Rollins Museum of Art

On the campus of Rollins College, a few blocks from the shops of Park Avenue, the Rollins Museum of Art traces its roots back further than almost any other art institution in the state. Rollins began assembling a collection of portraits and natural history artifacts in the early 1900s, and fine art entered the picture in the 1930s through donations connected to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In 1941, the college opened the Morse Gallery of Art, the first purpose built museum on its campus, and that institutional lineage eventually led to a dedicated fine arts complex funded by a gift from George and Harriet Cornell. Opened in 1978 as the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the institution was renamed the Rollins Museum of Art in 2021.

The museum holds more than 5,000 objects spanning antiquity to the present, including over 500 paintings and more than 1,500 prints, drawings, and photographs. Its ethnographic holdings run past 1,100 objects, and a gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2008 added 156 photographs to the collection. In 1981, the museum became the first college art museum in Florida to earn accreditation from the American Association of Museums, and it describes itself as the only teaching museum in the greater Orlando area, meaning its exhibitions and collection are built explicitly around classroom use as well as public viewing.

Admission is free, which is not a small thing for a museum of this depth. The galleries are open Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m., closed Mondays. A satellite exhibition space at the nearby Alfond Inn, opened in 2013, extends the museum’s reach into a hotel setting a short walk from campus, a nice touch for visitors staying in town who might not otherwise wander onto a college campus.

Because it operates as part of Rollins College rather than as a fully independent nonprofit, the museum runs a little differently than some of Winter Park’s other arts institutions, but the collection and programming are every bit as serious as anything found at a standalone museum. For anyone building an arts itinerary around Winter Park, the Rollins Museum of Art belongs on the list both for its collection and for the fact that, unlike almost everywhere else in town, visitors can walk in without paying a dime.