Salvador Dalí Museum

Shortly before marrying in 1942, Reynolds and Eleanor Morse attended a Dalí retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Intrigued by the artist's subject matter, and impressed by his draftsmanship, they bought their first painting a year later. This purchase began a 40-year relationship as patrons and friends of Dalí that resulted in a comprehensive collection of original Dalí work. Until 1971, the Morses displayed their collection in their Cleveland, Ohio, home. In March 1971, with Salvador Dalí presiding over the opening, the Morses opened a museum adjacent to their office building in Beachwood, Ohio. By the end of the decade, with an overwhelming number of visitors, the Morses decided to again move their collection. A Wall Street Journal article titled "U.S. Art World Dillydallies Over Dalí" caught the attention of the St. Petersburg, Florida, community, who rallied to bring the collection to the area. A marine warehouse in downtown St. Petersburg was rehabilitated and the museum opened on March 7, 1982, where it remained until 2010. In mid-2008, a new location for the Dali museum was announced. A new building was designed by Yann Weymouth of the architectural firm Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum and built by The Beck Group under the leadership of then-CEO Henry C. Beck III. Located on the downtown waterfront next to the Mahaffey Theater, on the former site of the Bayfront Center (an arena which had been demolished in 2004), the new, larger, and more storm-secure museum was opened on January 11, 2011. On April 18, 2012, the AIA's Florida Chapter placed the building on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places.

The museum's collection includes 96 oil paintings, over 100 watercolors and drawings, 1,300 graphics, photographs, sculptures, and objets d'art, plus an extensive archival library. In July 2020, the museum added a new exhibit called "At Home with Dali". Permanent collection displays are periodically rotated, and several temporary shows are mounted each year. The museum is home to more masterpieces of Dalí than any other museum in the world, including the large-scale paintings The Hallucinogenic Toreador, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, The Ecumenical Council, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. In addition to displaying the work of Dalí, the museum aims to educate the public and promote understanding, enjoyment, and scholarly examination of art through the exhibition of works by Dalí and artists of similar vision. With the exception of the Dalí Theater-Museum created by Dalí himself in his hometown of Figueres in Spain, the St. Petersburg Dalí Museum has the world's largest collections of Dalí's works. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Salvador Dalí Museum made their gallery available for viewing online.

The museum offers outreach and education opportunities to the local schools and community. In the 2021–2022 school year their art mobile visited 20 Pinellas County schools, the summer program had 50 Title I students enrolled, and they sent volunteers to 31 local elementary schools for the Great American Teach In. In 2022, the museum partenered with Dartmouth College on eye-tracking software that could compare the way a guest looks at a painting and the way the curator looks at the same painting.

Picasso and the Allure of the South was on display from January 22, 2022, until May 22, 2022, and explored the influence of Southern Europe on Pablo Picasso’s artwork over six decades of his career. The exhibit included 79 paintings, drawings, and collages, and was organized in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris. In 2023, the museum displayed a student surrealist exhibition, as it has each year since 1992 for students in Hillsborough County. There is an indefinite exhibit of augmented reality. The museum has placed Dali's largest works in the collection in an app. When standing in front of the paintings, visitors can open the app and use their phone camera to scan the painting and see parts of the work highlighted, watch them move, and learn more about the figures within the art. Another indefinite exhibit is the Dreams of Dali in Virtual Reality. Here participants put on VR headsets and step into some of Dali's work. Participants can walk around, through the desert, up the towers, and into hidden rooms within Dali's Archeological Reminiscences of Millet's "Angelus."