With the opening of the Tampa Museum of Arts new building on Saturday, the Gulf Coast city is making an aggressive bid to bolster its local cultural offerings. The new structure, built with a pricetag of $32.8 million, provides the city of more than 300,000 people with an elegantly minimalist venue in which to view art.

The museum's curators are inaugurating the space with a bevy of offerings, including a 170-plus-work Matisse show, an exhibition devoted to the photographs of Garry Winogrand, and “Taking Shape,” a group show culled from the art collection of Bank of America. The Martin Z. Marguelies Foundation has also loaned works by Doug Aitken, Donna Dennis, and Pedro Cabrita, among others, for an exhibition that will run through Dec. 5, 2010.

Stanley Saitowitz, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, designed the new building, which is cloaked in aluminum. An original design by architect Rafael Viñoly was canceled amid rampant overruns in projected costs. The museum will soon be joined by a new art neighbor in nearby St. Petersburg, Fla. — the $35-million new home of the Salvador Dalí Museum, which is slated to open by the end of the year.

Read more at the Miami Herald.