Every second Saturday galleries and art studios stay open late in St. Petersburg. This month I joined a mural tour centered on works in the warehouse district, just south of downtown.

Our tour was hosted by the Florida Wildlife Corridor, which runs Wild Space Gallery. The motivation behind the gallery is that art can help us relate to, appreciate, and even fall in love with nature – all of which will hopefully encourage us to protect it.

Our guide, Jenee Priebe, former director of the Shine Mural Festival, is a passionate supporter of the arts and her energy was contagious. All the murals and public art around town are part of why I love this area. Since its inception in 2015, the Shine festival has added 199 colorful murals and they aren’t done yet.

The evening was bracketed with murals by Ernesto Maranje, a self-taught painter from south Florida. I was absolutely captivated by his most recent work, The Panther and Egret. While the basic shape of the panther is easily identifiable from a distance, Ernesto has the outline dissolve into the swamp and forest, as though one is not separable from the other. An even closer look reveals a myriad of other Florida natives that rely on this shared environment.

Hopefully the Florida Wildlife Corridor can expand protections for these important wild spaces…