Opening Reception: 100 Years
May 7, 2027 @ 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Art & History Museums – Maitland
Celebrate the opening of Between Starshine and Clay, our newest exhibition, featuring art by founder J. André Smith, with live music, a food truck, and a cash bar on our beautiful National Historic Landmark campus!
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Admission, to this event is FREE! However, donations of any size are gratefully accepted with your order or at the event, in order to support our many free community programs!
About the Exhibition
A century ago, an artist followed unpaved roads into the Florida interior. Today, those roads lead to the Maitland Art Center.
What André Smith found here was not the Florida most visitors knew: there were no crowded coastlines, no tourist spectacle. Instead, he discovered an inland world of small towns and quiet villages shaded by stately oaks and towering pines, of lake-country breezes and unhurried lives lived among cabbage palms and Spanish moss. This simpler, slower Florida captivated him completely, inspiring a body of work that marked a sharp departure from his earlier work. Central Florida didn’t just change what Smith painted: it changed how he saw the world.
100 Years: Jules André Smith and the Sand Roads to Solitude marks one hundred years since that first arrival, a decade before Smith would find what is today the Maitland Art Center. The exhibition takes its structure from The Sand Roads to Solitude, his 1951 essay published in Ford Times, written not as a traveler passing through, but as someone who had long since made Florida his home. Visitors move through the galleries following the arc of Smith’s own words, with sketchbooks, works on paper, paintings, and archival material illuminating the landscapes and communities that shaped him.
Among the exhibition’s most significant threads is Smith’s sustained attention to Eatonville, America’s first incorporated Black township, and to the grove workers and everyday lives of Central Florida’s communities. These encounters shaped his vision as much as the landscape did, and that relationship is given the space it deserves here. Theatrical vignettes and storytelling elements throughout the galleries bring Smith’s written narrative into the physical space, deepening the experience beyond the works on view.
The exhibition coincides with the theatrical release of André Smith: Espero and the Reasonable Madness, a documentary by White Ladder Productions, bringing renewed attention to one of Florida’s most distinctive artistic legacies.
“These roads lead to the Florida I know. Slow down, and choose one.”
— André Smith, Ford Times, December 1951