Company Profile
Museum of Contemporary Art
Company Overview
The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (MOCA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and, as part of ArtsUNF, a Cultural Institute of the University of North Florida. Among the most prominent contemporary art museums in the Southeast, the museum serves the community and its visitors through exhibitions, collections, educational programs, and publications, designed to enhance an understanding and appreciation of contemporary art with particular emphasis on works created from 1960 to the present.
Located in the heart of historic Downtown Jacksonville, MOCA is one of the city’s most significant cultural assets. MOCA’s exhibitions and programs set the pace for arts and art-integrated programming on a regional and national stage. Renowned in this community, MOCA casts the spotlight on Jacksonville as a burgeoning, vital arts destination.
The museum is also a cornerstone of Jacksonville’s multibillion-dollar downtown revitalization plan with exhibitions and programs that bring new visitors to the civic core during the day, at night, and on weekends.
Company History
Founded in 1924, the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville was the first visual arts organization in Jacksonville, one of the first art museums in the state of Florida, and one of the first contemporary art museums to be founded in the United States.
The museum grew out of the work of the Women’s Club of Jacksonville, which regularly hosted art exhibitions for the public, with the purpose of fundraising for the city’s public schools. The civically-minded women of the Club were some of the most influential changemakers in Jacksonville during the early 20th century. These visionary women broke with the norms of their time by coming together to make meaningful change in our city, starting more than two decades before women had the right to vote.
Among the Club’s members were four women who got the idea that Jacksonville needed something more permanent. Merrydelle Hoyt, longtime chair of the Club’s Art Department took it upon herself to support 3 young women in making this idea a reality. Rose Tharp, Louese Washburn, and Edith Harrison, each highly educated by one of this country’s leading art institutions—the Pratt Institute, the Chicago Art Institute, and Cooper Union—founded the Jacksonville Fine Arts Society in 1924, leading to what is now MOCA Jacksonville. These visionary, pioneering women, each professional artists in their own right, came together to imagine the kind of city they wanted Jacksonville to be—the kind of community they wanted to live in and be a part of. At the core of their vision for a rich, vital, and dynamic city were art, culture, and education. They believed that beauty was important to society. That it was a democratic value and that access to beauty was something that everyone in society should have and should benefit from. Beauty to them, did not begin in the privacy of the home, but belonged in the public square.
In 1924, the Jacksonville Fine Arts Society hosted its first art exhibition; an exhibition second only to the 1913 Armory show in its importance for modern art and that would establish the beginning of the modern art movement in the South. It also established MOCA Jacksonville as the second museum of modern and contemporary art in the country. The exhibition included works by 65 cutting edge modernist artists, including George Ault, Peggy Bacon, Charles DeMuth, John Dos Passos, Wood Gaylor, Thomas Hart Benton, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Adelaide Lawson, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Katherine Schmidt, Joseph Stella, Isabel Whitney, and others. Roughly one-third of the artists in the exhibition were professional women artists, a number that was nearly unheard of at that time. This exhibition helped to establish Jacksonville as a city at the cutting edge of the art world.
Benefits
As part of the University of North Florida (UNF), as an employee you receive a generous benefits package, including health and wellness, education and paid leave benefits.
(Your benefits rates and benefits options may differ depending on enrollment selections. This information is not to be misinterpreted as benefits advice. The University of North Florida is an equal access/equal opportunity university.)
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