Tonight was Gallery Night in Pensacola Florida, a night when artist, shop owners and locals all meet together in downtown Pensacola to soak up some culture and check out what Pensacola has to offer in the arts. One of the focus art collections was featured at the Hancock Bank, a collection of renowned art dedicated in the name of Mrs. Anna Lamar Switzer who loved the arts and this community.

Now numbering over 400 pieces, the collection of renowned art is housed in the Visual Arts Gallery of the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts on the Pensacola Junior College Campus. The focus of the collection is on modern and contemporary art which has been acquired over a forty year period through purchases prizes, gifts and grants.

When Allan Peterson was hired back in 1974, his goal was to create a professional gallery program highlighting PJC’s already excellent academic and cultural programs.

Allan told me,

“I decided to do two things to accomplish that goal: start to develop a permanent collection of original art works that studio faculty could use in teaching, as well as bringing to the community a variety of contemporary art through changing exhibitions that they would be unlikely to see without traveling to a major metropolitan city.
I established a series of competitive exhibitions called The Pensacola Nationals that lasted for some twelve years and changed media focus each year. Starting with The Pensacola National Drawing Exhibition, national competitions in Painting, Ceramics, Sculpture,
Printmaking, Graphic Design, Crafts, Portraits, Calligraphy, and other media followed. Grant funded purchase prizes enabled us to add six or seven pieces to the growing collection each year. Over the years, gifts, donations, invitational exhibitions and other competitions continued to enlarge the collection that now numbers well over 400 pieces. In addition, we established a long series of grant funded workshops by a wide variety of established artists like potters Peter Voulkos, Bennett Bean, and Paul Soldner, whose works
were added to the collection. In 2002 with the grand opening of the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts, internationally known artists as photographer Clyde Butcher, architect Michael Graves and sculptor Albert Paley put the collection into a class of its own.

Portions of the collection have become traveling shows, visiting college galleries and museums and reviews have appeared in national magazines and newspapers.

The uniqueness of a junior college establishing a collection of such quality, of attracting major supporters such as the Reilly and Switzer familes who endowed the Switzer Center, and housing an exceptional visual art department with exceptional artist/teachers, has made the possibility of being recognized as a regional art center for the State of Florida a dream for the future.”

It has been my honor, if just for a brief moment, to photograph a portion of this collection and I hope that with this story, I can shed light on the great works of art and all the hard work that so many have done to gather such a collection that we all can enjoy.