Pensacola Museum of Art

The Pensacola Museum of Art presents engaging cross-disciplinary exhibitions, educational programming, and stewards a growing collection of modern and contemporary art of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The museum aims to promote the understanding and appreciation of art and ideas to audiences in the Northwest Florida region and beyond. We endeavor to create dialogue between university and community audiences by engendering experiences of joy, discovery, and creativity through diverse perspectives, and the transdisciplinary interactions of art, culture, the humanities, science, and technology.

The Pensacola Museum of Art, housed in the 1906 City Jail, is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., and Sunday Noon to 4 p.m. Managed by the University of West Florida Historic Trust.

Exhibits

The Pensacola Museum of Art hosts these exhibits on Museum Day 2022. On the first floor, Seance: Photographs by Shannon Taggert. For the past twenty years American artist Shannon Taggart (born 1975) has documented Spiritualist practices and communities in the United States, England, and Europe. The resulting body of work examines the relationship of Spiritualism to human celebrity, its connections to art, science, and technology, and its intrinsic bond with the medium of photography.

The photographs on display will explore the communities and phenomena associated with Spiritualism, including séance circles, mediumship, and the objects and technological devices used to aid communication with spirits. Often made in darkened rooms, the photographs are characterized by otherworldly blurs, chance flares and orbs, and entrancing portraits cast in glowing colors. Taking on the role of participant observer, Taggart bears witness with her camera to an unseen world of belief lying just beyond the fringes of everyday reality. Organized by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in collaboration with the Pensacola Museum of Art.

On the second floor will be the last weekend for America’s Everglades: Through the Lens of Clyde Butcher. The beauty of the Everglades is celebrated in the monumental photographs of Clyde Butcher. The scale, extraordinary clarity and tonal range set his photographs apart as exceptional works of art, earning him recognition as the foremost landscape photographer in America today. These powerful black and white images are portraits of the eternal bond between man and nature that is the soul of the Everglades. From the deepest cypress strands of the sawgrass prairies, coastal waters, and languid estuaries, to pinpoint still-lives of rare species, Clyde reveals its ecosystems in magnificent detail. He makes an unquestionable case for why we should care about its future.

Participation in Museum Day is open to any tax-exempt or governmental museum or cultural venue on a voluntary basis. Smithsonian magazine encourages museum visitation, but is not responsible for and does not endorse the content of the participating museums and cultural venues, and does not subsidize museums that participate.