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The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg holds more than 2,400 works by Salvador Dali, in every medium he worked in; it opened in 1982 and moved into its present building on January 11, 2011.
The Ringling in Sarasota is Florida's official State Art Museum and has been part of Florida State University since 2000; its grounds also hold Ca' d'Zan, John and Mable Ringling's mansion, and galleries on the circus. The Morse Museum in Winter Park has the world's most comprehensive collection of work by Louis Comfort Tiffany, including his chapel from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The larger cities have their own: the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach County, the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, the Orlando Museum of Art and the Tampa Museum of Art.
Pinellas County. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse started buying Dali in 1943 after seeing a retrospective, and kept at it for forty years as patrons and friends of the artist. Their collection opened as a museum in a converted marine warehouse in downtown St. Petersburg on March 7, 1982, and moved into the present building on January 11, 2011.
Open the guide →Sarasota County. John Ringling made a fortune in the circus and spent a large part of it on European art. He began building the museum on June 27, 1927; it opened briefly in 1930 and 1931 and properly on January 17, 1932.
Open the guide →Orange County. Jeannette Genius McKean founded the museum in 1942 and named it for her grandfather, Charles Hosmer Morse. Her husband Hugh McKean was its first director, and the two of them gathered Tiffany material over decades, much of it rescued from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany's Long Island estate, after a fire there in 1957.
Open the guide →Miami-Dade County. Herzog and de Meuron designed it and the building is an argument about how to put a museum in the subtropics. Two hundred thousand square feet of usable space sits across three stories on a raised platform, with a wide perforated canopy reaching out past the walls to throw shade over open-air terraces where people gather without going inside.
Open the guide →Palm Beach County. Ralph Hubbard Norton ran the Acme Steel Company in Chicago and collected paintings and sculpture with his wife Elizabeth. When he semi-retired in 1935 the couple began spending their time in the Palm Beaches, and rather than leave the collection to a city that already had museums they founded one here, to give South Florida its first.
Open the guide →Duval County. Ninah Cummer left her house, her gardens and her art collection to the city when she died in 1958, and the museum opened on November 11, 1961, as the Cummer Gallery.
Open the guide →Pinellas County. Margaret Acheson Stuart founded the museum and Florida chartered it in 1961. It opened to the public in 1965, the first art museum in the city. John Volk designed the building with a curving colonnade facing Beach Drive, and said he wanted it to convey permanence.
Open the guide →Orange County. A group of art enthusiasts founded the Orlando Art Association in 1924. It became the Loch Haven Art Center in 1960 and the Orlando Museum of Art in 1986, and it stands at 2416 North Mills Avenue in Loch Haven Park, next door to the Orlando Science Center.
Open the guide →Hillsborough County. The institution dates to 1920, when it was founded as the Tampa Museum of Fine Arts. Its present building opened on February 6, 2010, in Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, on the east bank of the Hillsborough River with the Riverwalk running past the door.
Open the guide →Fifteen Major League teams train in Florida, in the Grapefruit League. Around Tampa Bay: the Yankees in Tampa, the Phillies in Clearwater, the Blue Jays in Dunedin, the Pirates in Bradenton, the Orioles in Sarasota and the Tigers in Lakeland.
St. Augustine, in St. Johns County. Pedro Menendez de Aviles came ashore there on September 8, 1565, and the city describes itself as the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States.
The Overseas Highway, the southern end of U.S. 1, runs 113 miles from Key Largo to Key West and crosses 42 bridges.
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