Maitland Art Center sets eyes on expansion

Visions of an active, expanded artist colony at the Maitland Art Center are dancing through city board members’ heads as conceptual plans for an Art & History Museums – Maitland expansion continue through the city’s vetting process.

Last week, Maitland’s Development Review Committee approved conceptual site plans presented by A&H for a proposed 10,000-square-foot expansion to the Maitland Art Center’s campus. This Thursday, Dec. 17, the plans will be presented to the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission for review.

A&H Executive Director Andrea Bailey Cox said the goal of the expansion is to satisfy clauses in A&H’s 50-year lease with the city, and to help in the mission of restoring the center to its original glory. The Maitland Art Center earned a spot on the National Historic Landmark registry in 2014 as one of the places in the country that, “exceptionally illustrate or interpret the heritage of the United States.”

“The goal is to bring the center back to its time as an artist colony,” Bailey Cox said.

The expansion would include 10,180 gross square feet of new student and gallery space, a winding sculpture walk, bench seating, and 56 new on-site parking spaces.

The new building would allow A&H to relocate its offices and classrooms out of the original campus to allow for those rooms to be restored into artist-in-action spaces.

“It would take all of our classrooms now and return them to their original function,” Bailey Cox said.

The proposed additions are to be built on empty land surrounding the art center’s campus, which was previously part of the research studio’s property when it was founded in 1937 by artist and architect J. André Smith.

In the lease A&H signed with the city of Maitland for its rental of the Maitland Art Center property in 2012, Bailey Cox said there is a clause that A&H needed to work toward bringing all of the original historic property back together. The two missing parcels are 1.2 acres in between the existing Maitland Art Center campus and Lake Sybelia, and .3 acres in Quinn Strong Park.

The conceptual site plans currently working their way through the city boards show how A&H plans to utilize the properties. If the conceptual plans are approved when they go before the City Council on Jan. 11, the two missing parcels would come under A&H’s lease, and time will start ticking on the decade timeframe given to make the additions a reality. That process includes going back through the city boards with final site plan proposals, and another approval from City Council.

Bailey Cox said as soon as the plans are approved, the hunt for grant funding and fundraising will begin to pay for the proposed expansion.