Pensacola’s art scene did not happen by accident. For a metropolitan area of roughly 450,000 people, the city has maintained all five of the major cultural institutions that city planners call the Big Five — an art museum, a symphony orchestra, an opera, a performing arts center and a ballet — for decades. And that foundation, says Maria V. Goldberg, explains everything visitors see today along Palafox Street and beyond.
“We are fortunate to have had these people who wanted the Big Five… to enhance the quality of life in their city,” says Goldberg, director of marketing, public relations and events for Great Southern Restaurants, and the former executive director of the Pensacola Museum of Art. “This didn’t just happen. Fast forward to today, and we have so many galleries, organizations and festivals related to arts and culture because of the Big Five established years ago.”
A century of donors and a tour worth taking
Goldberg has spent a quarter-century inside Pensacola’s cultural machinery — first with the Arts Council of Northwest Florida, then eight-plus years leading the Pensacola Museum of Art, and now with the restaurant group that anchors the waterfront dining scene. Her tour of the city’s cultural geography doubles as a history lesson.
Sculptures and murals punctuate downtown; open markets and festivals fill nearly every weekend. “The arts and cultural community have the community’s support,” she says. A century of generous donors — often operating behind the scenes — built and sustained it. “Every organization has strong people that support their favorite form of art. It has resulted in a richer, fuller existence in Pensacola.”
The pandemic proved the point by subtraction. When indoor events shut down, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra moved to a socially distanced Symphony on the Plaza, and the Pensacola Opera staged Opera al Fresco outdoors. Both were so well received they became permanent fixtures.
“When the arts are part of the community, it makes a better community,” Goldberg says — and businesses agree. Her favorite anecdote involves an Ohio couple with a worldwide business weighing a move to Pensacola 25 years ago. The first thing they asked about was the arts. They moved. “You may not go every day, but you want them here, and that, in itself, is comforting.”
Foo Foo Fest: the shoulder-season engine
Goldberg’s most consequential civic work may be Foo Foo Fest, the 12-day arts celebration she helped create with fellow advocate David Bear through the nonprofit Arts, Culture and Entertainment, Inc. (ACE), which raises government, corporate and individual funding and distributes grants to arts organizations across Escambia County.
The idea, hatched in 2014, was simple: fill Pensacola’s November shoulder season with something cool. “David set all this in motion. We knew the event had to be cool and had to be fun or we didn’t want to do it,” Goldberg says. Mobile-based boutique marketing agency Hummingbird Ideas came up with the name — “Pensacola is a Navy town. A Foo Foo is a purported musical gathering on a naval ship,” Goldberg explains — and the festival launched on the first full weekend of November.
A decade on, Foo Foo Fest is the umbrella for the region’s fall cultural calendar: the Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival, which marked its 51st year, leads into the Blue Angels Homecoming Airshow at NAS Pensacola, with more than 50 “Friends of Foo” partner organizations staging programming across the two-week window. The festival committee funds and promotes artistic nonprofits throughout, marketing the whole slate across the Southeast.
The bricks and boards of downtown
Year-round, downtown’s institutions anchor the scene. Gallery Night Pensacola closes streets on the third Friday of every month, a tradition now 25 to 30 years old. Palafox Market, the Saturday farmers-and-artisans market, has grown from a four-month experiment into a year-round, four-block event from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a two-block expansion into Ferdinand Square recently announced.
Ferdinand Square is the dense heart of it all: the Pensacola Museum of Art, Artel Gallery, the Pensacola Performing Arts Center, the Saenger Theater and Vinyl Music Hall all cluster within steps. Historic preservation did much of the work — the old jail now houses the Museum of Art, the old City Hall holds the Pensacola Museum of History, and the old courthouse became The Center, home of Pensacola Little Theatre, now undergoing a major renovation funded largely by the Clark family, including a rooftop performance venue and café. Arts organizations — the Pensacola Ballet, West Florida Literary Foundation, the Stamped Film Festival and others — lease office space in the same complex.
Artel Gallery’s arrangement is famously frugal: the city leased the old courthouse annex to the artist-run gallery for one dollar a year. Opened in 2014, it mounts rotating local exhibits, including a recent showing of artist and graphic designer Joe Vinson’s “Lost Pensacola.”
Murals, trails and the Palafox transformation
Two newer projects tie the history together. In 2017, the University of West Florida Historic Trust installed murals downtown, a program that evolved into Pop Murals — 12 historic images of Pensacola painted on building sides, each with a QR code explaining the scene. And the America’s First Settlement Trail runs a three-mile red-line loop through the cultural district, with badges and QR codes marking history from the spot where Governor Andrew Jackson first raised the American flag over Florida.
Even the bike racks are art: when downtown needed them, Evan Levin — owner of Vinyl Music Hall with his brother — designed creative custom racks along Palafox Street.
The cumulative effect is the transformation Goldberg has watched from the inside: Palafox Street going from boarded-up storefronts to one of the South’s most vibrant small-city downtowns in about a decade. The grand dame remains the Saenger Theater, where premier cultural events still take the stage.
“This didn’t just happen,” as she says. The people of Pensacola wanted an arts city, funded one, and keep showing up — which is why the galleries, the festivals and the gallery nights keep growing.