In a continued celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the passage of the 19^th amendment, Beaches Museum is proud to present our new history exhibit: Breaking Ground: Beyond Bathing Beauties.

The popular image of beach women as bathing beauties only hints at the diverse lives of women at the beaches. From the first settlers to women of today, this exhibit provides the opportunity to explore the many dynamic roles of women as proprietors, laundresses, civic leaders and more.

The beaches were a rare opportunity for women to have careers, shape society and break boundaries. Join us in celebrating the women that shaped our community.

Two companion events are planned with this exhibit. The first, on November 15, is a Cemetery Tour exploring the H. Warren Smith Cemetery with history detective Johnny Woodhouse as he discusses the well-known women interred in the cemetery. The second, which will take place on January 30, will be a Story Tellers event with the groundbreaking female mayors of the Beaches, past and present. The Mayors will discuss their service to the community and the stories behind their motivation to run for office. Learn what it takes to not only survive, but thrive as a female leader at the Beaches.

Breaking Ground: Beyond Bathing Beauties is sponsored by Florida Women’s Law Group, the Rotary Club of Ponte Vedra Beach and Chao Framing.

For more information about this exhibit please visit the Beaches Museum website or call 904-241-5657.

Thank you to our generous sponsors:

Jacksonville’s past includes a deep Indigenous history. Beginning more than 10,000 years ago, small family bands occasionally moved through the area. By 5,000 years ago, Native populations started living permanently near the Atlantic coast. Contrary to the myth of an unchanging Native American past, migrations, contact with outsiders, long-distance interactions, and technological innovations shaped the precontact history of Northeast Florida.

The story of Indigenous, French, and Spanish encounters in Northeast Florida is most often told from a European perspective. Today, Fort Caroline is a memorial to French efforts to colonize Mocama land, and the Castillo de San Marcos is a national park honoring Spanish successes in both vanquishing the French and taking over Timucua homelands. But what did the Mocamas make of French and Spanish colonizers? And why isn’t their side of the story told?

Drawing on archaeological and historical evidence, the Indigenous perspective presented in Our Land begins 1000 years ago and continues to the present day.

Students from the University of North Florida helped to design this exhibit for a course co-taught by Dr. Keith H. Ashley and Dr. Denise I. Bossy in the fall of 2019 called “Public Archaeology and History of Florida Indians.”

Generous funding for this project was provided by the Humanities Initiative of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNF, the UNF Archaeology Laboratory through the support of the Cummer Family Foundation, and the Beaches Museum. 

Artistic interpretations of the Mocama were sponsored by the Public Trust Environmental Legal Institute of Florida through the Timucua-Mocama Art Contest with the goal of presenting a more authentic portrayal of the scenes depicted in the classic but ethnocentric sixteenth-century works of Jacques Le Moyne and Theodor de Bry.

For more information on this exhibit, please call 904-241-5657 or visit the Beaches Museum website.

In a continued celebration of local artists and in honor of the 100^th anniversary of the passage of the 19^th amendment, the Beaches Museum is proud to present the work of Sara Conca, Tiffany Manning and Princess Simpson.

Sara Conca is a contemporary abstract artist.  Her creation of a fresh new aquatic mystical series involving natural mixed media, raw pigment colors, mica flakes and natural crystals is intended to “instantly immerse the viewer into the visual and emotional energies” that she has devoted  to each piece. 

Tiffany Manning is an acrylic painter whose drive to create is fueled by a lifetime fascination with energy, specifically, “the way that it moves through people to form the connective tissue that weaves our world together.”

Princess Simpson Rashid is an abstract painter and printmaker.  Her current body of work explores the relationship between color, perception and symbolism.  She is a breast cancer survivor and feels her more recent work has been matured and tempered by that experience. 

This exhibit will bring together the diverse backgrounds, techniques and inspirations of the artists in a coherent celebration of women’s suffrage. 

The exhibit will be on display from March 6, 2020 to May 31, 2020.

Please join us Friday, March 6 for an Exhibit Opening Night Reception for this exhibit at 6:00 p.m. in the main building of the Beaches Museum.  This event is free to Museum members with a suggested $5 donation for non-members.  For further information please call (904) 241-5657.

Since Neptune Beach was first planned in the 1880s, it has attracted people seeking a beach lifestyle and developers doomed to disappointment.  Neptune Beach: A Cool Place to Live provides not only an opportunity to reminisce about these people but also to explore the stories of local landmarks, from the train station(s) to Pete’s Bar. The exhibit will highlight the attempts to build Neptune Beach – some successful and others, not – and its identity as told through photographs, artifacts, and the personal accounts of those who have lived there.

The exhibit will be on display from November 15, 2019 to March 1, 2020. See it online! –> Neptune Beach: A Cool Place to Live 

Please join us Friday, November 15 for an Exhibit Opening Night Reception for this exhibit at 6:00 p.m. in the main building of the Beaches Museum.  This event is free to Museum members with a suggested $5 donation for non-members.  For further information please call (904) 241-5657.

Thank you to our exhibit sponsors:

Special Thanks to: 

The City of Neptune Beach

Pete’s Bar

Summer Morris

The Beaches Museum is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibit “Water.Life. Art.” by artist Annelies Dykgraaf.

Dykgraaf’s acrylic paintings and relief prints are inspired by the connections of the people, symbols, textile patterns, and mythological motifs of her birth land of Nigeria, West Africa and her homeland of Jacksonville, Florida.

Although on different continents, both Nigeria and Florida share coastlines of the Atlantic Ocean. In Nigeria, the Niger River allows fertile life to thrive just as the St. Johns River nurtures life in Florida. Along both bodies of water, people derive their culture.

Annelies Dykgraaf holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Calvin College and studied in France through the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is a leader of the visual arts and philanthropy community as a founding member of Jacksonville Consortium of African American Artists (now recognized as the Jacksonville Cultural Development Corporation) and The Art Center Cooperative, Inc.  She has served on the Board of Directors of the Beaches Fine Arts Series for twelve years. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Jacksonville Artists Guild.

This exhibit is free to Museum members with a suggested $5 donation from non-members. The exhibit will be on display July 26 to November 11, 2019. For more information, please call 904-241-5657 or visit www.beachesmuseum.org.

Music has long been an integral part of life in the Beaches community. Everything from dances at the old Jacksonville Beach Pier to concerts at Einstein a Go-Go has helped to shape the entertainment scene at the Beaches. Sand, Soul, & Rock n’ Roll: Music at the Beaches provides a look at the most popular local trends and venues throughout the 20th century. Memories, events, photographs, and memorabilia that depict a fascinating time of changes in lifestyle and entertainment over only a few generations will be shared with all.

The exhibit has been extended to Sunday, July 21, 2019.

The Beaches Museum & History Park is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibit “Vibrancy & Illumination” by artist Jeffrey Luque.

Luque’s highly detailed large-scale floral paintings are inspired by his time in the desert where the sparse landscape emphasized the singular beauty of the plants. Upon returning to his hometown of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, Luque began his “Girl with Flowers” series which pushed his technical and creative skills to a new level. Using pointillism to highlight and add depth to the larger than life subjects of his paintings, Luque transforms oil paint and canvas into snapshots of natural beauty.

Jeffrey Luque grew up in Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach. Although always inspired by nature, his painting career didn’t begin until the age of 23 when he experimented with oil paints on large canvases. He is entirely self-taught. This event is free to Museum members with a suggested $5 donation from non-members. The exhibit will be on display October 11 – February 17. For more information please call 904-241-5657.

From the 1910s to the 1970s, Jacksonville Beach’s boardwalk served as a hub of entertainment for visitors and locals alike. Amusements, dance halls, snack bars and parades made for a vibrant coastal destination. Jacksonville Beach or Bust!: A Look Back at the Boardwalk provides not only an opportunity to reminisce but also to explore the boardwalk’s role in shaping a community. The exhibit will highlight the range of experiences as told through photographs, artifacts, and the personal accounts of those who remember this rich piece of Beaches history. See it online! –> Jacksonville Beach or Bust!: A Look Back at the Boardwalk

A Storyteller Event held on August 11 will also feature long time residents as they describe and retell their first hand accounts of life, and the experience of growing up, at the Boardwalk. 

Please join us Friday, June 8 for an Opening Night Reception for this exhibit from 6-8 p.m. in the main building of the Beaches Museum.  This event is free to Museum members with a suggested $5 donation for non-members.  For further information please call (904) 241-5657.

The Beaches Museum & History Park is pleased to announce the exhibit “Nature Reconstructed” by artist Lana Shuttleworth.

Her highly original art uses common plastic castoff materials, particularly traffic safety cones, to create lavish landscapes and sculptural figures that challenge the viewer’s comprehension. The Los Angeles Times said that in her work “you find yourself looking at these everyday plastic objects in a whole new way.”

Lana has exhibited throughout the West coast and the East coast, with reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, ArtScene, Florida Times-Union and nationwide Associated Press articles. Her artwork was also featured on the quiz show, Jeopardy. She was recently the cover artist for the prestigious art and literary journal, Cincinnati Review, which featured an eight-page spread of her work. The Beaches Museum is proud to showcase the thought-provoking work of this astonishing and talented artist.

The exhibit will be on display February 9 – June 3. For more information please call 904-241-5657.

Ponte Vedra Beach is recognized as a thriving resort community, internationally famous for its contributions to the world of golf. However, only 100 years ago it was still a largely uninhabited, swamp-filled area with a very different community just beginning to pave its way into existence!

Join the Beaches Museum & History Park in recognizing Ponte Vedra Beach’s predecessor: Mineral City. Due largely to the discovery of valuable minerals in its sands in the mid-1910s, the area became home to a mineral mining operation led by George A. Pritchard and Henry H. Buckman.

The exhibit is filled with personal photographs depicting life in the wild Florida terrain and scenes of a vibrant mining town that stand in stark contrast to the Ponte Vedra Beach of today. The Museum will explore the life of this relatively short-lived community and its transition from mining minerals to boasting world-class golf resorts.

Please join us Friday, October 20 for an Opening Night Reception for this exhibit from 6-8 p.m. in the main building of the Beaches Museum.  This event is free to Museum members with a suggested $5 donation for non-members.  For further information please call (904) 241-5657.

Thank you to our event sponsors: