Foosaner Art Museum in Melbourne, Florida

The Foosaner Art Museum was a fine art museum that Florida Institute of Technology ran at 1463 Highland Ave. in the Eau Gallie Arts District of Melbourne from 2011 until 2021.

The institution was older than its name. Florida Tech's own archives list it under the earlier name Brevard Art Museum (1978-2011), and the university's July 25, 2011 gift announcement credits the museum with education and cultural enrichment started by the museum in 1978. A September 15, 2011 Florida Tech notice uses a third form of the old name, saying the Foosaner Art Museum (formerly Brevard Museum of Art) merged with Florida Institute of Technology in July of that year.

The museum no longer operates. Florida Tech's March 15, 2021 release said its final exhibition would remain open until June 19, after which the Foosaner will permanently close. This page covers the museum as a piece of Eau Gallie and Brevard County arts history rather than as a place that can be visited today.

The museum grew from one small building into a group of buildings on both sides of Highland Avenue, as Florida Tech's 2011 gift announcement describes.

According to that release, the Foosaner Foundation's first major gift paid for a 6,000 square foot building adjoining what was then the original, small museum. The building was named the Renee Foosaner Education Center and remodeled for studio classes in which children and adults made their own artwork. Some time later, the release states, the art museum itself expanded across the street into the former Eau Gallie Police Department building.

Local artists were part of the institution from its first years. A Florida Tech release of April 1, 2019 records that from 1979 to 1999 the museum in the Eau Gallie Arts District hosted an annual juried exhibition by an auxiliary group called the Artists' Forum. That group became the Strawbridge Art League, which held its juried shows at the Henegar Center for many years before returning to the Foosaner for Vision 2019, on view from April 6 until May 25, 2019. A smaller companion show, Selections from Artists' Forum Past Purchase Awards, displayed pieces by Brevard artists that the museum had bought from those early exhibitions for its permanent collection.

Florida Tech took over the museum in July 2011 and renamed it on July 25, 2011, after a $1 million gift from the Foosaner Foundation.

The process began on April 29, 2011, when Florida Tech said it would open formal discussions with the Brevard Art Museum (BAM) Board of Trustees to merge museum operations with the university. President Anthony J. Catanese said the intention was to run the museum, located in the Eau Gallie Arts District, as an outreach and educational effort, and the chairman of the museum board said his board had also approved the talks. The executive director of the Eau Gallie Arts District welcomed the prospect in the same release.

The July 25, 2011 release announced a $1 million gift from the Foosaner Foundation and said the museum would become the Foosaner Art Museum effective immediately. It explains the name. Samuel J. Foosaner, a New Jersey tax and estate planning attorney with a home in Cocoa Beach who served on the Florida Tech Board of Trustees, started the foundation in 1980 in memory of his wife, Renee, a student of the arts who taught art to neighborhood children in New Jersey. He died in 1988. The 2011 gift closed out the foundation, whose family gifts had also paid for a pedestrian bridge in his memory and a gazebo in the Botanical Gardens on the main campus.

The new name came with a short closure. Florida Tech's September 15, 2011 notice said the museum would be closed Oct. 3-29 to prepare for the grand opening and dedication of the building under the new name, and would reopen on Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011 with Treasures Revealed, a permanent collection show that ran until Jan. 7, 2012.

Admission later became free. A February 25, 2016 Florida Tech release announced that starting March 1, 2016 the Foosaner would eliminate admission fees every day, a benefit previously offered only on Thursdays, and would open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. The same release placed the change alongside free admission at the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, which the university had opened in 2009, according to the April 2011 merger release.

Florida Tech described the holdings in May 2018 as a 5,000-piece collection ranging from Pop Art on paper to ancient American pottery.

The university's 2011 description of the permanent collection in Eau Gallie said it spans 20 centuries and covered works on paper, paintings, sculpture, decorative arts and industrial design. It singled out two collections of substantial size: an archive of the German artist Ernst Oppler, born in 1867 and died in 1929, with hundreds of his prints and drawings, and the Enrique and AnaMaria Conill Mendoza Collection of American Industrial Design, 327 pieces of Chase Art Deco objects. The same notice listed works by 20th century women artists including Alice Aycock, Jennifer Bartlett, Miriam Schapiro, Janet Fish, Viola Frey, Isabel Bishop and Louise Nevelson.

The 40th anniversary exhibition, A Look Back: Forty Years of the Foosaner Collection, ran from June 1 to Nov. 3, 2018. Florida Tech's release lists works on paper by the Pop artists Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain, landscape paintings by Larry Leach and Ted Waddell, portraits of the ballerina Anna Pavlova by the German Impressionist Ernst Oppler, abstract works by the local favorites Frits van Eeden and George Snyder, ancient American pottery and Art Deco industrial arts. The monthly Jazz Friday concert that opening evening was held in the Foosaner's Harris Community Auditorium, with admission of $10 per person or free for members.

Touring shows also came to Highland Avenue. Florida Tech scheduled Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray for Jan. 10 through March 22, 2015: more than three dozen photographic portraits of the Mexican painter, dating from 1937 to 1946, organized by the Nickolas Muray Photo Archives, with a hands-on gallery for children called La Casa Azul (Blue House).

Florida Tech closed the museum because of its cost, saying it had spent more than $7 million to keep it open after taking over in 2011.

The decision was made in early 2018. In an Inside Florida Tech segment published February 1, 2018 on the university's station WFIT, President Dwayne McCay said Florida Tech had spent over $7 million to keep it open, and that at its meeting on Jan. 26 the Board of Trustees agreed that such spending was no longer a viable option, even as more upgrades were needed at the facility. He said he expected the museum to keep the Foosaner name at a future location, possibly on the Florida Tech campus.

On April 2, 2020 Florida Tech announced an agreement with the CEO of Northboro Builders, Inc. to buy both the museum and the adjoining Renee Foosaner Education Center. Both parties hoped to close on Aug. 31, 2020, and agreed that Florida Tech would keep operating the museum and education center through June 2021. The buyer described a boutique, multi-story hotel of perhaps 200 rooms with a rooftop restaurant and bar, said the Foosaner Art Museum building would be removed to make way for it, and planned to turn the education center into flexible shared office space. The same release states that the university spent approximately $1.8 million to bring the facilities up to code after taking ownership, and more than $7 million in all to keep the museum open.

The last show was Abstraction: Retrospective Memories, which opened on Saturday, March 20, 2021. Florida Tech's release describes Rene Griffith as a mixed-media artist based in Indialantic who grew up in the Eau Gallie area of Melbourne, and Steve Seinberg as a Brooklyn-born abstract artist living in Georgia. Museum director Ashley Milliken said the final exhibition celebrated the 40-plus-year history of the museum. Admission was still free, with hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

Florida Tech said in April 2020 that it retains the museum art collection and was still seeking a suitable arrangement to display it or donate it when the museum closed.

Two years earlier, the WFIT segment had described the collection as likely to be relocated closer to the Florida Tech campus. None of the Florida Tech pages re-read for this page states where the collection finally went, or whether the Highland Avenue museum building has been removed, so this page does not name a destination or describe the site today. For the university's other museum, which shared the free admission policy, see the separate guide to the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against nine Florida Tech news releases from April 2011 to March 2021, the Florida Tech archives record for the museum, and the February 2018 Inside Florida Tech segment on WFIT.