Albin Polasek House and Studio, Mediterranean-style artist home and studio in Winter Park, United States.
The Albin Polasek House and Studio is a Mediterranean-style villa with workshop spaces and gardens on a multi-acre property overlooking Lake Osceola, displaying more than 200 classical sculptures. The setting combines residential rooms with working studio areas, allowing visitors to see where the artist lived and created side by side.
Albin Polasek, born in Frenštát, Moravia, in 1879, immigrated to the United States in 1901 and headed the sculpture department at the Art Institute of Chicago for 27 years before moving to Winter Park in 1950. He opened his Mediterranean-style home and studio to the public as a museum in 1961. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 2, 2000.
Polasek was born in Frenštát, Moravia, in 1879 and reached the United States in 1901 as a wood carver. The museum keeps about 200 pieces, including his own sculpture, work by his first wife Ruth Sherwood, and antiquities he collected. Each April the Winter Park Paint Out brings 25 artists who paint across the city for seven days, and the finished works are hung in the gallery's "Wet Room" and sold to benefit the museum.
The museum occupies three acres at 633 Osceola Avenue, overlooking Lake Osceola. Daily tours cover the permanent collection and the Capen-Showalter House, a 4,200-square-foot home moved here in halves across the lake. The garden holds a butterfly garden, two water gardens and a cycad collection along the front drive.
The museum is the only Florida member of the Historic Artists' Homes and Studios program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a network of 36 preserved living and working spaces of painters, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers and furniture designers. Its grounds also hold a butterfly garden, two water gardens and a cycad collection along the front drive.
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