If you haven’t been up to North Franklin Street in downtown Tampa recently, I think you’d be surprised—a small restaurant-office-residential resurgence is taking place on a couple of blocks up at the northern end of downtown. There’s Fly Bar, which has delicious small plates, good draught beers, and the requisite attractive staff (not to be too shameless in my plug, but I’m addicted) AND Café Hey, a coffee shop with sinful brownies and affordable lunch eats.

Now enter Orange Park Gallery International, housed in the historic Arlington building across from Fly. With easy-to-like, not-too-provocative artworks—including figurative paintings and sculptures, abstract paintings, prints, and drawings—Orange Park is likely to hold a lot of appeal for a sizable part of the local gallery-going crowd. Just my guess. After all, why not head up to North Franklin if you can hit happy hour at Fly and an art opening?

Orange Park isn’t the edgiest white box you’ve ever been to (assuming you’ve gallery-hopped outside of Tampa), but the work is good. I liked a quartet of surreal linocuts by Cuban artist Israel DelMonte and mostly-abstract paintings (like the one pictured above) by Fauzie As’Ad, who is Indonesian but lives in Lichtenstein. The gallery focuses on international artists, though director Greg Phillips says he’s looking for a few top-tier local artists to represent. A show of local university students is also under consideration.

On Friday, Nov. 23—the day after Thanksgiving—Phillips will host a wine-and-cheese social from 6-10 p.m. The current work on view also includes figurative paintings of ballet and tango dancers by Larissa Makeeva (Russian, lives in Atlanta) and a variety of figurative sculpture by Jamaican artist Basil Watson. If you can, RSVP to info[at]orangeparkgallery[dot]com.

Orange Park Gallery International
1215 North Franklin Street
Tampa, FL 33602
813-333-6299
orangeparkgallery.com

If you’ve had a chance to check it out, what did you think?