The Coral Springs Center for the Arts is a modern style 1,471-seat theatre and art museum in

Coral Springs, Florida Coral Springs, officially the City of Coral Springs, is a city in Broward County, Florida, United States. The city is located approximately northwest of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Fort Lauderdale. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 U.S. C ...

. The facilities include a

theater Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actor, actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The p ...

which hosts

broadway shows Broadway theatre,Although ''theater'' is generally the spelling for this common noun in the United States (see American and British English spelling differences), 130 of the 144 extant and extinct Broadway venues use (used) the spelling ''Th ...

and their home studio, Next Stop Broadway. The studio also hosts many audition workshops. The facility also hosts the Coral Springs Museum of Art, which features changing exhibits of works by nationally-recognized artists and Florida artists.

History

During a community visioning exercise in the City of Coral Springs in the early 1980s, the participants indicated that there was a need for a

community center Community centres, community centers, or community halls are public locations where members of a community tend to gather for group activities, social support, public information, and other purposes. They may sometimes be open for the whole co ...

to host meetings and events, as well as serve as a hub for recreational activities. As part of a large general obligation bond issuance for parks and a public safety facility, $8 million was allocated for the community center, which was expanded to include a

gym A gymnasium, also known as a gym, is an indoor location for athletics. The word is derived from the ancient Greek term " gymnasium". They are commonly found in athletic and fitness centres, and as activity and learning spaces in educational ins ...

nasium, which had also been identified as a need. During the construction, many consultants and engineers worked on the facility, which was designed by

Donald Singer Donald Robert James Singer (20 August 1954 – 11 June 2022) was a British clinical pharmacologist who was the president of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. Biography He was born in Forres, Scotland and attended schools in Iraq, Bahra ...

, a local architect of international stature. Due to space limitations, a novel solution to the need for

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

courts and

auditorium An auditorium is a room built to enable an audience to hear and watch performances. For movie theatres, the number of auditoria (or auditoriums) is expressed as the number of screens. Auditoria can be found in entertainment venues, community ...

space was developed by combining the two. The two-court gymnasium opened directly into the

, with portable seating used to service both. When facing south, the bleachers served as the

mezzanine A mezzanine (; or in Italian language, Italian, a ''mezzanino'') is an intermediate floor in a building which is partly open to the double-height ceilinged floor below, or which does not extend over the whole floorspace of the building, a loft ...

of the theater, when facing north as

grandstand A grandstand is a normally permanent structure for seating spectators. This includes both auto racing and horse racing. The grandstand is in essence like a single section of a stadium, but differs from a stadium in that it does not wrap a ...

s for the gymnasium. During the three-year construction, cost-overruns totaling another $1 million and several contractor bankruptcies forced many “value engineering” decisions to be made, including reducing the stage and fly tower space, reducing the number of classrooms, and downgrading material specifications. The basic envelope of the building however, remained the same. The facility opened in 1989 as a division of the Parks & Recreation Department. Before a year had passed it had become evident that although the building had been designed primarily for recreation activities, the demand for cultural activities far outweighed the level of use the facility was generating. By 1990, the City Centre (as it was then called) was made into its own department separate from Parks & Recreation and theater professionals were recruited to run the facility. In 1994 the City committed funds generated from revenue bonds to fix the acoustical and space problems in the facility. At the same time, a wealthy artist was courting the City to partner in building an

art museum An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own Collection (artwork), collection. It might be in public or private ownership and may be accessible to all or have restrictions in place. A ...

. The two projects were a natural match and a total of $4.5 million ($1.5 million from the patron) was allocated to the project. The renovated facility reopened in 1996 and the complex was renamed The Coral Springs Center for the Arts.

Coral Springs Museum of Art

Opened in 1997, the focus of the Coral Springs Museum of Art is on highlighting present day, nationally-recognized artists and Florida artists who create traditional, Modern, Postmodern and

digital art Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various names ...

. Each year the museum also hosts an exhibition by members of the Coral Springs Artist Guild. Recent exhibitions have included works by Pablo Cano,

Scott Draves Scott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms. He is also a v ...

Clyde Butcher Clyde Butcher (born September 6, 1942) is an American large-format camera photographer known for wilderness photography of the Florida landscape. He began his career doing color photography before switching to large-scale black-and-white landscap ...

William Glackens William James Glackens (March 13, 1870 – May 22, 1938) was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School, which rejected the formal boundaries of artistic beauty laid-down by the conservative National Academy of De ...

and Charles Mills. On May 9, 2015 the Coral Springs Museum of Art hosted its inaugural comic book convention, Comics Fest Coral Springs. The event featured panels on costuming, comics creation, a Quick Draw competition, and cartooning lessons, as well as vendors and an Artist Alley. The Coral Springs Museum of Art offers art instruction in ceramics, painting techniques, illustration, and mixed media to age levels ranging from child to adult, and operates an art camp program during the summer.

References

External links

Coral Springs Center for the Arts

Coral Springs Museum of Art
{{authority control 1989 establishments in Florida Performing arts centers in Florida Theatres in Florida Buildings and structures in Coral Springs, Florida Community centers in Florida Museums in Broward County, Florida Art museums and galleries in Florida Tourist attractions in Broward County, Florida