Museums - Appleton Museum of Art

Located within the forty-four-acre Appleton Cultural Complex, the Appleton Museum of Art is one of the South’s premier art repositories and education centers. The Appleton Cultural Center was founded in the early 1980s, and in 1986, the museum’s beautiful travertine-clad museum by the architectural firm The Design Arts Group of Tampa was completed and presented to the City of Ocala by its founder Arthur Appleton. In 1996, the 22,000 square foot Edith-Marie Appleton Wing was added to the original 45,000 square foot building. Since July 1990, the museum has been part of Florida State University and Central Florida Community College.
Appleton began collecting initially as he traveled through Europe with his parents, browsing the antique shops and galleries with lively interest. Over the years, he purchased not only fine individual pieces, such as Tibetan sculptures from his visit to India in the 1950s, but also entire collections, including the Victor DuBois Collection of African Art. The museum’s first-floor galleries illustrate the variety of cultures in which Appleton was primarily interested and collected, including Mediterranean antiquities, African, Asian, pre-Columbian, European, and American art and artifacts. While the museum was established on these collections, over the years numerous additional donors have expanded the quantity and scope of the permanent collections to include over 8,000 objects dating from 3000 BC to the present.
The ethnographic collection includes approximately 400 African pieces (primarily West African), a dozen Oceanic objects, and approximately 1,500 pre-Columbian works. The latter were mostly purchased in Miami and are strong in West Mexican material as well as many of the various cultures of Peru.