Before I went exploring for art in Central Florida's Polk County, I believed good art in Florida thrived in the usual urban epicenters: Tampa/St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Miami. Visits to each metropolis presented so many cultural diversions that any sophisticate would leave assured that the fine arts were alive and well exactly where she hoped to find them. Central Florida, I imagined, with its patchwork of lakes and woodland country, stitched together by small towns and home to Florida's Natural Orange Juice, was a worthy subject for landscape paintings. But not, I thought, the kind of place that shows them.

I was wrong. It's true that these lovely towns with their rustic, bygone touches warrant artistic study: Warhol could have done a number on the vintage citrus labels my husband, Ryan, and I saw displayed everywhere. But cultural venues displaying meaningful work were everywhere, too. From top-notch museums to restored churches doubling as art centers, history museums to symphonies, Polk County's cultural venues are fresh, dynamic alternatives to what you find on the usual cultural circuit. I left these museums and galleries with my calendar circled (changing exhibitions, choral shows and holiday festivals here are appointment-important) and my cultural misconceptions corrected.

Not a Still Life
From the moment the Lake Wales Art Center appears on the road like a Spanish Mission-style mirage, Ryan and I know we're in for something different. The church, with its cupolas and bell towers, dates back to 1927. Set to be demolished in the 1980s, the community rallied and gave the building new life as a home for the Lake Wales Arts Council. We enter the new Michael Crews gallery and find ourselves surrounded by red earthenware and pottery pieces in varying shades of rust, a color that recalls the stucco exterior of the church itself. The space is airy and well lit, with pedestals featuring work by regional and national potters. The exhibit will be switched out soon enough, replaced by pieces from the permanent collection, new work and student exhibits.

We shuffle into the old building, also restored and all gleaming wood floors and white walls. We spy New Guinea masks lurking in corners, a group of mixed-media pieces and an arts library. In the church, we're surprised by a kind of artistic "accident." The stained glass windows here are comprised of chunky blocks of colored glass, separated by not a little cement. An inexperienced company put them in the 1970s, and they have an odd Cubist allure. And they're rare: only two examples of this mistake remain intact. The church's lantern is painted with stars and clouds, and there are wrought-iron lights and lots of stone. The stage is small, but the Art Center takes full advantage of it. Chorale concerts, small plays and chamber music performances are held throughout the year.

Upstairs, local artists teach classes to the community. The transition from the bold formal display in the new gallery to the quiet serenity of the church and now to a bustling workshop complete with its own kiln is exciting indeed. There's a sense of movement and activity, the idea that a community can create an artistic space that functions on many levels.

Orange and Art Groves
Standing before a bicentennial quilt at the Lake Wales Museum & Cultural Center (commonly known as The Depot), I realize that local history museums are also galleries. Ryan and I are still reeling at the fact that Lake Wales is a town of 12,000 that puts on an annual juried art show that drew 20,000 visitors last year. Then we find that The Depot – a small pink onetime railroad station with a 1926 caboose out back – makes a kind of art out of industry. We pass from a room that features an original parachute dress and a German machine gun to a perfect replication of a trainmaster's desk, complete with a mailhoop. In another room we discover a Native American exhibit with a chickee, Seminole clothing and a 1,500-year-old dugout canoe. We're immersed in local history in the Lake Wales Room, which houses the permanent collection and includes old telephone directories, letters and an original Highwaymen painting.

The freight room, built in 1938, returns us to just after the Florida land boom. Here, each period industry gets a tribute, with representations of turpentining, a selection of citrus labels and a whirring model train. There are dollhouse cracker houses, cattle horns and, finally, passage into the caboose itself, which is remarkably preserved. Each item at The Depot is displayed with all the consideration such artifacts require. With exhibits changing frequently, The Depot is vibrant and intimate.

The Polk County Historical Museum in Bartow is equally fascinating. The sober neoclassical building looks imposing when we pull up, but once inside the Dixon rotunda, its floor handlaid with mosaic tiles, we encounter more preservationist spirit and wide hallways leading to countless rooms. The first floor has a children's Discovery Room and a Natural World Room, where Florida pioneerism goes interactive. As this was once a courthouse, we head for the restored courtroom upstairs, where plays like "The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge" are performed using local lawyers and judges. Here too we find a local gallery depicting the community timeline, and the exhibits are rich in visual and tactile representation. Period clothing, photographs and tools are arranged thoughtfully in cabinets, and each period is shown in such authentic, characterizing detail that Ryan and I keep returning to displays we've already scrutinized. Admission here is free, and the museum is so spacious that you could lose yourself several times. The scale is just right, I think, for capturing the area's rich historical, social and environmental persona.

The Artful Dodger
Far from dodging art, we keep running into it. In Lakeland, it's right there on Lake Mirror in the form of a public sculpture, Tribute to the Volunteer Spirit. Rising vividly from a simple pedestal, the work is anything but static. Colorful and evocative, the piece proudly demonstrates the abundant force of volunteerism. But it's the Florida Outdoor Sculpture Competition held in conjunction with the Polk Museum of Art that stirs this community to make public art a priority. Lake Mirror Park and the Lemon Street Promenade showcase placeholders in this national competition.

In the Polk Museum of Art’s sculpture garden, we find a water wall and a leonine skeleton bolting out from the wall. Inside, we stand in the light that streams from an atrium ceiling and try to decide where to start. There's the permanent gallery of Pre-Columbian work, or we can begin in the Dorothy Jenkins gallery where changing exhibits are shown, some brought in from regional and national collections, others supplemented by the museum's permanent collection and still others devoted to regional work entirely.

We find ourselves drifting easily through the nine galleries, taking our time, attentively reading the name cards. The museum literature boasts that it's more than a museum, and this we confirm early on. We learn that the astute, wide-ranging exhibits in the first galleries are rivaled by another devoted exclusively to student work. The museum is also a teaching institution, a stage for alternative theatre, a movie house and a research library. Its identity is decidedly progressive and outreaching. The 153-seat auditorium hosts symposiums and brown bag lunch discussions. The gift shop is a gallery in itself, and upstairs we find classrooms, workshops and serious pieces from the permanent collection on the walls. Here kids and community folks learn the language of art, with a variety of hands on activities and classes and camps energizing the museum's mission, extending the community's cultural conversation and helping to produce more work for the student gallery downstairs. Ryan and I stop before another quilt – this time made by nine year olds who studied Picasso's Guernica. The quilt is beautiful, reflecting the process in big stitches and their new understanding of Picasso's work in abstract patches.

In the Heart of the Arts
The small towns in Central Florida's Polk County each offer distinct takes on history and culture, with dozens of antiques shops in Winter Haven and Auburndale, fine dining at Antiquarian in Lakeland and independent galleries popping up everywhere. We take lunch at the Stuart Avenue café in Lake Wales, where I open my calendar to October and November and start making notes. Choosing from Lake Wales' own Pioneer Days, the Bartow Main Street Market and Antique Fair, the Polk County Museum of Arts' blues festival "Red, White & Blues," and Bok Tower Gardens’s "Sunset and Symphony" with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra seems a tall order, but, as is often repeated by famous artists, "Life is short; art is long." My idea of art and where to find it is still being made. Polk County is one vibrant patch.