History

1885 – Founding of Rollins College, Florida’s oldest liberal arts college.

c. 1900 – Contributions to the college of a few oil portraits of college notables, engravings, and a small natural history collection.

1930s – General and Mrs. John Carty donate the first Old Master painting, The Dead Christ with Symbols of Passion by Lavinia Fontana, in 1936. Gifts by Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1937 and 1938 formally inaugurate fine art collecting.

1941 – Jeannette Morse Genius, spouse of Dr. Hugh McKean, president of Rollins College from 1951-1969, donated funds to erect The Morse Gallery of Art on campus. The McKeans introduced a program of exhibitions and encouraged students, faculty, and Florida artists to exhibit their works. During the ‘60s their collection of Tiffany glass was exhibited on campus.

1950s – Gifts to the fledgling collection continue; Winter Park Resident George H. Sullivan makes several major gifts including paintings by William Louis Sonntag and Francesco de Mura.

1960s – Rollins alumni Jack and June Myers donate what would become the backbone of the Museum’s Old Masters collection, including works by Gerolamo Bassano, Jacopo Tintoretto, Thomas Lawrence, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and others.

1970s – George ’35 ’85H and Harriet W. Cornell ’35 HAL ‘90H donate funds to construct a complex to include a new museum, renovating The Morse Gallery of Art. The Cornell Fine Arts Museum opens in 1978.

2000 – Kenneth Curry bequeaths over 30 Bloomsbury Group Paintings and the first endowment restricted for acquisitions.

2006 – The Cornell Fine Arts Museum reopens after renovations including additional galleries, a print study room, and a museum shop.

2008 and 2013 – The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts donates 156 Photographs and Polaroids, as well as several prints, through the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program.

2013- The College opens The Alfond Inn at Rollins, a philanthropic boutique hotel whose proceeds fund student scholarships.

Barbara ’68 and Ted Alfond ’68 donate The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins. The collection continues to grow in 2018 totaling over 400 works on view both at the Museum and the Inn.

2017 – The Museum opens the exhibition Time as Landscape which includes the debut of acquisitions by Julie Mehretu, Richard Mosse, and Luis Camnitzer. Simultanously, a newly commissioned installation by Tomás Saraceno was unveiled at The Alfond Inn.

Patrick Martinez’s first solo exhibition at a museum: Patrick Martinez: American Memorial.

2018 - Towards Impressionism: Landscape Painting from Corot to Monet marks the first time that an exhibition drawn exclusively from the collection of The Musée des Beaux Arts in Reims traveled to the United States; the Museum was one of only two venues nationwide to host this collection.

Barbara ’68 and Ted Alfond ’68 donate 20th century American works in several media that allow the Museum to present a more dynamic and multifaceted history of twentieth-century modernism in the United States.

First solo exhibitions at a museum: Ria Brodell: Devotion; Trong Gia Nguyen: My Myopia; Jamilah Sabur: Ibine Ela Acu/ Water Sun Moon