The Situated Body: Reconfiguring the Symbolic
2026-01-24 11:00 - 2026-04-05 16:00 (America/New_York) | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
About the Exhibition
From soot on paper to felt, The Situated Body, an exhibition of the work of Mexican sculptor Jacobo Alonso, redefines the classical depictions of the human form through contemporary materials. Alonso transforms traditional drawing and sculptural practices into expressive and tactile abstractions, all referencing the configuration and movement of the human form. Inspired by both pre-Columbian traditions and the Art Center’s Mayan Revival architecture, his work, some created during his 2025 residency at A&H, challenges assumptions about form, identity, and materiality.
Alonso stated, “Each body possesses its own geography and undergoes numerous inevitable mutations that reveal the genealogy of its image and form. It is a territory inherent to the individual, tracing the constellation of their identity yet always appealing to an inherent instability”.
This exhibition is the first time that Alonso’s “fumage” works of soot on paper will be shown alongside his vibrant sculptural works of reconfigured felt.
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All 2025-26 free programs at A&H are supported by a grant from Duke Energy Foundation.

a loom, a fence, a wire, a thread
2026-04-25 11:00 - 2026-07-05 16:00
About the Exhibition
Mär Martinez, a Syrian American artist and Fulbright scholar, presents new work developed during her 2024–25 Fulbright research in Istanbul. Her project investigates traditional Turkish and Middle Eastern textile techniques while reflecting on themes of urbanization, surveillance, and cultural memory. Drawing from nighttime walks through Istanbul’s neighborhoods, Martinez transforms architectural barriers, barbed wire, fences, and centuries old textile patterns, into motifs of both resistance and resilience. Her haunting paintings explore personal heritage, global textile history, and contemporary social commentary in poetic, layered form.
The initial threads of this, her first solo museum exhibition, created in Istanbul and New York, began at the Art & History Museums of Maitland during her 2021–2023 Studio Artist Residency. This exhibition represents both a new artistic departure and an expanded exploration of the themes she began contemplating during her residency.
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US
2026-07-25 11:00 - 2026-09-27 16:00
Join us for the opening reception on Friday, July 24 from 6:30-9pm: Meet the curator, enjoy live music, food truck, and a cash bar all just 15 minutes from downtown Orlando on our beautiful National Historic Landmark campus.
Free Tickets Here

About the Exhibition
“Ours is the wide-open mind with gusts of ideas blowing through it and demanding manifestation.”
Drawing inspiration from Jules André Smith’s 1939 essay, “An Insanitorium of Art,” US embraces Smith’s vision of an artistic practice rooted in inquiry and intellectual openness, and examines how generations of artists have engaged with the Art Center as a site for creative exploration.
The exhibition brings together works by six Bok Fellows from the 1930s and 40s, artists who spent their winters working at the Center, alongside selections by Smith himself. Named in honor of Mary Curtis Bok, whose support was instrumental to the establishment of the Art Center, these historical artists’ works are presented in dialogue with works by nine of our contemporary resident artists, the intellectual and artistic heirs of Smith’s Bok Fellows program.
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Vilomah: Against the Natural Order
2026-10-17 11:00 - 2027-01-03 16:00
Join us for the opening reception on Friday, October 16 from 6:30-9pm: Meet the curator, enjoy live music, food truck, and a cash bar all just 15 minutes from downtown Orlando on our beautiful National Historic Landmark campus.

About the Exhibition
Soude Dadras is an artist, curator, and educator currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in Iran and graduated from Islamic Azad University with a bachelor’s degree in Persian Rugs. Dadras was awarded her MFA from the Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta. In her solo exhibition, Vilomah: Against the Natural Order, Dadras investigates the traumatic sociocultural experiences she encountered firsthand in Iran, as well the processes and rituals of healing which enabled her to turn her pain into positivity. This unique installation of traditional handwork, found objects, video, abandoned textiles, and discarded data will seek to centralize disparate voices in this multidisciplinary exhibition.
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Between Starshine and Clay: Ceramics Across Diaspora, Land, and Lineage
2027-01-23 11:00 - 2027-04-11 16:00
About the Exhibition
Clay contains memories. It holds the impression of hands, the memory of fire, and the knowledge passed from one generation to the next without always being written down.
Between Starshine and Clay: Ceramics Across Diaspora, Land, and Lineage opens the 2027 season at the Art & History Museums of Maitland with a major exhibition exploring the enduring legacy of African and African American ceramics through contemporary studio practice. Rooted in themes of diaspora, memory, land, and shared cultural tradition, the exhibition brings together the work of artist Osa Atoe and the Kaabo Clay Collective in a conversation that moves across continents, centuries, and communities.
Atoe’s work begins with the ground beneath her feet. Her functional vessels and sculptural forms are shaped from locally sourced Florida clay, drawing equally from the state’s landscape and from traditional Nigerian water vessel forms. These are objects made for communal use, to be poured from, passed around a table, and integrated into the rhythms of everyday life. In honoring pottery as a collective cultural practice, Atoe connects the contemporary studio to a far longer arc of African craftsmanship and regional identity, insisting that beauty and utility have never needed to be separate.
The Kaabo Clay Collective extends that arc across generations. This section of the exhibition brings together influential elder Black ceramic artists whose contributions have shaped the field, including Florida-based ceramicists Yvonne Tucker and David Mack, alongside examples of Afro-Native colonoware that trace the intertwined ceramic histories of African and Indigenous peoples in the American South. In gathering these voices and forms together, the exhibition acknowledges that artistic lineage is not only inherited, but also actively tended.
Between Starshine and Clay offers a significant contribution to Florida’s cultural landscape and to the broader history of Black ceramics in the United States, providing a reminder that the knowledge carried in clay is older, and more resilient, than any single tradition.

100 Years: Jules André Smith and the Sand Roads to Solitude
2027-05-08 11:00 - 2027-09-05 16:00
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
