Lakeland Arts & Entertainment: Cast Your Vote, Attend A Pow Wow

AUBURNDALE, FL — The 27th annual Spirit of the Buffalo Pow Wow and Native American Festival at the International Market World Flea and Farmers Market in Auburndale, 1052 U.S. 92 W, will take place Feb. 3 to 5.

The event features crafts, intertribal dance competitions, historic Native American village displays, workshops and more than 60 exhibitors.

Those attending will also see artifacts, crafts and live demonstrations by more than 20 tribes from all over the nation, including the Luck of the Wheel dance competition, tomahawk throwing, bow and arrow tutorials, flint knapping and Stone Age fire-making.

The event will feature authentic Native American food as well.

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Cast Your Vote For The Florida Children's Museum

The Florida Children's Museum of Polk County is among the nominees for USA Today's 10 Best children's museums in the country.

The museum is urging fans to vote daily until polls close on Monday, Feb. 13, at noon, to help the Florida Children's Museum receive the honor of the top children's museum in the country.

The winning museums, as determined by the number of votes they receive, will be announced on Friday, Feb. 24. Among their competition are the Glazer Children's Museum in Tampa, Louisiana Children's Museum, Mississippi Children's Museum, Delaware Children's Museum, Crayola Experience in Pennsylvania, the City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, Boston Children's Museum and Chicago Children's Museum.

The Florida Children’s Museum, formerly the Explorations V Children’s Museum at its previous location, opened in the fall at Bonnet Springs Park in Lakeland.

The 47,800-square-foot Florida Children's Museum contains two stories of interactive exhibits designed for children from babies to 12 years old.

Exhibits include Design Park where older kids can create an aerodynamic paper airplane, build a home out of LEGOs and experiment with magnet tiles.

The Watermelon Seeds Exhibit is a large climbing apparatus that celebrates the growing watermelon-producing industry in Polk County. Kids can begin climbing at the roots and make their way to a slide behind a giant slice of watermelon.

Youngsters can also prepare "watermelons" for market and then load them into a watermelon delivery truck.

Since Lakeland is home to Publix, the museum wouldn't be complete without a Publix supermarket exhibit where kids can check out groceries on scanners and use touch-screen cash registers.

Kids will also find a child-size farm stand, orange juice factory and pizza food truck.

At the City Play area, kids can pretend to be a sheriff's deputy or firefighter and drive miniature versions of a sheriff's car and fire truck and put out fires with hoses, try their hand at being a 911 operator using real maps on a computer screen, and be a weather forecaster at the Bay News 9 and Central Florida 13 Weather Center, where they'll find wind sound machines and cameras to create video forecasts.

Other exhibits include the Found Sound booth where kids can try different musical instruments and experiment with different backgrounds with a Green Screen.

A coming outdoor space will feature a fruit and vegetable garden, a 100-foot alligator named Blinky that kids can climb on and the Mosaic Dig Pit where kids can search for fossils.

The Works Of Edward Hopper And Guy Pène Du Bois

"Edward Hopper and Guy Pène Du Bois: Painting the Real" will be on display at the Polk Museum of Art, 800 E Palmetto St., Lakeland, through Sunday, March 26.

This original Polk Museum of Art exhibition comprises approximately 60 works and focuses on Hopper and Pène du Bois, two thematically different but stylistically overlapping artists who became lifelong friends from the time of their earliest studies at the New York School of Art.

Hopper and Pène du Bois shared a deep interest in representing the evolving modern worlds around them — New York City, Paris, suburban and rural America — and each refracted those worlds through his own unique lens of Realism. Both were also celebrated in their own era as masters of and authorities on American art and Realism.

Despite the close connections between Hopper and Pène du Bois in life and in their art, "Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois: Painting the Real" is the first to examine these two American masters side by side and in the context of a full museum exhibition.

The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.