Daytona Beach, FL – For the first time in over 6 years, a big part of Daytona Beach’s Museum of Arts & Sciences will be fully open to the public.
A ribbon-cutting will take place at 9am Friday for the new West Wing following a $6.4 million overhaul mostly funded with federal emergency management dollars.
Some of the exhibits haven’t been open to the public since a strong rainstorm in May 2009 overflowed a canal nearby, sending 4 to 6 inches of water into the 20,000 square-foot West Wing.
MOAS Executive Director Andrew Sandall says none of the exhibits and artwork were damaged in that storm, but the West Wing as it was built at the time wasn’t really a safe place to keep anything valuable.
“Because it was the oldest part of the museum, it was on the flood plain,” Sandall added. “The museum slowly re-opened it but never really had the money to do it in a very good way.”
MOAS had to wait until May 2012 before FEMA ponied up $4.4 million through the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Sandall says that was largely due to the efforts of United States Congressman John Mica, the House Representative of the area at the time.
That FEMA money – along with $1.6 million from Volusia County’s ECHO Program and $400,000 from the museum itself – was enough to bring the old West Wing to the ground and re-build it several feet higher so that flooding won’t be an issue in the future.
Construction on the new West Wing started in April 2014. The Planetarium part of the West Wing opened 4 months later.
Among the 6 galleries being housed in the new West Wing include the Prehistory of Florida – featuring a full skeleton of Florida’s Giant Ground Sloth (pictured below) – and the Cuban Foundation, a collection of Cuba-themed art that former Cuban President Fulgencio Batista took with him after he was deposed in 1959 by Fidel Castro.
Sandall said some of Batista’s relatives living in Miami helped re-design the new gallery to show off all the artwork Batista and his wife donated to the city, one he called the largest display of Cuban-themed art outside of Cuba.
Also in the new West Wing is the Karshan Center of Graphic Art – a collection of paintings and photography by renowned photographer Jack Mitchell – and the Marzullo Gallery, a display of weaponry from all around the world.
There’s also the Gillespy Gallery – a large collection of Sub-Saharan African artifacts – and the main hall, which is decorated with a series of contemporary pieces from the MOAS collection.
The new West Wing will make its public debut on Saturday.
Click here to see photos of the new West Wing.
Copyright 2015 Southern Stone Communications.
