. As a colorist, Rattner also enjoyed the luminosity of watercolor for capturing the spirit of light. Highlighted in Abraham Rattner: French Watercolors are eleven watercolors from Rattner’s early career, which document his travels throughout France in the 1920s and 1930s.
Rattner was first exposed to the medium of watercolor while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia between 1916 and 1919, which was interrupted in 1917 by his service in the U.S. Army during World War I. PAFA embraced Impressionism and plein air (painting outdoors) painting as a serious artistic expression. During Rattner’s time there, his teacher, Arthur B. Carles, and PAFA created the Chester Springs Summer Campus to help students learn to paint landscapes in an outdoor setting. This learning experience had a profound effect on Rattner.
In 1919, Rattner received a Cresson Traveling Scholarship from PAFA that allowed him to continue his art studies in Europe. He remained in Paris, France, for the next 19 years until the events leading up to World War II forced him to return to the United States. Although Rattner exhibited his oil paintings in the French salons, he continued to paint watercolors to record his many travels. Rattner’s documentations, from steerage passengers on trans-Atlantic crossings, to his time spent living in Giverny, to vacations on the Brittany coast and trips to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, are an important reflection of his time in Europe.
Image: Abraham Rattner, Untitled, c. 1920, watercolor, 11 ¼ x 15 ¼ in., Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, on loan from the St. Petersburg College Foundation.
RELATED EVENTS
This fall, LRMA’s exciting schedule of programs includes gallery talks, tours, and theater programs! For details, please visit www.leeparattner.org/calendar.
Artist Talk: Jeff Whipple
Friday, October 17, 2025
6:00-8:00 pm
LRMA Interactive Gallery
Admission is by a suggested donation of $10
Join artist Jeff Whipple and LRMA Curator Sara Felice as they explore Whipple’s 50-year retrospective Jeff Whipple: Past, Present, Future, on view August 9 – December 7, 2025.
RSVP: Call Visitor Services at (727) 712-5762 or online at https://web.spcollege.edu/survey/38535
Image: Jeff Whipple, Order Me, 2013, pencil on paper, 28 x 22 in. Courtesy of the artist.
TheatreFor presents Clone by DC Cathro
Wed., Oct. 29, 2025
6:00 – 8:00 pm
LRMA Interactive Gallery
Admission is a suggested $10 donation. Free to SPC students with ID
RSVP by calling Visitor Services at (727) 712-5762 or online at
https://web.spcollege.edu/survey/38631
In a chillingly plausible near-future, clones have been discovered living secretly among us. When Mick’s clone, Robbie, is apprehended and turned over to him as property, what follows is a gripping, claustrophobic power struggle between two genetically identical men—one determined to assert control, the other determined to reclaim his humanity.
Author: DC Cathro; Director: Graham Jones; Cast: Robbie: Nick Wilbur, Mick: Rudy Gonzalez, Officer: Susan Dearden
An Evening with Jeff Whipple: Four Scenes, One Wildly Original Mind
Thursday, November 6, 2025 7:00 – 8:00 pm
LRMA Interactive Gallery
Admission $15 donation
RSVP – https://web.spcollege.edu/survey/38546
or call Visitor Services at (727) 712-5762.
You may know Jeff Whipple as a celebrated visual artist—but what happens when his surreal wit and sharp eye for humanity hits the stage? Join us for a lively evening of staged readings featuring four scenes from four of Jeff’s acclaimed plays.
These compact moments pack a punch of humor, insight, and the kind of unexpected twists only Jeff Whipple can deliver.
You’ve seen his art—now experience the stories that live inside his head.
Presented in partnership with Dunedin Public Theater with staged readings by:
Stageworks Theatre
St. Petersburg College Theater Department
Tampa Rep
freeFall Theatre Company
Image credit line: Jeff Whipple, Self-portrait, 2009, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Sunday Tours
Docent-led tours of LRMA’s special exhibitions and permanent collection.
Every Sunday at 2:00 pm
Please call LRMA’s Visitor Services at (727) 712-5762 to confirm availability or to make a reservation.
Admission is by a suggested donation of $10.
On view in the Permanent Collection Galleries:
Abraham Rattner: French Watercolors; Artistic Journeys with Abraham Rattner, Esther Gentle and Allen Leepa; Elemental: Fine Crafts from the Collection; and Made in Florida: The Art of Giving.
About the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art
Opened to the public in 2002, LRMA is a modern and contemporary art museum with a collection of more than 7,000 works of 20th and 21st century art. The museum’s permanent collection includes works by Abraham Rattner, a renowned figurative expressionist; Esther Gentle, Rattner’s second wife and a printmaker, sculptor, and painter; Allen Leepa, Rattner’s stepson and an abstract expressionist artist; and an extensive collection of works by notable 20th century artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger and Henry Moore. The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, a distinction held by only 3 percent of all U.S. museums.
LRMA is located just west of U.S. Highway 19 at 600 E. Klosterman Road, on the Tarpon Springs Campus of St. Petersburg College. Museum hours are 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission by suggested donation of $10. The museum is closed on Mondays and major holidays. Additional information is available at leeparattner.org.
