LeMoyne Arts

LeMoyne Arts occupies the Meginnis Munroe House, an antebellum home built around 1854 on North Gadsden Street in the Park Avenue Historic District, a few blocks from the state Capitol. The organization itself is younger than the building it calls home. LeMoyne Art Foundation was established in 1963 by a group of Tallahassee community leaders, Mary Metzke, Clifton Lewis, June Strauss, and Nanette Fisher, with Al Block serving as the first president. The foundation actually started out behind a bank on South Calhoun Street in a building called the Deeb House before eventually moving into the historic Meginnis Munroe property that defines it today.

The gallery is organized into four named exhibition spaces inside the house, the Albrecht, Marylou Kuhn, Hoover, and Puckett galleries, along with a gallery shop selling work from local and regional artists and a ceramics lab tucked into the basement for classes and studio work. Outside, a sculpture garden connects the gallery to a separate education center at 121 North Gadsden Street by way of an ADA accessible path, and visitors can take a self guided audio tour through the grounds at their own pace. The whole campus is wheelchair accessible, with a ramp leading to the front porch of the main house and accessible restrooms located in the education center next door.

LeMoyne is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and closed Sunday and Monday. Admission is five dollars at the door, though members get in free and so do children twelve and under, which keeps the gallery genuinely accessible to families rather than functioning as a members only club for collectors. Exhibitions rotate on a monthly and bi monthly basis, and the organization runs education programming that spans from preschool art classes through adult workshops, plus scholarships for students who want to keep studying past a single semester. Parking is available by meter along North Gadsden Street or in a reserved lot at the education center, with drop off space at nearby Bye Plaza for anyone who needs it.

Because LeMoyne is a locally run nonprofit rather than a university gallery or a state museum, its exhibition calendar tends to favor North Florida and regional artists over traveling national shows, and the gallery shop reflects that same regional focus in what it stocks. It functions as both a gallery and a working arts education center, with the ceramics lab and classroom space getting as much daily use as the exhibition rooms upstairs. For a city that also has FSU’s museum facilities and FAMU’s Foster Tanner gallery, LeMoyne fills a different role: an independently funded, community founded gallery that has operated continuously in downtown Tallahassee for six decades now, run today out of a house older than the Civil War itself.