Best Museum

For much of its half-century history, the Boca Raton Museum of Art was crammed into a woefully inadequate structure on Palmetto Park Road -- an acoustically atrocious set of galleries that was hardly worthy of the extensive holdings. Under the stewardship of long-time executive director George S. Bolge, the museum built a solid track record of creative programming, but there was no getting around it: the building sucked. That changed in January, when the new and improved Boca Raton Museum of Art opened at its spacious, not to mention gorgeous, new digs at the northern end of Mizner Park. With 44,000 square feet and two levels, the museum now has a showcase not only for major exhibitions such as its inaugural Picasso retrospective but also for displays drawn from its permanent collection, which includes pre-Columbian art, African art, English ceramics, modern and contemporary European and American art, photography, and a world-class collection of prints.