Inside the Maitland Art Center: The Landmark an Artist Built by Hand

There is a walled garden in Maitland where the twentieth century took a strange and wonderful detour. Behind white stucco walls at 231 West Packwood Avenue, carved faces peer from turquoise gateposts, concrete reliefs bloom with Aztec and Mayan imagery, and a small outdoor chapel sits under moss-draped oaks. This is the Maitland Art Center — and on August 25, 2014, the Secretary of the Interior designated it a National Historic Landmark, the first in the greater Orlando area and still the only one in Orange County and the surrounding four counties.

A Cornell architect, a Curtis Bok fortune, and a laboratory for art

The center began as the Research Studio, founded in 1937 by Jules André Smith, a Cornell-trained architect who had made his name as a painter-etcher. Smith had built himself a small private gallery on the property; his patron, philanthropist Mary Louise Curtis Bok, turned the idea into an institution. The National Park Service nomination records that Bok founded the Research Studio “for the purpose of encouraging the explorative approach to the art problems of the day,” and her support was not symbolic — she contributed more than $300,000 to the project over its life, funding a nonprofit structure that provided room, board and living expenses for guest artists who came to live and work through the winter months.

Smith kept building for the rest of his life. The landmark’s period of significance runs from 1934 to his death in 1959, and across two parcels on Packwood Avenue he designed eleven contributing buildings and six structures — studios, a gallery, courtyards, and the chapel and recreation area across the street. The initial complex cost roughly $15,000 to build; what Smith added with his own hands over twenty-five years is the real architecture. The Art & History Museums of Maitland count more than 2,500 sculptures, reliefs and murals across the grounds, drawn from Aztec and Mayan imagery, nature, myth and world religions, in a Mayan Revival style the nomination calls an outstanding American example of the form.

The colony years — and the rescue

For two decades the Research Studio drew nationally prominent artists to this quiet street: Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, Doris Lee and photographer Consuelo Kanaga among them. The gallery was among the first in Florida to show modern art. When Smith died in 1959, the colony’s engine died with him, and the campus drifted toward the fate of so much unusual Florida architecture. The turning point came in 1969, when the City of Maitland purchased the property specifically to save it from demolition. It joined the National Register of Historic Places on November 17, 1982 — a full generation before the landmark designation recognized what the Park Service calls its national significance.

Five museums, one organization

Today the Art Center is the crown of the Art & History Museums of Maitland, formed in 2010 when the Art Center merged with the Maitland Historical Society. The family includes the Maitland Historical Museum, a Telephone Museum full of working antique phones and switchboards, and — over at the lake — the Waterhouse Residence Museum and Carpentry Shop Museum, which anchor our Lake Lily walk. The Bok studio, once the patron’s quarters during her visits, now hosts the Artists-in-Action program, giving working artists studio space on the same ground where the colony lived. Classes, workshops and residencies run year-round, and the gallery rotates contemporary exhibitions alongside Smith’s own work.

How to visit well

Go slowly, and go on foot. Start in the gallery, then cross Packwood to the chapel — weddings have been held there since the late 1940s, and the courtyard remains one of Central Florida’s most distinctive ceremony sites — before wandering the studio courtyards without a route, reading the carved doorways as you find them. Docent tours run regularly for visitors who want the iconography decoded. Pair the visit with lunch on Orlando Avenue from our Maitland eating guide, find the campus on the Orlando Top Spots Map, and place it in the wider story with our guide to Maitland itself. Theme-park Orlando builds fantasy worlds behind ticket gates and rebuilds them every decade. Maitland built one behind a garden wall in 1937, for working artists — and it is still standing, still working, and still free to wander into the story of American art.

Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY, via Wikimedia Commons.

Filed under Art & History Museums · Maitland · Maitland Art Center · Museums · National Historic Landmark

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