Jacksonville is a large city in northeastern Florida where the St. John’s River meets the Atlantic Ocean. A regional business center, it has many museums and cultural offerings. Swimming and surfing are popular at nearby barrier island beaches such as Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach. Championship golf courses in the area include Ponte Vedra Beach’s TPC Sawgrass, headquarters of the PGA Tour.
The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens is an art museum in Jacksonville’s Riverside neighborhood. It was founded in 1961, following the death of Ninah Mae Holden Cummer, who willed her collection, home, and gardens to the museum. Its galleries display one of the world’s three most comprehensive collections of Meissen porcelain as well as large collections of American, European, and Japanese art. The grounds also contain two acres of Italian and English gardens begun by Ninah Cummer.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (MOCA Jacksonville) is a contemporary art museum funded and operated as a “cultural resource” of the University of North Florida. Tracing its roots back to the formation of Jacksonville’s Fine Arts Society in 1924, it opened its current 60,000-square-foot (6,000 m2) facility next to the Main Library downtown in 2003. The museum features eclectic permanent and traveling exhibitions and a collection of over 700 works.
The Museum of Science & History (MOSH), located in downtown’s Southbank Riverwalk, specializes in science and local history exhibits. It features a main exhibit that changes quarterly, plus three floors of nature exhibits, an extensive exhibit on the history of Northeast Florida, a hands-on science area and the area’s only astronomy theater, the Bryan Gooding Planetarium.