The Mennello Museum of American Art endeavors to preserve, exhibit, and interpret our outstanding permanent collection of paintings by Earl Cunningham. The Mennello Museum of American Art also seeks to enrich the public through rotating exhibitions, programs, educational initiatives, and publications that celebrate other outstanding traditional and contemporary American art and artists across a diverse range of disciplines and reflect the rich diversity of American art, while making it accessible to all.
Our vision is to be a distinguished and thriving institution that will build on its city base of support through strong board and community relationships resulting in an improved operating environment and a reputation for being a local and national treasure.
The Central Florida Watercolor Society will be demonstrating their talents en plein air in the Museum's sculpture garden!
OUR ORLANDO: MAKING SENSE OF OUR WORLD features the work of four rising local artists: Sarah M, Bender, Peterson Guerrier, Boy Kong, and Kelly Joy Ladd. These four artists conceptualize a multitude of relationships within our shared world – ranging from the personal and familiar to the mysterious and universal. In this exhibition human experience is depicted, varied as it is in its accounts, through figuration and form, in two and three dimensions. The voices and visions of the artists presented here can be seen in a consideration of how we, as humans, relate to one another and our time on earth by reflecting upon representations of individuality and imagination.
Bender uses humor and the figure to explore both personal and prevailing experiences of womanhood as an artist and mother in compositions that meld time. Guerrier realizes large scale portraits that are at once penetrating but deny intimacy through mark making to cover. Kong creates contemporary mythologies that function to enliven our notion of seeing and storytelling. Ladd forms the imperceptible, making visible and tactile visions of introspection and connection to the universe.
AMERICAN YOUTH: OUR FUTURE is an exhibition to support and foster the creativity of Orlando’s talented teen artists. In this exhibition’s second year, The Mennello Museum of American Art will be holding a juried art show with a Call for Art open to all Orange and Seminole County high schoolers as part of our increasingly expansive, diverse, and inclusive exhibition program. AMERICAN YOUTH: OUR FUTURE aspires to empower rising artists and give them a space to engage in conversations through their art with our community.
THE COLLECTORS PASSION: PAINTINGS BY LAURENCE A. CAMPBELL presents the continued interest and art connoisseurship of the Mennello Museum’s co-founder, Michael A. Mennello. His passion further influences this drive to collect in the myriad of people he befriends, including the Keen and Perez families. In particular, these individuals take immense joy in the paintings of the great American cityscape draped in American flags in seasons and paintings inspired by the impressionists as depicted by Laurence A. Campbell. Campbell’s scenes of his native Philadelphia and New York City extoll his own, and by extension his collectors,’ pride in country and admiration for the historic architecture established in the American city.
EARL CUNNINGHAM: Selections from the Permanent Collection Earl Cunningham’s paintings intermix fact, fantasy and his own life experiences. Filled with vibrancy and confidence of life itself, his work reflects his own unique vision of the world. Vivid use of colors across each wood panel have given Cunningham the reputation of being an American Fauve.
Cunningham’s paintings were described by noted art critic, Roberta Smith as a “fusion of traditional folk art and pop culture. [Cunningham’s] world is not only fabulously Technicolored, with skies tending toward hot pinks and yellows, and rivers and bays toward red or brown or ochre. It also teems with bright, often closely observed flora and fauna ... all rendered in unexpected textures and often ingenious brushwork.” (R. Smith, New York Times, February 17, 1995, p. C-30).
Since his death in 1977, Cunningham’s work has received an overwhelming amount of attention and he has secured a place as a major Twentieth Century American Folk artist. In 1986, The Museum of American Art, New York, launched a national tour of his works. Since then, his paintings have not only been shown throughout the country, but a number of museums have also acquired his work, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, Virginia.
The beautiful twin works, Waltzing Matilda and Twin Vortexes were originally part of series of seven sculptures in Aycock’s significant outdoor exhibition on Park Avenue in Manhattan, entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase. Inspired by the wind and the frenetic energy of city life, these two sculptures will remain on display in the garden through September 2017. References to nature and industry intermingle as viewers walk around each sculpture sensing the whirling, organic shapes made from aluminum and fiberglass.
Aycock has often focused on creating public art installations, from her pioneering early land art in the 1970s, to these current complex objects made of fiberglass and aluminum. Alice Aycock has lived in New York City since 1968. Her work is in a number of collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, LA County Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and the National Gallery, as well as on view in cities across the United States. She has been included in the prestigious global exhibitions The Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII and the Whitney Biennial.