On Thursday, August 27, staff at the Maitland Art Center will cut a ribbon on a building most residents have watched go up for months without knowing what it's for. Six thousand square feet, a ceramics studio, three classrooms, a small gallery. On paper it reads like a routine capital project. What it actually does is give back a piece of the campus that has been missing its original purpose for years, and the person whose name is on the building spent his own working life fighting for exactly that kind of space.

The new structure is called the Que Throm and Cicero Greathouse Education Studios, and if you've walked past 231 West Packwood Avenue this year, you've seen the construction fencing around it. The dedication ceremony runs from 6 to 8 p.m. on the 27th, open to the public, on the same grounds where Jules André Smith built his artist colony in 1937 and where the murals and cement reliefs he carved by hand are still worked into the walls of the older buildings. This is the first physical expansion of that campus since Smith's own lifetime.

What's Actually Being Built

The numbers matter here because they explain a problem the Art Center has quietly had for a while. The new facility sits on 1.26 acres on the north side of the property, land that was originally part of Smith's own campus and once held his orange grove before the City of Maitland folded it back into the museum's lease. Designed by DLR Group, the building cost roughly $2.5 million and can hold up to 500 students per semester, nearly tripling what the Art School could handle before.

That capacity number is the whole reason this had to happen. For years, the Art School's growing class schedule had taken over space in the historic Studio Court, the ring of small studios Smith built specifically so visiting artists could live and work on site. Painters and sculptors visiting from out of state were sharing square footage with beginner watercolor classes. The new building doesn't add prestige to the campus so much as it untangles two programs that had been squeezed into the same rooms for longer than anyone intended.

The Studio That Started This

The name on the building isn't a naming-rights transaction. Cicero Greathouse was a painter and a former senior art director at Walt Disney World, an Imagineer in the company's own language, who spent a year in the Art Center's Artists in Action residency program. Through the kind of coincidence that only a small campus produces, the studio he was assigned during that residency was the one that had originally belonged to Smith himself.

He kept working after that year ended, filling his abstract paintings with whatever material was on hand, cardboard, traditional Chinese joss paper, anything that changed the surface. He and his wife, Qurentia "Que" Throm, had met decades earlier when she was his teacher, and later, after both had built separate lives, they married and spent the following years traveling together, leading friends on trips to Nepal, Thailand, India, Morocco, and Mexico, and eventually building three homes in San Miguel de Allende where they lived as expats for half of each year. Their home in Orlando, which Greathouse designed and engineered himself, was named Casa Querencia and drew directly from the Art Center's own architecture. Greathouse died in 2019. The estate he and Throm left behind is largely what funded the building that now carries their names, and the new gallery inside it will permanently display their work alongside pieces by current instructors and students.

Executive Director Danielle Thomas put the point plainly when the project was first announced:

"This expansion brings André Smith's vision of a living, evolving artist retreat into the twenty-first century. It allows us to modernize and grow our Art School, while also restoring the historic Studio Court to its original purpose as working artist studios."

That second sentence is the one worth sitting with. The new building isn't really the story. What it frees up is.

What Changes On The Ground

Once the Art School's classes move into the new facility, the historic Studio Court reverts to what Smith actually built it for: working studios for artists in residence, not classroom overflow. The residency program grows from four studios to seven, a jump of 75 percent, which is the largest single change to that program since the campus opened.

For a resident who has walked past those studio doors on a Saturday afternoon and seen them empty, the practical difference is that they're more likely to be occupied by a working artist going forward, not a stack of folding chairs from the last workshop.

How To Actually Walk Into This

The dedication itself is open to anyone who wants to see the new building before the fall semester fills it up, but the Art Center's regular calendar gives you more chances than a single ribbon-cutting. The campus runs on a rhythm that rewards showing up more than once:

• Last Wednesday of every month, the main gallery stays open into the evening with a cash bar and no admission charge, including Wednesday, August 26, the night before the dedication.
• First Saturday of every month, resident artists in Studio Court open their doors from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. so visitors can see work in progress, not just finished pieces on a wall.
• Art classes continue out of the Cottage at Lake Lily through the rest of August, taught by working instructors. Jami Akins closes out a two-session workshop on the evening of August 27, the same night the new building is dedicated a short drive away, and Abbey Kish teaches a session on August 30.
• A few blocks over, the Maitland Farmers' Market runs every Sunday morning on Independence Lane, with produce and craft vendors alongside food from Sanford Brewing Company, Houndstooth Kitchen and Eatery, and Boku Sushi, giving you a reason to make a morning of the neighborhood before an afternoon at the Art Center.

None of this requires planning around a single event. The Art Center has built its calendar so that a resident who shows up once a month, on whichever Wednesday or Saturday fits their schedule, ends up seeing the campus in a different state each time.

The Maitland Art Center has been a National Historic Landmark since 2014, the only one in the four-county Central Florida region, and that designation has always rested on Smith's original Mayan Revival buildings. What's opening this month doesn't touch that architecture at all. It sits quietly to the north of it, doing the unglamorous work of giving the old buildings room to be what they were built for.

If you already call Maitland home, you've likely driven past this construction all year without knowing what it would become. If you're weighing whether a neighborhood with a working artist colony inside a National Historic Landmark is the kind of place you'd want to put down roots, that's a longer conversation, and one Pamela Porazzo has been having with families across Maitland, Winter Park, and the surrounding suburbs for years. Reach out when you're ready to see what's actually on the market nearby.