The Mennello Museum: Folk Art, a 350-Year-Old Oak and a House on Lake Formosa
The world's largest Earl Cunningham collection, kept in Howard Phillips' former home in Loch Haven Park — the smallest museum in the park makes the biggest claim.
3 minute read
The smallest museum in Loch Haven Cultural Park makes the biggest claim: the Mennello Museum of American Art holds the largest collection of Earl Cunningham paintings in existence, and it keeps them on permanent display in a former private home on the shore of Lake Formosa. If you do one cultural thing in Ivanhoe Village, do this. The museum, at 900 E. Princeton St., is the intimate counterweight to everything big and busy in Orlando art — a Smithsonian Affiliate that you can absorb completely in under two hours and remember for years.
A folk artist, a fortune, and a promise kept
Earl Cunningham (1893–1977) was a self-taught American folk artist who painted the East Coast the way it looked in his head: flat, saturated, fantastical seascapes and coastal towns, sailboats under impossible skies, Florida light rendered as pure color. Marilyn and Michael Mennello collected his work with devotion and donated the collection to the city; the museum, established in November 1998 and owned and operated by the City of Orlando, exists to preserve, exhibit and interpret it. Marilyn Mennello is credited with nearly single-handedly building Cunningham’s reputation — which makes the Mennello that rare museum founded not on an institution’s ambition but on two collectors’ conviction that one overlooked painter mattered.
The house on Lake Formosa
The setting does half the persuading. The museum occupies what was once the private home of Howard Phillips, son of Orlando philanthropist Dr. Philip Phillips, tucked into Loch Haven Cultural Park on Lake Formosa’s shore. The scale is domestic, and the museum uses it well: Cunningham’s glowing coastal scenes in rooms that feel like rooms, changing exhibitions of American art — including traveling shows organized through its Smithsonian affiliation — rotating through the galleries alongside works from the City of Orlando’s own permanent collection. Nothing is behind a velvet rope of intimidation. This is art at conversational distance.
The Mayor and the garden
Do not skip the grounds. The Marilyn L. Mennello Sculpture Garden is always open to the public, and its presiding presence is “The Mayor” — a sprawling live oak more than 350 years old, draped in Spanish moss, shading the lawn between the museum and the lake. The garden hosts the museum’s Grounds for Exhibitions program of large-scale sculpture by nationally recognized American artists, installed outdoors year-round. On a clear morning, the sequence — folk paintings inside, monumental sculpture under a 350-year-old oak outside, Lake Formosa beyond — is as good an hour as Orlando offers anywhere.
Why Cunningham lands here
There is a reason this collection lives in Florida. Cunningham spent his later years in St. Augustine, painting the coast he knew — working harbors, pleasure boats, palm-fringed inlets, the whole luminous edge of the state — and his canvases carry a Florida that predates the interstates and the theme parks: hand-built, water-ruled, defiantly colorful. Standing in front of them in a quiet house on Lake Formosa, minutes from downtown, feels less like a museum visit than like being shown someone’s vivid memory of the state before it was developed. Visitors who arrive expecting folk art’s usual modesty tend to leave talking about the color — the blues and greens are almost aggressively joyful, and they hold a room.
How to visit
The museum keeps daytime hours Tuesday through Saturday and Sunday afternoons, closing Mondays; admission is modest by any museum standard. Families should aim for Free Family Funday, held on the second Sunday of each month with art projects and tours, and the museum’s annual Indie-Folkfest brings folk art and music to the grounds each February. The Orlando Urban Trail passes the park, and the museum is a short walk from the SunRail station at Florida Hospital Health Village — pair it with the rest of Loch Haven Cultural Park or fold it into a full Ivanhoe Village day: art in the morning, antiques after lunch, the lake at sunset.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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