Arts and Culture in Florida

Florida’s arts and culture are well developed partly because of the energies of its diverse population and partly because of the state’s serious commitment to the arts. From Afro-Cuban music and the Orlando Philharmonic to wildlife photography to improvisational comedy, the state offers a wide variety of entertainment and self-expression opportunities through music, visual arts, and performance. Supporting and promoting this enthusiasm is the Division of Cultural Affairs, a major agency within Florida’s State Department. The DCA was founded in recognition of the importance of the arts to people’s mental and physical well being, to the strength of communities, and to tourism and the economy. The agency provides grants for cultural organizations, projects, and facilities, notably through the multimillion-dollar Regional Cultural Facilities Program. Established in 2002, the program assists symphonies, museums, dance companies, schools, and other entities. Among its other activities, the DCA runs the Art in State Buildings program, coordinates Florida Heritage Month, and manages the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. The rich folk heritage of Florida gets institutional support too. Florida’s Park Service gets into the act by running the Florida Folk Festival. Held since 1953 in White Springs, it is the nation’s longest-running annual folk festival. In addition, the Division of Cultural Affairs includes several organizations that help to sustain traditional music, stories, and handicrafts. The Florida Folklife Program, among its several activities, maintains the Florida Memory Web, which provides ready access to selected primary historical documents and audio recordings that reflect Florida’s various ethnicities and cultures. The advisory arm of the Cultural Affairs Division, the Florida Folklife Council, selects candidates for the Florida Folk Heritage Award given annually since 1985 for "long-standing contributions to the folk cultural resources of the state." HIGH ARTS Full professional symphonies can be found in Jacksonville, Miami, and Orlando. A number of communities, such as Venice and Key West, support orchestras on a smaller scale, while the Florida Philharmonic, Imperial Symphony Orchestra, and Southwest Florida Symphony are among those that tour local theaters, bringing music to audiences throughout their regions. Youth programs such as the one operated by the Florida West Coast Symphony enhance the musical experience of young artists. If it’s opera you’re after, you have some options. The well-established Florida Grand Opera performs classic works in their original languages in two stunning facilities, the Adrienne-Arsht Center in Miami and the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale. Just up the coast, the Palm Beach Opera, also running for over half a century, performs in the handsome concert hall at the city’s landmark Kravis Center. Florida boasts four more opera companies in Orlando, Sarasota, Tallahassee, and the Miami Lyric Opera. Of Florida’s 60 art museums, the most prominent are the Tampa Museum of Art (with the most comprehensive collection), the Miami Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and the Orlando Museum of Art. MUSIC Florida hosts a musical smorgasbord, much of which can be enjoyed in the open air. As many visitors to southern Florida are aware, the émigré Cuban population makes a hefty contribution to the vibrant music culture of the state. Cuban rhythms especially permeate Miami’s Little Havana, but are by no means limited to this famous Cuban enclave. Dozens of salsa clubs in Miami and Broward unite this music with its true purpose: dancing. Afro-Cuban music and dance have their own following, as do Haitian, Argentinean, and others. For a quick about-face, you can find bluegrass music all over the state—Florida hosts 13 bluegrass festivals throughout the year. Or you could consult your local bluegrass association, of which the state has several. Folk music clubs are based in Broward, Palm Beach, Sarasota, and Miami. Folk culture culminates in the annual Florida Folklife Festival. Featured musicians at this folk extravaganza have included much-loved Floridians such as Gamble Rogers, Ida Goodson, and Will McLean; the festival also attracts national figures. Other festivals celebrate and promote many genres of music. Up-and-coming musicians get a boost from the eclectic Florida Music Festival in Orlando. This three-day event takes the form of a musical bar crawl to make use of 15 venues featuring 250 acts. Both Miami and Cocoa Beach put on reggae festivals. The Clearwater Jazz Holiday, now in its fourth decade, puts on four days of free jazz in Coachman Park, while Lake Orange hosts the Lakeside Jazz Festival, bringing together nationally acclaimed acts and young enthusiasts learning jazz in their middle and high schools. In defiance of Florida’s stodgy image, the urban punk music scene has been virulently active since the 1980s. Along similarly iconoclastic lines, the death metal genre started with the Orlando band Deathin 1984. Mirroring the state’s rich musical life, the Miami-based recording industry generally makes up in diversity for what it lacks in nationwide volume of sales (although big names like Criteria cover a lot of high-profile territory). Miami rivals Detroit in sheer number of recording labels (well over 100), producing a gamut of music including indie rock, meringue, salsa and other Latin and Caribbean genres, R&B, various flavors of Florida hip-hop, new age, and a variety of more extreme forms of musical expression. THEATER AND PERFORMING ARTS Broward and Miami-Dade counties are particularly big on dance, with nearly 50 dance organizations between them. Whether it’s ballet or belly dance that floats your boat, you can find it here. For theater, the larger metropolitan areas such as Miami and Tampa are as rich as you’d expect, but it’s the small Sarasota/Venice area that shows startling vitality for its size, with the award-winning Venice Theatreamong the 15 theatrical organizations. FILM Hundreds of films have been shot in Florida, which ranks just behind California and New York in film production. Orlando is the capital of Florida filmmaking, with 10 production studios including Disney-MGM and Universal; Tampa comes in second. Some filmmakers have chosen the location merely for the convenient climate, and it doesn’t hurt that numerous prominent actors make their homes in the state’s posh communities. But Florida is the setting and sometimes the subject of films, too, going back to the Marx Bothers’ 1929 The Cocoanuts and including such recent documentaries as Vernon, Florida. Film schools in Orlando, West Palm Beach, Tallahassee, Miami, Winter Park, and Coral Gables contribute to the talent pool of filmmakers, while film festivals (10 major ones) bring plenty of material for inspiration to enthusiasts and professionals. LITERARY ARTS Several noted 19th- and 20th-century authors saw Florida as a hopeful place for peaceful race relations. The most famous was abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe had a winter home in Mandarin, the subject of her Palmetto Leaves sketches of happy and relaxed life in northeast Florida. She founded an integrated school in Mandarin and wrote that the future prosperity of the South "must depend, to a large degree, on the right treatment and education of the Negro population." Stowe lived to see the reversal of many of her hopes with the passage of Jim Crow laws throughout Florida. But she would have been encouraged by the writing of a woman who was a child in Stowe’s time. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) grew up in Eatonville, a Florida town founded in 1887 as an intentional community for blacks. Hurston’s lively and revealing stories of African-American life are an enduring Florida legacy known throughout the U.S. Florida crossovers between politics and writing are especially illustrative of the idealism Florida has inspired in some. John Willis Menard (1838–1893), a Florida poet and editor of two Florida newspapers, became the first elected black U.S. congressman in 1868; he later served in Florida’s legislature and on the county judiciary. The dynamic writer, professor, activist, and diplomat James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), of Jacksonville, brought perception and spirit to his writing, includingThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the stirring anthem of Black America, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) wrote numerous stories taking place in Florida’s backcountry, most famously the classic coming-of-age novel The Yearling. A friend of Rawlings, the well-traveled Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), lived in Key West in the 1930s, loving its lush vegetation. Several of his most notable books were written here. Hemingway also spent time across the water in Cuba, where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Not all Florida writing is upbeat, idealistic, or about the lives of rural folk. John D. MacDonald (1916–1986), Florida’s preeminent writer of crime and suspense novels, inspired a welter of more recent contributors to the genre. MacDonald’s hard-boiled Travis McGee characters kept readers riveted through 21 volumes of trekking through Florida’s urban and rural landscapes on the trail of sleaze. Several of MacDonald’s books have been made into films or television shows. More recent Florida writers of crime fiction have taken MacDonald’s lead in seeking the dark underside of the Sunshine State, such as Miami novelist Jeff Lindsay, whose sympathetic serial killer character Dexter was adapted for an eponymous cable TV series. VISUAL ARTS Early Florida artwork largely documented daily life. The first European to create images of Florida wasJacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533–1588), the recording artist for a French exploring party sent to Florida in 1564. Prints of 42 of his artworks survive, comprising landscapes, depictions of local people, sketches of local plants and animals, and maps. The most famous early artist in Florida wasJohn James Audubon, the finest wildlife illustrator of the early 1800s. Audubon made several long visits to Florida to find birds as subjects for his startlingly detailed illustrations. Painters have long been attracted to Florida’s landscapes. Winslow Homer (1836–1910), famous for his nautical scenes, often stayed in Florida during winters, pleasure fishing and painting in harbor towns, on the water, and on the St. John’s and Homosassa rivers. More recent and more local, Albert Ernest "Bean" Backus (1906–1990) captured light and motion so well in his canvasses that a person viewing one of his beachfront scenes can almost feel the sun and wind of the place. The Orlando Museum of Art, one of 60 art museums in the state, provides access to quality artworks from around the world, while the Museum of Florida Art shows and fosters the work of Florida artists. The state’s pleasant weather encourages the enjoyment of outdoor artworks, with several communities make the most of opportunities to display in public places. The city of Winter Haven and its Polk Museum of Art present the Florida Outdoor Sculpture Competition annually, with the town’s Central Park as the exhibition grounds. Sarasota’s annual Season of Sculpture brings international artists by invitation to display their works along the city’s waterfront during the entire first half of each year. Docents lead free tours of the exhibition on Sundays. ARCHITECTURE Two architecture styles are associated with Miami neighborhoods. The wave of Art Deco and decorative design that swept Miami Beach in the 1930s impacts the look and feel of the area immensely; guided tours point out specific buildings and the history of the times that built them. The neighborhood is even listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Another direction of Miami architecture is dubbed Garden Style, characterized by a U-shaped floor plan for a duplex surrounding a central garden courtyard, with passages and entry areas on the outside of the building. Modern Florida architecture expands on the garden theme by striving for living environments harmonious with nature through greener building materials and structural design that minimizes the need for air conditioning. HANDICRAFT AND FOLK ART Florida’s most notable and characteristic handicrafts come from its two native tribes, the Seminoles and the Muscokees. Craft fairs offering beadwork, clothing, carvings, and other native handicrafts occur annually in many of Florida’s towns. Seminole quilts and clothing made with a technique known asSeminole strip piecing are popular, and this quilting is practiced outside of native communities as well. Visitors to the Seminole Living Village on Brighton Reservation may observe various kinds of handiwork in progress. HISTORIC ART MOVEMENTS A group of African-American Ft. Pierce artists now referred to as the Florida Highwaymen became active in the 1950s, creating a uniquely Floridian style of painting whose vivid palette captured the quality of the state's lush vegetation and sunlight. One of the Highwaymen, Alfred Hair, met the landscape painter A.E. "Bean" Backus in the mid-1950s and became convinced that his cohort could earn a living through painting. Rather than attempting to sell through galleries, as a white artist like Backus could, the Highwaymen sold their work out of the trunks of their cars. The feeling of vibrancy that pervades many of even the Highwaymen’s most tranquil scenes comes partly from skill at rendering light, partly from the lightning-swift execution of the canvases (usually Upson board). Many of these painting were completed in under an hour. The Highwaymen were most active from the 1950s through the 1980s. Their work is sought after today, and followers of the school still produce works in the "Highwaymen" style.