Florida Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

About Florida Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Florida Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Florida’s cultural story is one of collectors and builders. A circus owner left a Venetian palace and an art museum to the state; a group of young architects turned Sarasota into a laboratory of modern design; a railroad king gave Palm Beach a Beaux-Arts mansion; and St. Petersburg built a glass-crowned home for the art of Salvador Dalí. Sarasota sits at the heart of it all. Here is the back story, and how to see it.

The Ringling

The circus owner John Ringling and his wife Mable hired the architect Dwight James Baum to build their winter home on Sarasota Bay. Cà d’Zan, their Venetian Gothic mansion, was finished in 1926 after about two years of work and quickly became the centre of Sarasota society. Decades later the mansion underwent a $15 million restoration.

In 1925 John decided to build an art museum as a legacy and a memorial to himself and Mable. Designed by John H. Phillips, it opened, a few years after Mable’s death, to the public in 1930. When John died in 1936 he left the museum and the rest of his estate to the people of Florida; since 2000 it has been governed by Florida State University. Today the estate brings together the Museum of Art, the Circus Museum, the gardens and Cà d’Zan, so give it a full day.

Sarasota is where the circus money met the modernists: you can see both in a single afternoon on the bay.

The Sarasota School

After the Second World War, Sarasota became the home of a new kind of architecture. Paul Rudolph and Victor Lundy were among the architects of what became known as the Sarasota School of Architecture, which gave the town modern houses, schools and shops in the years after the war. The Sarasota Architectural Foundation keeps the story alive with films, lectures and tours, and it built a replica of Rudolph’s Walker Guest House on the grounds of The Ringling.

The best place to see the school in context is Sarasota Art Museum. Ringling College of Art and Design converted the former Sarasota High School, a 1926 Collegiate Gothic building by M. Leo Elliott, into a museum that opened in 2019. It is a kunsthalle, with changing exhibitions rather than a permanent collection, and its campus also takes in a 1957 Paul Rudolph building for the “new” high school and a 1959 Victor Lundy building, a former furniture store.

Sarasota’s stages

On North Pineapple Avenue, the Sarasota Opera House began life as the A.B. Edwards Theater, designed by the Jacksonville architect Roy A. Benjamin in the Mediterranean Revival style and unveiled on 10 April 1926. Will Rogers and the Ziegfeld Follies played here, and in 1952 it hosted the road premiere of The Greatest Show on Earth, filmed in Sarasota. Today its main theatre seats 1,119 and is home to Sarasota Opera.

On the bayfront, the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall calls itself the world’s only purple seashell-shaped theatre, with touring Broadway, concerts and comedy through the season. A new Sarasota Performing Arts Center is being planned for The Bay park, where the published schedule lists it for 2030 to 2033, and the city has said the Van Wezel will stay in use.

Dalí in St. Petersburg

Across Tampa Bay, The Dalí Museum opened its waterfront building on 11 January 2011. The architect Yann Weymouth wrapped a concrete box in a free-form glass structure called the Enigma, made of 1,062 triangular pieces of glass and rising 75 feet, a homage to the dome of Dalí’s own museum in Spain. Inside, a helical staircase recalls the artist’s fascination with spirals and the double helix.

A few blocks away, the Morean Arts Center shows its Chihuly Collection and runs a glass studio with demonstrations. Pair the two for a day of art in St. Petersburg, with lunch on the waterfront.

The Gilded Age east coast

On the Atlantic side, Henry Flagler’s railroad opened up Florida’s east coast, and his architects John Carrère and Thomas Hastings gave it its grandest buildings. Whitehall, the Beaux-Arts mansion in Palm Beach that Flagler gave his wife Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, was completed in 1902 and is now the Flagler Museum, a National Historic Landmark. In St. Augustine, the Lightner Museum fills Flagler’s former Alcazar Hotel, across King Street from Flagler College.

Palm Beach keeps its cultural season at The Society of the Four Arts, with exhibitions, gardens and a season of talks, films and concerts, and at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, which opened in 1992.

What’s new (checked October 2026)

The Sarasota Opera House is celebrating its 100th year, a century after the Edwards Theater opened in April 1926. Plans for the new Sarasota Performing Arts Center were revised in January 2026, moving the site to the south side of the Centennial Park canal.

Cultural calendar

Sarasota Opera’s fall production of Hansel and Gretel runs from 30 October to 14 November 2026, and its Winter Opera Festival runs from 6 February to 21 March 2027, opening with a new production of La traviata and including the company’s first Gilbert & Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore, and Janáček’s Jenůfa. For exhibitions at The Ringling, Sarasota Art Museum and The Dalí, check each museum’s own programme before you go.

How to see it

Our advice: base yourself in Sarasota. Give The Ringling a full day, spend a morning at Sarasota Art Museum and an evening at the Opera House, then take a day trip to St. Petersburg for The Dalí. Save Palm Beach and St. Augustine for a separate trip. Book tickets direct with each venue, and see our Arts & Culture page for every museum and stage we recommend.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Florida Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story before you go.