Foosaner Art Museum — Melbourne, Florida

The Foosaner Art Museum was a fine art museum on Highland Avenue in the Eau Gallie Arts District, at the northern end of Melbourne, that Florida Institute of Technology owned and ran for a decade before closing it in 2021. Florida Tech gave its address as 1463 Highland Ave. in the Eau Gallie Arts District of Melbourne. The institution was older than its name. Central Florida Public Media reported on April 12, 2021 that it was established in 1978 as the Brevard Art Center and Museum, and for most of its life it was known locally as the Brevard Art Museum.

The Foosaner name dates from July 25, 2011, when Florida Tech announced a gift from the Foosaner Foundation and renamed the former Brevard Art Museum, which had merged with the university that summer. The museum is now a closed institution. Its final exhibition ended in June 2021, and Space Coast Living reported in September 2021 that nearly all of its roughly 5,000 objects had gone to the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala. 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 out of local fundraising in the late 1970s. In a July 26, 2018 profile, Vero News quoted the museum's executive director describing the 1978 founding as a grassroots movement in which the community raised the money. The building complex on Highland Avenue was assembled piece by piece from older Eau Gallie structures. Vero News observed in 2020 that the Foosaner was forged out of municipal buildings, unlike Florida Tech's purpose-built textile museum on its Melbourne campus.

Florida Tech's 2011 gift announcement traces that expansion. The Foosaner Foundation's first major gift paid for a 6,000 square foot building adjoining the original small museum, which was remodeled for studio classes and named the Renee Foosaner Education Center. Later, the release states, the art museum itself expanded across the street into the former Eau Gallie Police Department building. By July 2014 Vero News described the result as a 28,000-square-foot complex with an auditorium and an education building, anchoring the arts district north of downtown Melbourne.

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 shows at the Henegar Center for many years before returning to the Foosaner for Vision 2019, opening April 6, 2019.

The merger began with an announcement on April 29, 2011. Florida Tech said it would open formal discussions with the Brevard Art Museum (BAM) Board of Trustees to merge museum operations with the university, and President Anthony J. Catanese described the plan as running the Eau Gallie museum as an outreach and educational effort. The executive director of the Eau Gallie Arts District welcomed the prospect in the same release. Vero News later dated the completed merger to July 1, 2011.

On July 25, 2011 Florida Tech announced a $1 million gift from the Foosaner Foundation and renamed the Brevard Art Museum the Foosaner Art Museum, effective immediately. The release explains the name. Samuel J. Foosaner, a New Jersey tax and estate planning attorney with a home in Cocoa Beach who had served on the Florida Tech Board of Trustees, started the foundation in 1980 in memory of his wife, Renee, an art student and teacher. He died in 1988. The 2011 gift closed out the foundation, bookending its first donation to the Brevard museum three decades earlier.

Under Florida Tech the museum sat alongside the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, which the university opened in 2009 on its Melbourne campus. A February 25, 2016 Florida Tech release announced that starting March 1, 2016 the Foosaner would drop admission fees every day, a benefit previously offered only on Thursdays, and would open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

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 40th anniversary exhibition, A Look Back: Forty Years of the Foosaner Collection, ran from June 1 to Nov. 3, 2018 and showed works on paper by Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain, landscapes by Larry Leach and Ted Waddell, abstract works by the Brevard artists Frits van Eeden and George Snyder, and Art Deco industrial design.

The best known holding in the Eau Gallie galleries was a body of work by the German Impressionist Ernst Oppler. Vero News reported in 2014 that the Foosaner held the largest collection in the world of the painter's work, and its 2018 review described a full Foosaner gallery of Oppler paintings and etchings of the ballerina Anna Pavlova. Central Florida Public Media's 2021 report adds Asian ceramics and metalwork, works by Central Florida artists and photographs by Clyde Butcher.

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. Monthly Jazz Friday concerts on the first Friday of each month tied the museum to the Eau Gallie Arts District's First Friday evenings, and Florida Tech's 2018 release places those concerts in the Foosaner's Harris Community Auditorium.

Cost was the stated reason. Vero News reported in July 2018 that a Feb. 9, 2018 Florida Tech release found running the museum financially unsustainable for the university and announced plans to sell the real property and relocate the collection in 2021. When Florida Tech announced a buyer on April 2, 2020, it stated that after acquiring the former Brevard Art Museum in 2011 it had spent about $1.8 million bringing the Eau Gallie facilities up to code and more than $7 million in all to keep the museum open.

The April 2020 release named the buyer as the CEO of Northboro Builders, Inc., under a contract covering both the museum and the adjoining Renee Foosaner Education Center. The plan called for a multi-story hotel, with the Foosaner Art Museum building to be removed to make way for the hotel and the education center converted to shared office space. Florida Tech agreed to keep operating both buildings through June 2021.

The last show was Abstraction: Retrospective Memories, pairing Rene Griffith, a mixed-media artist who grew up in the Eau Gallie area of Melbourne, with the Georgia painter Steve Seinberg. Florida Tech's March 15, 2021 release said the show would open March 20 and remain open until June 19, after which the Foosaner will permanently close. Accounts of the final date vary: Central Florida Public Media reported a July 1, 2021 closing, and Space Coast Living reported on September 10, 2021 that the Foosaner closed at the end of July.

The collection left Brevard County. Central Florida Public Media reported on April 12, 2021 that Florida Tech was finalizing transfer agreements with the Appleton Museum of Art and the College of Central Florida in Ocala, and that the Ruth Funk Center collection could go as well. Space Coast Living reported in September 2021 that nearly all of the Foosaner's objects were transferred to the Appleton Museum, while a collection of NASA art and moon landing era photographs stayed on the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne.

Two pieces were tied to the Highland Avenue building itself. Space Coast Living described a two-story steel work by Frits Van Eeden and Hot Rods by George Snyder, both attached to the exterior walls, as the remaining loose end, and reported that Northboro Builders planned to demolish the museum and build a hotel and parking garage once they were moved. No source consulted for this page documents whether the Eau Gallie building has since been demolished or what occupies the site as of October 2026.