The 1940s and 50s
Before it was a museum, it was an arts center. Before an arts center, an art guild. Before an art guild, a library. Through its various designations and iterations over the past 72 years, the Boca Raton Museum of Art has remained a community-driven institution, a place founded by artists and powered by philanthropy, sweat equity and good will. From the very beginning, its impact exceeded the sum of its parts.
In the 1940s, Boca Raton was a cultural desert—a largely agricultural community and a chief exporter of green beans, whose population, at the turn of that decade, was 723. In 1942 the Army Air Corps established its only wartime training school for radar technology on what is now Florida Atlantic University, bringing an influx of military servicemen and their families to the region. But a 1940s-era photograph of an unpaved Palmetto Park Road, with an occasional shack visible through overgrown foliage, betrays its more untamed reality.
A small group of enterprising women spearheaded the charge to transform this subtropical wilderness into an artistically minded city. In the late 1940s, they hatched the town’s first organization, the Boca Raton Christian and Civic Club, in a single room in the city’s former Town Hall, with the goal to establish a small library. Two of the library’s board members, philanthropist Hildegarde Schine and socialite Roberta MacSpadden, who had moved to Florida from New York and Ohio, respectively, were tasked with organizing their club’s second-annual Open House Library Festival. They decided to include a showcase of paintings borrowed from friends and loaned by galleries from Palm Beach to Miami.
The ladies’ modest exhibition tapped into a burgeoning demand: An unprecedented 1,000 visitors turned out—enjoying a buffet luncheon for an extra $2—from a winter population that barely exceeded 1,500. Seeing the need for future artistic engagement, Schine and MacSpadden officially founded the Boca Raton Art Guild in 1950.
The Guild would go on to host exhibitions at the Boca Raton Hotel, designed and built by architect-developer Addison Mizner in 1926 that came to be a seasonal playground for the elite and visiting dignitaries. This would prove to be the first of many connections between the Museum and the eccentric architect, who all but defined Boca Raton’s Mediterranean Revival aesthetic.
At the time, the hotel was owned by J. Myer Schine, Hildegarde’s husband, and it quickly became a central hub in the otherwise underdeveloped city. The Guild hosted exhibitions, among other events, then synonymous with high-society life at the posh hotel—costume balls, musical theatre, tea and card parties—all with the goal of raising enough money to build a permanent library/arts center. With each passing year, the need for such a facility increased. MacSpadden kept the Guild’s archives in her guestroom under the bed. The founders were outgrowing their humble origins.
All the while, local artists finally had an institution where they could showcase their work. An article in the Boca Raton News describes one of the Art Guild’s periodic sidewalk art shows, a forerunner to today’s outdoor art fairs: “They would hang 200 pictures and 25 to 30 crafts. … Unframed paintings would hang from clotheslines and be sold directly from the artists.”
Their fundraising efforts resulted in an $85,000 investment in the construction of a new building on the hotel property. But the plan was halted after Arthur Vining Davis, the world’s fifth-richest man, purchased the Boca Raton Hotel from the Schines for $22 million, then the biggest real estate deal in Florida’s history, torpedoing the art center’s future.
The 1960s
It wouldn’t be the last challenge for the Art Guild, but the founders continued to pursue expansion plans that would embed their new organization in the City. Their permanent facility finally materialized in 1960 with Ada MacKidd’s gift of a $6,000 parcel in Old Floresta, a neighborhood designed by Addison Mizner on West Palmetto Park Road. Five adjacent lots were purchased on land that originally housed the site of WFLA, the “Voice of Tropical Florida,” an AM radio station owned and funded by the Mizner Development Corporation and later used for World War II radio communications. With enough funds raised during the past decade, the Guild was able to pay the $61,500 for the land and the construction in cash.
Completed in 1962, the one-story, glass-enclosed stucco structure is nestled among palm and pine trees that the founders took pains to keep in place. It would become the Guild’s home for nearly 40 years and remains today the home of the Museum’s Art School.
With the building came a more structured managerial hierarchy. According to historian Celia S. Lawrence, “heretofore it had been loosely run, like a big, sprawling, squabbling family, each sort of going off in his or her own way, all volunteers.” The Art Guild incorporated under a charter with an 11-member board of directors and a general membership of 314—100 of whom were working artists or crafters. But it remained a volunteer-staffed organization until 1969, when a part-time typist/bookkeeper was hired.
This coincided with continued growth of the Guild and the need for additional studios and exhibition galleries. At its opening dedication, MacSpadden said, “The Art Guild is organized to encourage and stimulate an interest in art and all creative work especially among young people and to work towards the erection of a Library and Art Center.”
The 1970s and 80s
In 1973, the Guild changed its name to the Boca Raton Center for the Arts and incorporated itself as a nonprofit, setting into motion a decade-plus of historic firsts. The board organized a children’s theater in 1975; hired its first full-time director, Maria Lawton, in 1978; established the Friends of the Boca Museum, an energetic volunteer group, in 1980; and enlisted its first docents in 1981.
Nineteen eighty-five would prove to be a particularly seismic year of advancement. The previous December, the Board hired Roger Selby, its first director with professional experience, at a time when the arts center did not yet have a collection. Selby sought to change this; his slogan was “we are on the move.” In 1985, the building’s exhibition space was increased and improved with modern track lighting. However, of more symbolic significance, this was the year the institution was rechristened the Boca Raton Museum of Art.
In 1987, an exhibition of the Art of Ancient America, largely drawn from the Jean and David Colker Collection—still a staple of the Museum’s collection—shattered all previous attendance records. Art critic Gary Schwan summarized in the Palm Beach Post in 1987, “If they gave a rookie of the year award for museum directors, Roger Selby would win for turning the museum into a class operation in a little over one full season.”
By that year, it was evident that the Museum’s current space was inadequate to meet its ever-growing demand in a city that now housed some 60,000 residents. “Our present site is only 2.88 acres, and we need at least four acres in order to build anything significantly larger to serve the needs of the community 50 years down the road,” Selby told the Boca Raton News.
As early as 1984, the Board had been eyeing a move to a larger facility, with Selby concurring with Planning Committee Chairman Robert Levinson’s opinion that “Mizner Park would be the best possible site for a new museum.” It was an intuitive and farsighted goal, given that Mizner Park wouldn’t open as an al-fresco lifestyle center until 1989; at the time, it had been the site of an enclosed and failing shopping mall which later served as office space for IBM.
The 1990s
In the meantime, the Museum would continue to organize exhibitions and began active collecting of works of art at its Palmetto Park home. In 1990, the Museum received its most significant art donation to date: Dr. and Mrs. John J. Mayers’ collection of 51 late 19th-century and early 20th-century drawings by 34 modern masters, including Picasso, Seurat, Degas, Giacometti, Matisse, Modigliani and Klee. The Museum expanded by 4,300 square feet to accommodate them, plus a gift shop, art supply store, a Boardroom, and a third classroom for its on-site Art School.
The Museum now comprised 12,000 square feet across two buildings, its stable of volunteers had increased to 800, and it was drawing 90,000 visitors annually. By 1991 its annual budget had increased to $1.1 million.
In 1993, the Museum Board purchased an 11-acre tract on Banyan Trail with a 175,000-square-foot building formerly owned by IBM, with the goal to raise $20 million for a new Museum Center. Architect Moshe Safdie was hired to design the structure, which would house not just an art museum but a performing-arts center and an automobile museum. However, after three years of planning, the project was terminated in favor of locating the Museum in Mizner Park. The land at the north end of Mizner Park was designated by the City to serve as a center for the arts, with plans for the Museum, an amphitheater (which opened in 2002, a year after the Museum) and a building for the performing arts that continues to be in the planning stage.
The 2000s
The new Museum included 44,000 square feet for exhibitions, a burgeoning collection, and educational programming. Architect Donald Singer designed a classic postmodern building with bold volumes and articulated cornices, windows, and masonry that evoke Mizner’s architecture. Singer created a sculpture garden with its walls merging with the building in a seemingly free play of forms. The rusticated pink concrete blocks on the exterior create deep shadows in the bright Florida sunshine. In this and in many ways, Singer also paid homage to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work he greatly admired. Funding was successful, with an initial major gift from Jeanne Spence, for whom the galleries are named. George Bolge was the Museum’s Director, overseeing this significant project and its grand opening on January 22, 2001. It set the Museum on a new course — building its art collections, establishing an active exhibition program, underscoring it all with a mission of education, and receiving its AAM Accreditation in 2009.
Speaking of education, the Museum’s Art School fully occupies the former galleries at the historic location on Palmetto Park Road, with studios and an exhibition gallery. The Boca Raton Museum Art School offers more than 100 weekly classes taught by 35 art instructors, with an annual student population of more than 5,000. The purpose of this great venture, pronounced in 1962, remains true: “to encourage and stimulate an interest in art and all creative work.” The Museum remains committed to fostering a pipeline of talent and engagement connecting its two facilities.
2014 - Present
With the arrival of Irvin Lippman as Director in 2014, a significant endeavor was established by the Board to celebrate and improve the Museum building, which over the 20 years had been effectively camouflaged behind landscaping, gates, confusing signage, and suffering from having no clear entrance or wayfinding. The Museum turned to Margi Glavovic Nothard at Glavovic Studio to take on the challenge of creating a new relationship between the Museum and its surroundings, creating a more welcoming public space.
The opening of the Ohnell Sculpture Garden and the removal of the west colonnade of the amphitheater now complete a 360-degree promenade around the Museum that allows visitors to enjoy the phenomenal qualities of the outdoors as part of the art experience. Among the new art commissions in the Ohnell Sculpture Garden is a kaleidoscopic 144-foot-long mural by Odili Donald Odita entitled Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. It’s a fitting title for an organization that has encompassed, for some seven decades, Boca Raton’s pride in its past, its commitment to the present, and its faith in the future.
The Boca Raton Museum of Art was seeded by the interest and sophistication of the City’s visitors and growing residents. With the initial impetus to grow the cultural experience and infrastructure of Boca Raton, the Museum’s dynamic Board, staff and generous supporters have led the way for more than 70 years — and remain dedicated to ushering Schine and MacSpadden’s modest venture into an exciting new era.