Orange Blossom Award: Freddie Hughes, Building Where Art Can Breathe

Freddie Hughes, known artistically as FreddieFred, is the Exhibition & Impact Manager at The Studio@620, where he curates and produces visual art exhibitions centered on belonging, care, and artist-led storytelling. Photo provided.

by Avery Anderson

There’s a difference between hanging work on a wall and building a space where people feel safe enough to see themselves in it. Freddie Hughes understands that difference—and at The Studio@620, he’s quietly turning it into an ecosystem.

Known artistically as FreddieFred, Hughes is a semi-taught mixed-media artist whose work blends geometry, rhythm, and cultural memory—urban structure meeting natural flow, Wilmington grit meeting Puerto Rican roots. Acrylics, spray paint, watercolor, pen-and-ink: his materials move the way his life has, layered and in motion. But while his own work has been exhibited in St. Petersburg and Newcastle, Delaware, it’s his curatorial leadership that’s reshaping how visual art lives in Tampa Bay.

As Exhibition & Impact Manager at The Studio@620, Hughes doesn’t just curate shows. He stewards experiences. Drawing on more than a decade across gallery operations, exhibition design, and luxury hospitality, he approaches each exhibition with the same guiding question: How do we make people feel welcome here?

That care shows up in the numbers—and in the room.

Under Hughes’ leadership, exhibitions at The Studio@620 have drawn thousands of visitors while centering artists who are too often sidelined or flattened into themes without context.

The Unseen Thread brought together 19 artists and nearly 900 viewers, creating what one attendee described as “personal and intimate…yet universal,” with stories of femininity and resilience interlacing across generations.
Community EFX: Black Male Joy welcomed more than 800 viewers and 14 artists, offering a counter-narrative that one guest summed up plainly: “Joy is resistance, and it’s beautiful.”
Between Worlds, the studio’s first loft exhibition, may have featured just three artists—but it delivered something rare: cultural specificity without spectacle. “The colors, textures, and stories…transported me to my culture,” one visitor wrote.
From Art of Recovery, featuring 47 artists connected to Pinellas County’s Adult Drug and Veteran’s Treatment Court, to Exceptional Voices, spotlighting 150 student artists from Pinellas County Schools, Hughes has consistently widened the definition of who exhibitions are for.

What makes this moment matter is not just output—it’s posture.

Hughes is artist-centered in a way that’s increasingly uncommon. He shows up. He rolls up his sleeves. He builds exhibitions with intention from concept to installation, attentive to atmosphere and detail, but never at the expense of the people whose work fills the space. His hospitality background isn’t a footnote; it’s the framework. Everyone deserves to feel welcome in creative spaces, and he designs accordingly.

In a cultural moment where institutions are being asked—rightfully—to do more than showcase diversity as a talking point, Freddie Hughes is doing the quieter, harder work of building conditions where artists and audiences can actually thrive together.

Not louder rooms.
Better ones.

And Tampa Bay is better for it.

What Are the Orange Blossom Awards?

A month-long series from The Arts Passport celebrating the people and organizations whose quiet, steady work strengthens Tampa Bay’s arts ecosystem. No applications. No campaigning. Just community-driven recognition, released daily in December.