Arts Alive!: Christine Renc-Carter, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art

As executive director of the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art , Christine Renc-Carter oversees one of the most impressive collections of modern and contemporary art in Florida.

Leepa-Rattner, located on the Tarpon Springs campus of St. Petersburg College, is fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, a distinction held by something like 3 percent of all museums in the country.

On today's Arts Alive! podcast, Renc-Carter discusses the life and works of famed abstract expressionist Allen Leepa, who retired to North Pinellas and donated the majority of his archives to the museum, which debuted in 2002.

Leepa's stepfather was watercolorist Abraham Rattner, a contemporary of Picasso and Dali, and the Leepa donation included a substantial amount of original Rattner works, along with his personal archives.

There are more than 6,000 works in the museum's collection, including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henry Moore and contemporary Florida artists and fine craftsmen.

The Leepa-Rattner Museum is also home to the only full-sized reproduction of Picasso's masterpiece Guernica, fully endorsed by the Picasso estate.

A Pinellas County native, Renc-Carter is the daughter of artist parents – and she herself has a series of mixed-media installations now on view in the Florida CraftArt gallery (St. Petersburg), as part of the exhibition Layered Narratives.

Click on the arrow to listen to the interview.