Museums

While in the St. Petersburg area, we used one day to recover from sunburn a little bit and went to a couple of museums.  There are several museums in the area, but we were especially interested in seeing the Salvador Dali Art Museum.  The Florida International Museum was just up the road, so we decided to check that one out too.  

Salvador Dali Museum

We planned on going to this museum before we left home.  We don't know a lot about art, but we knew that Dali was famous and thought it would be fun to learn a little more about him.  We really enjoyed the museum and learned a lot.  We still don't know a lot about art per se, but we do know that Dali was very talented, was a leader of the Surrealist movement in the 1930's and he had some mental problems that almost interfered with his ability to do much of anything.  

The museum is home to many of his works and rotates the items on display.  It took us around 2 hours to see the works on display.  The works were organized chronologically by the four periods of his work.  The periods are Early, Transitional, Surreal and Classic.  He is most famous for his Surreal works, but his classic period was very prominent and prolific as well.  His surreal paintings have been described as hand-painted dream photographs.  This seems to be a very accurate description as the backgrounds and many of the images look life-like, but like dreams can be, some things are twisted or distorted out into strange realities. 

For more information and to view images of his work, visit www.salvadordalimuseum.org

Florida International Museum

The Florida International Museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Museum.  They have a permanent Kennedy collection and three rotating exhibitions.  They currently have a big exhibition on the Cuban Missle crisis which was very educational and fun.  The exhibit walks you through what life was like in the 1960s and did a good job of setting up the missile crisis, then takes you day by day through the major events of this brief, but very tense 13 day period in our nation's history.  

The Kennedy collection was very interesting, although not nearly as focused as the Cuban Missile Crisis exhibit was.  The exhibit includes a recreation of the Oval Office and the deck of PT-109, Kennedy's boat in WWII.  Many artifacts from wife Jackie were on display as well.  

An exhibit displaying all 322 covers of the Saturday Evening Post that were done by Norman Rockwell were on display.  Those were really neat to look at and see how his work changed from his first cover in 1916 to his last in 1963.  The final exhibit was On Miniature Wings, Model Aircraft of the National Air and Space Museum.  That exhibit was kind of interesting, but neither of us are into planes too much so we didn't spend as much time with it.   

For more information, visit: www.floridamuseum.org