 | |
  Location within Florida | |
| Established | 1998 |
|---|---|
| Location | (former) 350 South Duval Street Tallahassee, Florida |
| Coordinates | 30°26′20″N84°16′59″W / 30.43902°N 84.28309°W |
| Type | Art, Science center [1] |
The Mary Brogan Museum of Arts and Science, also known as the Brogan Museum and MOAS was an art and science museum located at 350 South Duval Street, Tallahassee, Florida. [1]
Located in downtown Tallahassee on Kleman Plaza, the museum was formed from the merger of two struggling Tallahassee museums, The Museum of Art/Tallahassee and the Odyssey Science Center. The two former organizations were created independently in 1990 and 1991 respectively. The organizations agreed to share a common building, opening to the public in 1998, and to merge in 2000. The building was constructed on land belonging to The City of Tallahassee and the Museum executed a transfer of its sub-lease to Tallahassee Community College (TCC) from Leon County Schools in 2003. It was named posthumously after former Florida Lt. Governor Frank Brogan's wife, who died of cancer in 1997. Mrs. Brogan had worked as an educational consultant during her husband's tenure as Lt. Governor and had a strong interest in arts and education. [2] [3]
The Museum was part of Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) as well as a Smithsonian Affiliate. The museum's mission was to stimulate interest in, and understanding of, how visual arts, sciences, mathematics, and technology connect. The museum had two floors of interactive science exhibits, an art gallery displaying a range of works as well as a gift shop, educational classrooms and rental space for special events. A few notable exhibitions the museum staged include Bodies: The Exhibition in 2009, Dale Chihuly's Seaforms in 2003 and multiple showings of the various Kokoro Sanrio animatronic dinosaurs. [4] [5]
The museum ran a day-camp program focused on Art and Sciences, called "Camp All That!". [6] [7] Other programs and activates included StarLab (planetarium), EcoLab (aquatic life tanks) and the WCTV Weather station. The Museum was also home for many years to a beloved guinea pig named George.
In 2004, in conjunction with the Florida Department of Education, the Florida Department of State and the Institute on World War Two and the Human Experience, the museum developed a curriculum for American History supplement on CD's, featuring historical educational materials, personal histories and interviews. [8]
2003: Seeing the Unseen: Photographs by Harold Edgerton [9]
2010: Videotopia [10]
2008: The Roswell Exhibit [11]
2010: STRIDe Lab ME2 outreach program [12]
2001: Hello Cuba. Braking Barriers Contemporary Cuban Contemporary Art [13] [14]
2005: Art and Ecology Triennial [15]
2006: Transitory Patterns: Florida Women Artists [13]
2009: The Kinsey Collection [16] [17]
2008: Enrique Chavarria: Journey Into the Subconscious [18]
2010: North by Southwest, Native American Art: From the Collection of : I.S.K. Reeves V & Sara W. Reeves [19]
2010: Appetite: Expressions of the Politics Encircling Food [20]
2011: Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition [21]
2011: Coming Out of the Closet: Clothing Art as an Emergent Form [22]
In 2007, the art installation "The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag" by artist John Sims garnered criticism from the local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter. The piece, depicting a Confederate Battle Flag hanging from a wooden arm in a noose, was cited as "offensive, objectionable and tasteless" by Sons of Veterans members. The Brogan executive director noted "There's a balance between the nature of the art that we show and the outcome that we seek, which is to promote dialogue and conversation, and have you maybe think of something in a slightly different way". [23] The Florida Attorney General's office agreed that no laws were broken with the display. [24]
In 2008, "The Roswell Exhibit" was controversial with local scientists who believed a museum dedicated in part to science should not be promoting "the pseudoscience of UFO's". [25]
In 2009, the Bodies: The Exhibition show faced criticism due to possible human rights violations, resulting in a joint effort by the Florida Legislature and Anatomical Board of the State of Florida to restrict exhibits requiring museums to confirm that the human remains on display were ethically obtained. [26]
In 2011, the Museum was requested to hold on to a piece of artwork that was part of a recently closed exhibit. [27] The piece, “Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged by a Rogue,” by the Italian Renaissance artist Girolamo Romano, was reportedly looted from a Jewish family during the Holocaust. It was eventually returned to the heirs of the family. [28]
In January 2012, TCC and the board of directors announced the "indefinite" closure of the Museum. [3] The staff continued to offer limited programs, including "Camp All That!" through the summer of 2012. [29] TCC and the board of directors spent most of the 2013 attempting to bridge the financial gap, including selling some of the museums artwork collection. In early 2013, when a bid for $150,000 in funding from Leon County fell through, [30] the museum closed permanently, with "dire financial straits" and an inability to bring in "blockbuster" exhibits cited as reasons behind the closure. [31] [32]
In 2014 there were efforts to use the bottom floor for a non-profit center, while the upper floors were tangled in a legal dispute. According to the Tallahassee Democrat:
"Attorneys for both sides are attempting to clean up a "messy lease," first created in January 1992 when the school board was granted state funds to construct the building on land owned by the city of Tallahassee. The state money came with strings that mandate particular uses for the building. Expansion to the vacant areas can't occur until the Leon County School Board approves the terms of yet another amended lease." [33]
By 2017, the building had been fully repurposed by TCC as non-profit innovation center:
"The 34,000-square-foot facility, which formerly housed the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science, underwent significant renovations. It now houses offices and conference rooms for rent, technology infused training and collaboration spaces, a retail incubator, tenants including WTXL-ABC 27 and a New Horizons Computer Learning Center, the Institute for Nonprofit Innovation and Excellence, and a Starbucks coffee shop. The Starbucks is licensed by TCC to help support retail training and student job opportunities and is part of TCC’s commitment to advance entrepreneurship in the College and the community." [34]
In early 2020, after three years, TCC announced they were closing the Starbucks coffee shop located in the former museum gift shop space, citing financial struggles and high staff turnover. [35]
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Tallahassee is the capital city of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In 2022, the population was 201,731, making it the eighth-most populous city in the state of Florida. The population of the Tallahassee metropolitan area was 385,145 as of 2018. Tallahassee is the largest city in the Florida Big Bend and Florida Panhandle region, and the main center for trade and agriculture in the Florida Big Bend and Southwest Georgia regions.
Leon County is a county in the Panhandle of the U.S. state of Florida. It was named after the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León. As of the 2020 census, the population was 292,198.
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Tallahassee Community College (TCC) is a public community college in Tallahassee, Florida. It is part of the Florida College System and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. As of fall 2017, TCC reported 24,639 students.
Thomas Kent Wetherell was an American politician and educator. He served as a member of the Florida House of Representatives from 1980 to 1992, and was president of Florida State University from 2003 through 2009.
The Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida, is an architecturally and historically significant building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Capitol is at the intersection of Apalachee Parkway and South Monroe Street in downtown Tallahassee, Florida.
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Flagler College Tallahassee is a branch campus of Flagler College, a private liberal arts college in St. Augustine, Florida. It is hosted through Tallahassee Community College and was founded in 2000 as the product of a legislative mandate to expand opportunities for four year degree-seeking students. The campus offers bachelor's degree programs in six majors and four minors.
The John Gilmore Riley House is a historic home in Tallahassee, Florida. It is located at 419 East Jefferson Street. On August 1, 1978, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. It is now known as the John G. Riley Center/Museum of African American History and Culture.
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The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag is an art installation by John Sims. The controversial installation consists of a Confederate battle flag hanging from a noose at a 13-foot (4.0 m) gallows. The Proper way to Hang a Confederate Flag was first shown in Schmucker Gallery at Gettysburg College in 2004 as a part of Sims' Recoloration Proclamation: The Gettysburg Redress. Recoloration Proclamation targets specific traditional symbols of southern heritage, which are inextricably linked to slavery and racism in America. Included in the exhibition are recolored Confederate flags, a Confederate flag hanging from the gallows, a contemporary rewrite of the Gettysburg Address, contemporary recordings of the song "Dixie", and a documentary film. A notable piece featured in the exhibition Recoloration Proclamation: The Gettysburg Redress is ReVote, an installation featuring three voting booths used in Florida's disputed 2000 presidential election with re-colored Confederate flags hanging above, including black, red, and green for the Pan-African Flag of the African Liberation Movement. Pink and lavender Confederate flags with feathers and sequins were also created for the exhibition signifying "drag flags". John Sims received national media attention for his lynching of the Confederate flag.
William Jonas Montford III is an American Democratic politician from Florida. He served in the Florida Senate from 2010 to 2020, representing parts of the Florida Panhandle around Tallahassee. Previously, he served on the Leon County Commission and as Leon County superintendent of schools.
Ray L. Burggraf is an artist, color theorist, and Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts at Florida State University. According to Roald Nasgaard, Burggraf's paintings exhibit "visual excitation...pulsating patterns, vibrating after-images, weird illusionistic spaces, multifocal opticality, executed with knife-edge precision...crisp and elegant and radiant with light." From a historical perspective, Burggraf's work is "nature evocative...reach[ing] back to the modernist landscape tradition of the Impressionists and of Neo-impressionists like Seurat, who, in the late-nineteenth century immersed themselves in the color theories of Chevreul and Rood".
Gadsden County High School, known as East Gadsden High School (EGHS) until 2016, was a public high school in unincorporated Gadsden County, Florida, operated by Gadsden County School District. It is between Havana and Quincy, and it has a "Havana, Florida" postal address. Starting in fall 2017 it is the zoned high school of all of Gadsden County. It closed in 2018 and was succeeded by Gadsden County High School with a student body 70 percent African American and about 25 percent Hispanic.
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John Evans Dailey is an American politician from the state of Florida. He is the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, serving since November 19, 2018. Dailey previously served for twelve years on the Leon County Board of County Commissioners, representing northwestern Leon County, FL from 2006 to 2018.
The 2022 Tallahassee mayoral election was held on Tuesday, November 8, 2022, to elect the Mayor of Tallahassee, Florida. The vote was held subsequently along with the other statewide elections.