Florida Southern students sing, act, dance, design, and exhibit alongside faculty artists and visiting professionals. Ensembles carry academic credit. Auditions are open. Student work goes on the wall in a real gallery. And when you would rather sit in the audience than stand on the stage, something is happening most weeks, much of it free.
The setting is part of it too. This campus holds the largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in the world, a National Historic Landmark you walk through on the way to class.
For more than fifty years, the Festival of Fine Arts has been how the arts happen at Florida Southern. Music, theatre, dance, and visual art all perform and exhibit as part of the season, alongside visiting guest artists and touring productions, and most of it is open to the campus community and to Lakeland.
Music at Florida Southern is not limited to music majors. Eight ensembles rehearse and perform here every semester, and each one carries one hour of academic credit for every semester you take part. At the 1000 and 2000 levels, that credit satisfies your WRIGHT Foundations Fine Arts requirement, so the thing you already love to do can count toward your degree. Ensembles perform throughout the year, through the Festival of Fine Arts.
Theatre arts stages four main stage productions a year, including two musicals, in the 336-seat Buckner Theatre. B.F.A. students are eligible for major roles starting their first year. There's also a lab theatre inside a Frank Lloyd Wright building, the Theatre-in-the-Round, programmed and produced entirely by students. If you want to direct your own work, that's where it happens. And performers are only part of it. Every production needs designers, stage managers, technicians, and crew.
The Wynee Warden Dance Studio is a freestanding 4,700-square-foot facility built specifically for dancers, opened in 2014. Dance performs its own concerts each year and appears on the Festival of Fine Arts season.
Studios in the Ludd M. Spivey Humanities and Fine Arts Center are where most of the day-to-day making happens. Student work goes up in the Melvin and Burks Galleries, which also bring established and visiting artists to Lakeland throughout the year.
Much of what happens at Florida Southern is open to the campus community and to Lakeland, and much of it is free.
Presented by the Lawton M. Chiles Center for Florida History, the Florida Lecture Series brings leading scholars to campus every month to talk about the state and the questions that surround it, across history, public affairs, law, sociology, criminology, anthropology, literature, and art.
Every lecture is free and open to the public. Show up because it is your field, or show up because it sounded interesting. Both are the point.
The Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Archives Center holds the Lawton M. Chiles Center for Florida History along with exhibit space, a public meeting space, and collections of papers, photographs, audio, video, and artifacts documenting Florida and Methodist history. It is open to students for research, and its exhibits are open to anyone curious enough to walk in.
Founded in 1966 as the Polk Museum of Art by a group of Lakeland residents and affiliated with Florida Southern since 2017, the Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art is Central Florida's only community academic art museum. The AGB is a Smithsonian Affiliate accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, and its collections and visiting exhibitions are a working classroom for students across disciplines.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed thirteen structures on this campus in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, the Danforth Chapel, the Water Dome, and 1.5 miles of covered Esplanades connecting them. Wright called it "Child of the Sun." The National Park Service calls it a National Historic Landmark. Students call it the walk to class.
Cultural trips take students across the state throughout the year, from museums and historic sites to the places you would never find on your own. Central Florida puts a lot within reach, and Discover Florida is how students get there.
Have a question about a performance, an exhibition, or studying the arts here? The Division of Fine Arts is happy to help.
