If you’ve never paid a visit to the Dali Museum, you really should! It’s a fantastic land of the surreal, and walking through the museum and really taking time to absorb what you see there can create entirely new neural pathways in your brain! Dali’s works are amazing, over the top explosions of color and shape and reality gone wild, and they are nothing but fun to see. Fans who live in the area or who visit here are very lucky – the St. Petersburg Dali museum holds the largest collection of Dali works in the United States and the largest collection outside of Europe.

For anyone who does not know Salvador Dali’s works, you can get a pretty good idea of what they’re about by checking out this Google Images site.  And for those that do know Dali’s work, but are not familiar with all of the great things about the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, you should check out the Museum’s web site.  It’s worth looking at – aside from information about the exhibitions at the Museum, you can also learn about special events like the Saturday Family Fun Day and the S’Real Friday Happy Hour, with live music and half price admissions after 5:30 PM.  Think about it – go to Happy Hour, have a couple of drinks, then walk around and take a look at some of the most mind-bending depictions of non-reality imaginable.  Guaranteed to make your Happy Hour even happier.  And, while you’re at it, you might make a new connection with someone else who’s attending – it’s a popular Friday evening event!

The current Salvador Dali Museum is located at 1000 3rd Street South, just to the south of the University of South Florida’s Bayboro campus.  For now. 

And that leads us to the photograph below (please click on the photo to see a higher resolution, full size image), and the really exciting news that I’m posting about.  The Dali Museum will be moving, probably in 2011, if all goes according to plan.  The new Dali home will be a 35 million dollar, 66,450 square foot structure – that’s twice the size of the existing museum!  Included in the layout will be 50% more gallery space than the current museum has, which means that there will be a lot more of Dali’s work on display at any given time.  The museum will feature a huge, futuristic looking glass geodesic structure, giving it a unique look and feel that should provide incredible visual impact in its setting on the waterfront and adjacent to the Mahaffey Theater.

I’ve been watching the progress on the new building since early last summer.  For a long time, it looked just like any new building, with foundation, walls, etc.  But in recent weeks, there has been, as the museum folks might say, surreal progress! The shell of the new structure is complete, and the very Dali-esque glass sculptures that will define the look and feel of the museum, both inside and out, are morphing towards completion. It’s both a bizarre and a beautiful look, and I have to believe that Dali himself would have smiled upon this new museum.

If you’d like more information about the new Dali, follow this link to an FAQ page.

And if you’d like to drive by to take a look for yourself, just head downtown on First Avenue South until you reach the last north/south road, which runs along the edge of the bay, which is BayShore Drive. Take BayShore towards the south, and after you pass the marina and Al Lang Field, you’ll see the Mahaffey Theatre. Right after the Mahaffey is the new Dali. You can’t miss it!