LAKELAND / ART & EDUCATION / INSPIRATION
Daryl Ward
A museum has
more to teach.
By Rob Urban
When Florida Southern College went looking for a permanent museum director, the search kept circling back to the person already doing the job.
Daryl Ward had been interim executive director of Lakeland’s Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art since June 2025. During the national search, college president Jeremy Martin realized he was asking candidates whether they would continue Ward’s work. That was a fairly useful clue. Ward received the permanent appointment, effective March 2, 2026.
The appointment announcement describes initiatives including FSC Voices, a symposium connecting faculty expertise with museum exhibitions. It also describes Ward becoming increasingly invested in the institution during those interim months. Sometimes an appointment marks the arrival of a new vision. This one recognized a relationship that was already taking shape.
For Lakeland, the choice brought a longtime local educator into a role where his classroom could include nearly anyone who walked through the door.
Thirty-two years
before the
museum office.
Ward spent 32 years in Polk County Public Schools, including seven as principal of Harrison School for the Arts. He retired from the district in 2020, worked briefly at Southeastern University, and later led the Polk Arts and Cultural Alliance. His education includes creative writing at Florida State, a master’s degree from Southern Mississippi, and a doctorate from the University of South Florida. He is also a photographer and has taught in Florida Southern’s education department.
That combination interests me. School leadership involves the unglamorous daily work that lets creative people develop: schedules, resources, relationships, and enough continuity for a young person to get better at something difficult.
The museum’s account of his interim appointment also credits his alliance work with arts advocacy, public art, and community recognition. He arrived with experience moving between individual artists and the organizations that help their work reach people. A museum needs both perspectives. Someone has to care about the photograph. Someone also has to make sure the room is open.
Let the students
write the labels.
One of the museum’s 2026 exhibitions offers a particularly good example of what an educational institution can do with an art collection.
For Here & Now, Florida Southern students in Kristen Carter’s contemporary art history course wrote new labels for works acquired by the museum since 2000. The assignment asked them to explain why those works mattered in the present. The artists represented include Alex Katz, Miriam Schapiro, Ed Ruscha, and others whose work gives a student plenty to think about before the first sentence comes easily.
Writing a label is a wonderful exercise in accountability. You have to look, decide what you mean, and make the explanation useful to somebody who has not been sitting beside you all semester. There is only so much room to hide behind impressive vocabulary.
The students’ interpretations became part of the public exhibition. Visitors could encounter the art and the thinking of people learning to understand it. That is a meaningful way for a college museum to connect scholarship with the experience of walking through a gallery.
There is generosity in giving someone a real audience before they have finished learning. A classroom assignment has a known destination: the teacher’s desk. A gallery label goes out into the world beside the work it discusses. The student has to imagine an unfamiliar reader, and the museum has to trust that a developing voice can contribute something worth hearing.
I admire that willingness to share the interpretive work. A museum has authority, but it also has the chance to help people develop their own judgment. Inviting students to make a case beside the art gives them a serious part in the conversation.
This
belongs
here.
Younger students have a place in the building, too. The George W. Jenkins Student Gallery presents work by Polk County schoolchildren, and the museum purchases a piece from each of those exhibitions for its permanent student collection. That collection has grown to more than 300 works. Pieces also travel to public settings, including county offices and schools.
I love the seriousness of purchasing the work. A child’s drawing can receive plenty of affectionate praise. Acquiring it for a collection gives that encouragement another dimension: this belongs here, and we intend to keep it.
The gallery’s schedule includes elementary, middle, and high school artists, with a Harrison senior exhibition planned for 2027. Ward’s former school is part of the larger educational community he now serves from a different address. He did not invent that relationship, but he brings unusually direct knowledge of the young people and teachers on the other side of it.
An artist explains
her own world.
There is room for an experienced artist to explain her own work as well. In a recording published in May 2026, Ward and Laura Putnam participated in the museum’s conversation with Andrea Dezsö. The accompanying description connects Dezsö’s imaginative worlds with her childhood in Transylvania under Romanian communism. Her practice moves among drawing, paper cutting, embroidery, sculpture, printmaking, and installation.
That range is a useful invitation to a visitor. You may arrive because you enjoy one medium and discover another way an artist gives an idea physical form. A paper cut, an embroidered surface, and a sculpture ask different things of the maker and of the person looking.
And the doors
open again next week.
The institution itself has changed substantially. Formerly the Polk Museum of Art, it adopted its current name in 2024 following a gift from the Nick and Ashley Barnett Foundation at GiveWell. Its history and naming account places that gift within a longer civic story: the museum began in 1966, became accredited in 1983, and established its Florida Southern affiliation in 2017. The supporting endowment addresses exhibitions, community programs, and operations.
Operations is an easy word to skim past. It is also what allows the inspiring part to happen again next week. A collection needs care. A teacher needs to know a visit can actually take place. A family needs a dependable place to return to as a child grows.
Room to begin.
For the youngest visitors, the museum’s September 25, 2026 program listing describes Storytime Studio, a free program for ages three to five that combines early literacy, creativity, movement, and social development. That listing includes supplies and welcomes beginners. Three-year-olds rarely arrive with an established position on contemporary art. They do arrive ready to notice things, provided the adults leave them some room.
That wide age range gives Ward’s new role its appeal. A preschooler moving through a story, a teenager seeing her work on a museum wall, a college student wrestling with a label, and an adult listening to an artist can all belong to the same institution.
Elsewhere in this series, Peter Schreyer’s work in Winter Park explores how photography and local history can bring people into cultural life. Ward’s Lakeland story adds another route: keep the doors open to learning at every age, and take the learner seriously enough to give them something worth their attention.
Ward’s long career in education makes this a particularly interesting next chapter. He understands how much preparation sits behind a moment when someone feels able to try. The museum offers many such beginnings, at many ages. I like the thought of a place that can keep meeting a person as their questions change.
About Daryl Ward and the AGB
Who is Daryl Ward?
Daryl Ward is executive director of the Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. His permanent appointment took effect March 2, 2026, following service as interim director beginning in June 2025.
What is Here & Now?
Here & Now is a 2026 exhibition pairing works acquired by the museum since 2000 with new interpretive labels written by Florida Southern College contemporary art history students. The labels consider why the works matter in the present.
Does the museum collect student artwork?
Yes. The museum purchases one work from each exhibition of Polk County schoolchildren’s art in its George W. Jenkins Student Gallery. Its permanent Student Collection contains more than 300 works, some of which are loaned to public locations around the county.
Sources: The AGB’s appointment announcements, exhibition and student-gallery pages, institutional history, artist-conversation description and September 2026 Storytime Studio listing. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about people and places that make curiosity welcome. If that connects with something you are building, or you would simply like to read more, meet Rob.