Pensacola Museum of Art Property

407 South Jefferson Street., Pensacola, FL 32502

Included with our unified admission. To learn more about the current exhibits, programs and classes see the Pensacola Museum of Art. 

The University of West Florida Pensacola Museum of Art augments the academic and community missions of the University and the UWF Historic Trust Museums by promoting an open and inclusive space of discovery and dialogue rooted in art, ideas and culture. We aim to facilitate the preservation, understanding, and engagement of visual culture for audiences in the Northwest Florida region and beyond through our permanent collection, interpretive programs, a vital and dynamic exhibition schedule, academic research and education.

On Exhibit

309 House Show: Artists in Residence Annual Exhibition 2023

October 11 - November 24, 2024

The 309 House Show is an annual group exhibition curated by Valerie George, Sean Linezo, and Christopher Satterwhite featuring work donated by artists who participated in the 309 Artist-in-Residence Program. This year’s show features the 2023 residents and includes work by Julia Arredondo, Cori Bush, Cindy Crabb, Cookies & Cake, Kim Darling, Jimbo Easter, Felicia E. Gail, Roscoe Hall, WM Johnson, Eli Lehrhoff, Dev Murphy, Jenny Price, and Panhandle Slim. Additional contributions include work by Heather Proskovec and Cleopatra Redbird.

This exhibition consists of artists from a myriad of cultural backgrounds and is diverse in race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Their work covers topics ranging from queer and trans advocacy,  cancer, cultural heritage, the celebration of lost local icons, Black resistance and rebellion, and social practices ranging from collaborative sound collage, visual art community projects, and creating (and collecting) ephemera for a local annual DIY music festival.

The 309 Punk Project is the only artist-run nonprofit organization in the South committed solely to archiving the creative efforts of our region’s punk/DIY culture. It is our primary goal to serve the local and regional community as an archive, residency, and venue for divergent practices in DIY culture and contemporary art that critically examines the sociopolitical cultural moment that is shaping all of our lives. 

The 309 Punk Archive is preserved to inspire research and creative practice from our collective histories currently preserved in the archive. We also use the archive to curate traveling exhibitions to raise awareness of our creative culture. We work to extend the reach of our audience while diversifying our voice in the punk community. The Archive serves and represents the marginalized, queer, anti-racist, artistic DIY radical countercultural voice to America’s Deep South narrative that has persisted and continues to persist to this day. The Archive consists mainly of Pensacola and regional punk ephemera, music, and DYI art but has also been gifted national and global pieces. The Archive inspires research and creative practice from our collective histories. For more information, please visit: 309PUNKPROJECT.ORG 

Celebrate 70: A History of Collecting 

June 7, 2024 - January 5, 2025

2024 marks the 70th anniversary of the Pensacola Museum of Art becoming an art center in Pensacola. Seven decades ago, members of the local chapter of the American Association of University Women envisioned a venue to exhibit traveling art exhibitions, offer art classes for both children and adults, and provide a community space for public meetings, lectures, and films. In 1954 they leased the vacant, historic City of Pensacola Jail and formed the Pensacola Art Association. The group established the Pensacola Museum of Art (PMA) in 1982 and purchased the building from the city in 1988. In 2016, the museum entered into a gift agreement with the University of West Florida to transfer the museum to the university. The PMA is now part of the University of West Florida Historic Trust.

This exhibition highlights the PMA’s permanent collection of international, national, and regionally acclaimed artists. Since its inception, the museum has built a collection of modern and contemporary art from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. As a community museum, collecting art is vitally important to our mission of enriching the lives of locals and visitors. Each artwork functions as a “link in the chain" to inspire creativity, facilitate an understanding of art history, and give life to beautiful, aesthetic experiences. Museum staff are stewards of the collection and are charged with protecting and expanding this valuable cultural resource to benefit the citizens of Pensacola and future generations. 

More than seventy artists are included in the exhibition with featured works by Francisco Goya, Milton Avery, John James Audubon, Henri de Touluse-Lautrec, Thomas Hart Benton, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Philip Guston, Clementine Hunter, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Alex Katz, Käthe Kollwitz, Erté, Louise Nevelson, Philip Pearlstein, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Fairfield Porter, Linda Benglis, Norman Rockwell, and Miriam Schapiro. Through these works, the exhibition will provide a survey of modern and contemporary styles and periods including, Cubism, Realism, Pop Art, Non-objective Art, Folk Art, and Illustration.

Collections Mission Statement

The University of West Florida Pensacola Museum of Art stewards a growing collection of modern and contemporary art of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The museum collects work in all media, with an emphasis on works on paper. The Museum’s priority is to strategically grow the collection in these areas through purchases, gifts, and bequests. The PMA subscribes to a policy of selective acquisition with the understanding that the stature of the Museum depends upon the quality of the permanent collection that it acquires and maintains. A prospective addition to the Collection, therefore is to be judged from the standpoint of aesthetic quality, educational or historic value, and support of the museum’s mission and vision. The goal should be excellence, not the size of the Collection.

OPENING SOON!

Rising Tide: Photography by Ben Depp

December 6, 2024- April 4, 2025

Southern Louisiana, once formed by sediment deposited by the Mississippi River, is now rapidly eroding. Over the past eighty years, Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles of wetlands, accounting for ninety percent of the coastal marsh loss in the US. Louisiana’s eroding wetlands provide a natural barrier from hurricanes and storm surges that protect seventy percent of the state’s population. They also support the largest commercial fishing grounds in the lower 48 US states and provide crucial habitat for many endangered and threatened species of birds and animals.

This exhibition is part of Ben Depp’s ongoing project documenting the rapidly shifting landscape of southern Louisiana. Depp has been flying above the bayous and wetlands of southern Louisiana in a powered paraglider for ten years, photographing the incredible beauty and the visual clues that tell the story of this place and its destruction.

With a powered paraglider, Depp can fly between ten and ten thousand feet above the ground. He spends hours in the air, camera in hand, waiting for the brief moments when the first rays of sunlight mix with cool pre dawn light and illuminate forms in the grass, or when evening light sculpts fragments of marsh and the geometric patterns of human enterprise—canals, oil platforms, pipelines, and roads.

In Depp’s photographs, one can make out varieties of plants, see the weather and seasonal changes—from the shifting high-water line, color temperature and softness of light, to what is in bloom—distinguish living cypress trees from those that have been killed by saltwater intrusion, or see the patterns made by wave energy on barrier island beaches.

This intimate view of Louisiana, from a bird’s-eye perspective, prompts Depp – and he hopes, others – to see and appreciate this landscape in new ways.