A&H Book Club: November 2026 Meeting
2026-11-15 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Maitland Art Center Studio 10, 210 W. Packwood Ave., Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Make new friends at the A&H Members-Only Book Club! Join A&H Director of Development Jessi VanPelt every other month to share your opinions on fascinating topics in the realms of art and history on our beautiful campus. At the end of each meeting, we’ll vote on what book to read together next. We will meet in Studio 10.
November’s Book: TBD
Book Club meetings are just $5 (which includes refreshments). Space is limited so you must register in advance.
This event is for A&H members only. If you’re not a current A&H member, you must join or renew before Book Club date.
Register >>
If you have any questions or need to verify your membership status, contact Jessi at jvanpelt@artandhistory.org.

Little Creatives & Me
2026-11-18 10:00 - 11:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Songs, stories and art time, especially for babies and toddlers and their very special person.
Join us in the main garden on the historic grounds of the Art & History Museums. We’ll have a themed circle and story time plus an art activity especially for littles! A snack will be provided too. Recommend age: under 3, and their very special person (parent, grandparent, caregiver). Older siblings are always welcome!
Space is limited and registration will close 2 days before the program date. Pre-registration is required >> email Jcohen@artandhistory.org
Please arrive about 5 minutes early to give yourself time to park and walk over to the main garden. We will begin promptly at 10 am. If you’d like, please bring a picnic blanket for your family.
This program is brought to you free of charge by the Art & History Museums of Maitland.
2025-26 Free Family Programs at A&H are generously supported by a grant from Duke Energy Foundation.

Stories in Stone: A Walking Tour of the Maitland Art Center
2026-12-05 10:00 - 11:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Step behind the gates of the Maitland Art Center and into a world shaped by vision, imagination, and legacy.
This one-hour guided tour takes you through the gardens and courtyards of a campus like no other—founded in the 1930s by American artist and architect J. André Smith as a haven for modern experimentation and creative freedom.
Click here to reserve your tickets>>
Experience the Tour
As your guide leads you through the campus, you’ll trace the story of Smith’s life—from his childhood in Hong Kong to his service in World War I to the founding of the Maitland Art Center, which he called “Espero,” a Spanish word for hope. These experiences—and his Episcopal faith—influenced the extraordinary design of the campus: a blend of Mayan Revival architecture with embedded Christian symbolism and East Asian motifs. The result is a surreal, immersive environment—at once spiritual, exotic, and modern—where over 2,500 carvings, sculptures, and reliefs adorn nearly every surface.
Along the way, you’ll learn about the community of artists who lived and worked here between the 1930s and 1950s—names like Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, and Doris Lee—and how this hidden Florida enclave became one of the state’s most forward-thinking creative centers.

Included with the Tour

Maitland Art Center Gallery
Maitland History Museum
Telephone Museum

Tickets

$4-$6 (includes 3 museums & grounds)
Free for members
Suitable for all ages; recommended for ages 13+

Click here to reserve your tickets>>

First Saturdays Open Studios
2027-01-02 11:00 - 14:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Connect with our Studio Resident Artists and see what pieces they’re currently working on!
On the first Saturday of every month from 11am–4pm, all of our Studio Artists will open their doors and welcome you into their creative spaces. This is your chance to connect directly with the artists, explore their works-in-progress, and ask questions about their practice.
Bonus: Enjoy FREE admission to our museums on these days!
This new program comes directly from your feedback asking for more predictable opportunities to engage with our artists and community.
Grab your FREE tickets here!
Plus, receive a 10% discount when you sign up for a membership during First Saturday events!

Opening Reception: Between Starshine and Clay
2027-01-22 18:30 - 21:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Celebrate the opening of Between Starshine and Clay, our newest exhibition, featuring art by Osa Atoe and Kaabo Clay Collective, with live music, a food truck, and a cash bar on our beautiful National Historic Landmark campus!

Click here to reserve your FREE tickets
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
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.

Between Starshine and Clay: Ceramics Across Diaspora, Land, and Lineage
2027-01-23 11:00 - 2027-04-11 16:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
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.

Last Wednesdays at A&H
2027-01-27 17:30 - 20:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Enjoy free gallery admission, grab a drink from our cash bar, and discover the beauty of our main garden after hours every Last Wednesday of the month. Jumpstart conversations with free tours of our current gallery exhibitions by our Chief Curator or a free lecture by a visiting expert in art or history every month from 6-7pm! Find your creative community every Last Wednesday at the Art & History Museums of Maitland.
Click here to reserve your spot>>

Last Wednesday at A&H
2027-01-27 17:30 - 20:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
Enjoy free gallery admission, grab a drink from our cash bar, and discover the beauty of our main garden after hours every Last Wednesday of the month. Jumpstart conversations with free tours of our current gallery exhibitions by our Chief Curator or a free lecture by a visiting expert in art or history every month from 6-7pm! Find your creative community every Last Wednesday at the Art & History Museums of Maitland.
Click here to reserve your spot >>

Last Wednesday at A&H
2027-02-24 17:30 - 20:00, 2027-03-31 17:30 - 20:00, 2027-04-28 17:30 - 20:00, 2027-05-26 17:30 - 20:00, 2027-06-30 17:30 - 20:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States

Opening Reception: 100 Years
2027-05-07 18:30 - 21:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
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!

Click here to reserve your FREE tickets
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

100 Years: Jules André Smith and the Sand Roads to Solitude
2027-05-08 11:00 - 2027-09-05 16:00 | Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave, Maitland, FL, 32751, United States
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
