Polk Art Museum, Lakeland Florida

     We made our first visit to the Polk Museum of Art, part of Florida Southern College in Lakeland Florida, on a recent Saturday and were quite happy to find a very interesting small museum. (https://polkmuseumofart.org/ )  There are plans for expansion to be completed in the spring of 2024 which will triple the museum's exhibition space.

    We were drawn to the Polk for its current exhibition of Rodin sculptures, through October 30, 2022. Auguste Rodin is generally considered the first modern sculptor, with his career stretching from the late 1800s into the early 1900s. He was extremely prolific, and his works are known around the world, among the most famous sculptures in the world like The Thinker, The Burgers of Calais, and The Kiss. He's one of my favorite artists, and I've been privileged to visit the Rodin House Museum in Paris and a great Rodin Museum in Philadelphia.  This collection was outstanding, including several smaller scale sculptures and 5 of the 6 individual Burgers of Calais. (Of course, these are relatively recent castings of Rodin's work. He usually concentrated his work on the clay originals, from which the metal castings are made.)

    One of the permanent exhibits at the Polk Museum of Art is a collection of Indigenous masks and other art work from various countries in Africa and from Papua New Guinea. They were quite interesting and beautiful.

    It was a great visit, and we look forward to future exhibits and the museum's expansion in the future.

Sneak Peek at a New World Class Museum Opening Soon

     The Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area of Florida is blessed to have some really spectacular museums like The Dali, the James Museum of Western Art, The Florida Holocaust Museum, the Ringling Museum of Art, and the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, just to name a few. Within a year, hopefully their ranks will be joined by MAPS - the Museum of Archaeology, Paleontology, and Science.

    The Museum's exhibits are currently housed in a very cramped building on a Pasco County Schools campus in New Port Richey, but a new and larger location is in the works. Right now, probably 90 % or more of the museum's collections are in storage, but staff and volunteers have staged a few exhibits and opened up for Sunday afternoon docent-led tours so that visitors can get a small taste of what's to come.

    Much of the museum's holdings have come from a couple of older museums that have closed, and they represent every area of the world. The Central and South American Pre-Columbian collection is one of the largest in the world, and, in and of itself, would make for a spectacular Pre-Columbian Museum. But wait there's more! There are large Native American, African and Asian collections as well. Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt are also featured. Paleontological specimens come from around the world, but there is a large collection of fossils representing Florida's prehistoric flora and fauna, and an exhibit representing underwater archaeology including artifacts from Spanish shipwrecks off Florida's coast.

    The Museum also has working relationships with many other museums and archaeological and paleontological digs around the world. 

    The Executive Director of the Museum, Charles Zidar, led our tour, and his enthusiasm and expertise were phenomenal. I have no doubt that history and museum lovers in the area will be wowed very soon.

For more info, here's the website: https://www.mapsmuseum.org/ And a few pictures. Remember, only a very small part of their collection is out of storage. There's much more to come once the museum is in its own larger space.