Jacksonville can be easily overlooked among Florida’s big cities. It lacks Miami’s nightlife and sex appeal. No amusement parks like Orlando. Tampa and St. Pete offer way more to do. Nothing of the glitz and glamour experienced around West Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale.
I moved to the Jacksonville area in 2012 and have lived here ever since. I am candid about its strengths and weaknesses.
The climate is spectacular if you don’t mind long, hot, humid summers. Winters are brief and mild, but do exist with low temps occasionally dropping into the 30-degree Fahrenheit range. Unlike most of Florida, four distinct seasons are experienced in northeast Florida with a lovely fall and spring.
Jacksonville’s beaches along the Atlantic Ocean are wide, welcoming, and mostly free to enjoy. The cost of living here is low. The airport is easy to navigate. Traffic is rarely bad. The area’s natural beauty is astonishing – that which real estate developers have yet to get their hands on and turn into sprawl.
On the flip side, unless you like golf or spending all day at the beach, there’s not much to do. Cultural travelers would find a week’s vacation in Jacksonville too long. I won’t go so far as to say Jacksonville is a cultural desert, but it’s lacking for a large city.
With one exception: The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens.
The Cummer has been Jacksonville’s cultural highlight since opening in 1961.
The art collection at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens was initiated by museum namesake Nina Cummer (1875-1958) who gifted her personal collection towards the opening of a museum. Her family money came from lumber and the particularly nasty, dirty, often brutal business of turpentine manufacture extracted from northeast Florida’s once abundant pine forests.
The museum sits on the site of Cummer’s former home.
The Cummer Museum is an encyclopedic museum with items on view from antiquity to the present day. Its strength, however, is modern and contemporary art.
The Cummer permanent collection features the finest John Singer Sargent landscape I’ve ever seen. A fresh, delightful, smallish mountain scene with a whimsical pair of goats dashed on top titled In the Alps (1911). Thomas Hart Benton’s June Morning (1945) gives a good accounting of what made him one of America’s most prominent mid-century painters, a classic example of Regionalism.
A large Norman Rockwell stands out among his entire body of work, this one a tender, restrained, heartbreaking scene of an elderly couple visiting the hospital, Second Holiday (1939), so unlike the optimistic, fresh-faced Americana he’s best known for.
Harlem Renaissance matriarch Augusta Savage was born and raised in the Jacksonville area. Editions of her Gamin (1930) sculpture can be found in top art museums across the country along with the Cummer.
The museum has a fantastic Whitfield Lovell, Pago Pago (2008).
My favorite work at the Cummer is Mildred Thompson’s Magnetic Fields (1991). Thompson (1936-2003), like Savage, was born and raised in Jacksonville, a Black female coming of age in a part of the world that wasn’t interested in anything someone fitting that description had to say.
Thompson left Jacksonville for greater artistic opportunity elsewhere. First to Howard University in Washington, D.C., then on to New York and eventually Europe.
What she is best remembered for today are her Abstract Expressionist “Magnetic Fields” series paintings like the Cummer’s, an undeniable masterpiece.
It vibrates. It pulses with energy. The yellow sizzles. The lines whirl.
Innumerable dynamic marks, large and small, work like a tractor beam drawing visitors closer. The vivid yellow background and bold dramatic reds are most noticeable, and then upon closer inspection, a multitude of blues and pinks find the eye.
It’s a large painting – 61 ¾ x 95 ½ inches – painted on two canvases hung side by side. As AbEx paintings go, despite being two generations past Pollock or Mitchell, it’s as triumphant as anything they’ve ever done.
The painting was acquired by the Cummer in 2021 under the then-directorship of Adam Levine.
“It has an exquisite balance to it. The center of the magnetic field is actually off center–it is to the viewer’s left and a little bit higher than the center of the composition, so you think that might skew things, but it actually centers the composition in a dynamic way,” Levine told me of the painting. “What you see are these magnetic fields, these concentric ovals emanating, but cropped by the top of the picture plane, so it creates this sense of the expansion beyond what the viewer is able to see and as a consequence, I think it wraps around the viewer–literally–this magnetic field and pulls you into it in this warm embrace.”
Levine’s successor, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, knows as much about contemporary Black female artists as anyone in the world thanks to her 20-year tenure leading the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, an institution devoted to artworks by and about Black women.
Brownlee is equally as impressed with the painting, but has a more intimate way of describing its appeal.
“I see astronauts, I see physics, I see an incredible solar system,” she told me. “I see (Mildred Thompson’s) purple hair. I see her partner. I see an incredible explosion of colors. Her paintings are so explosive and extraordinary as the solar systems.”
Among Florida’s art museums, the Cummer’s permanent collection is just OK. That’s not throwing shade, it’s more in praise of the state’s other art museums which are vastly underrated.
I think the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach has the finest collection of Modern art in the South. I think the Rubell Collection in Miami is the finest collection of contemporary art in the South. The antiquities at the Tampa Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg are first rate for the region. The Morse Museum in Orlando has one of the best collections of Tiffany in the world.
Where the Cummer tops them all is with special exhibitions. The Cummer’s special exhibition program is the best in Florida and punches far above Jacksonville’s weight as a cultural destination.
Just since 2020, the Cummer has featured national and international traveling exhibitions for blue chip, megastar, global contemporary artists including Zanele Muholi, Deborah Roberts and Anila Quayyum Agha. Examples from the Rockefeller’s Asian art collection and the Folk Art Museum in New York have been on view. Plains Indians ledger drawings. Japanese prints from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The caliber and variety of special exhibitions at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens is its distinguishing characteristic.
About those Gardens. Two-and-a-half acres of historic gardens overlook the St. Johns River in the museum’s “back yard.” The gardens are divided into three distinct spaces: the Olmsted Garden, the English Garden, and the Italian Garden.
The Italian Garden is one of the best of its kind in the nation with two long reflecting pools framing the view to the green, ficus-covered gloriette resembling the famous water gardens at the Villa Gamberaia in Tuscany.
The Cummer Museum (829 Riverside Ave, Jacksonville, FL 32204) is on the smaller side and most visitors should easily be able to peruse everything, including the gardens, in 90 minutes. Of course, real looky-loos could spend two hours or more.
Adult general admission is $20 with seniors, military, students (6-17), and educators paying $15.
Free admission is offered the second and third Tuesday of each month from 4PM to 9PM, the fourth Friday of each month from 4 PM to 9PM, and the first Saturday each month from 10 AM to 4 PM.
The Cummer is open from 11 AM to 9 PM on Tuesdays and Fridays, 11 AM to 4 PM Wednesdays and Thursdays, 10 AM to 4 PM on Saturdays and noon to 4 PM on Sundays. The museum is closed on Mondays, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year’s Day.
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Chadd Scott is a freelance arts and travel writer for a variety of publications including Forbes.com, Rovology.com, and his own website, SeeGreatArt. You can find him on social media @SeeGreatArt.