Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens

On the shore of Lake Osceola, three wooded acres hold the retirement home, studio, and sculpture gardens of Albin Polasek, a Czech American sculptor whose work once anchored the entrance halls of some of the country’s most prominent institutions. Polasek immigrated to the United States in 1901 and spent twenty seven years as head of the sculpture department at the Art Institute of Chicago before a stroke prompted him to retire to Winter Park in 1950. He spent his final years here creating art in the Mediterranean style house and studio he built for himself, and the property opened to the public as a museum in 1961, four years before his death in 1965.

Today the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens displays roughly two hundred works, including pieces by Polasek himself and by his wife, sculptor Ruth Sherwood, alongside antiquities Polasek collected during his career. The grounds are as much a draw as the galleries, with sculpture placed among butterfly gardens and water features overlooking the lake, and a historic house relocated onto the property in 2015 that now serves as office and exhibition space. In 2000, the site earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and it remains the only Florida site in the national Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program, a network of preserved studio homes maintained across the country.

The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m., closed Mondays. Tickets are sold online in advance, and while the museum does not publish a flat admission price on its main pages, staff can confirm current rates by phone before a visit. What visitors consistently mention is the setting itself, a quiet lakeside garden in the middle of a city, where sculpture is meant to be walked among rather than viewed from behind a rope.

As a nonprofit dedicated to preserving representational art at a time when it fell out of critical fashion, the museum also functions as a working showcase for contemporary sculptors working in that tradition, hosting rotating exhibitions alongside the permanent Polasek collection. For anyone spending a day exploring Winter Park’s museums, pairing the Polasek with the nearby Morse Museum or a walk along Park Avenue makes for a full and unhurried afternoon, one that traces the arc of a single artist’s late career from studio wall to public garden. Because the museum sits on a quiet residential street rather than along the busier Park Avenue corridor, it tends to draw a calmer, more contemplative crowd than some of Winter Park’s other cultural stops, which suits a collection built around a single sculptor’s decades of representational work.