Polk Museum of Art

The Polk Museum of Art is Lakeland's main art museum, a modest but worthwhile institution with a permanent collection spanning pre-Columbian artefacts, American paintings, decorative arts, and contemporary works. The building, renovated and expanded in the 1990s, is set in a pleasantly landscaped spot near Lake Mirror.

For the size of the city, the museum punches above its weight — the collection includes some genuinely interesting pieces, and the temporary exhibition programme is reasonably ambitious. Admission is free on Tuesdays. The museum shop is good for locally themed gifts and art books.

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The Polk Museum's collection includes a significant group of pre-Columbian artefacts — ceramics, textiles, and gold objects from Mesoamerican and Andean cultures — that is somewhat surprising to find in a mid-sized Florida city. The collection was assembled through several major donations over the decades and gives the museum a real point of distinction beyond the standard regional art museum programming.