Summer 2007
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By Morgan Lewis & Images Courtesy Crealdé School of Art
Nestled on lake front property just minutes from downtown Winter Park, the Crealdé School of Art was founded with the goal of serving artists and the community. For more than 32 years, Crealdé has offered affordable art classes for people of all ages and backgrounds, studio space for its teaching staff, and exhibition galleries for contemporary visual artists. With the recent opening of the Hannibal Square Heritage Center in West Winter Park, the school has deepened its commitment to serve non-traditional communities and to use the arts as a vehicle for community collaboration and revitalization.
The Crealdé School of Art was the brainchild of William S. Jenkins, a successful Winter Park businessman and artist. In 1975, Jenkins acted on his vision to build a place where artists would have space to create and show their work. Crealdé now offers a year-round educational curriculum of more than 80 affordable art classes in the areas of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and ceramics for all skill levels and segments of the population. Over 40 professional artists make up the Crealdé faculty.
The school makes significant efforts to attract students from varying segments of the community. Classes are offered free of charge to underserved populations and scholarships are awarded to at-risk teens and individuals who can not pay the school’s tuition. Crealdé partners with state and county organizations to provide specific career-related training that supports the professional individual artists it serves. The school hosts and facilitates workshops on marketing and communications for artists, and offers annual grant opportunities and grant techniques workshops for individual area artists.
During the 1990s, Winter Park began attracting new residents and businesses. The city’s development and growth began to extend to West Winter Park, threatening its residential character. "This culturally-rich neighborhood was on the brink of undergoing gentrification that threatened to homogenize and erase the memories and the landmarks of the African American contributions to Winter Park," says Crealdé’s executive director Peter Schreyer. The Hannibal Square Heritage Center is the result of a four-year collaborative outreach effort between Crealdé, the City of Winter Park, and residents, designed as a tribute to the past, present, and future contributions of Winter Park’s African American community. The Heritage Center is now the permanent home of Crealdé’s Heritage Collection: Photographs and Oral Histories of West Winter Park. The collection illustrates, in the words of its citizens, the history and rich cultural heritage of the community. Photographs spanning the twentieth century are paired with oral histories and contemporary portraits from the individuals contributing them.
Crealdé is no stranger to West Winter Park. Since the ‘90s, the school has had a permanent presence at the Winter Park Community Center offering free classes for children, teens, and seniors, and a variety of public art projects, including murals, photo-documentaries and sculptures. On February 17, 2007, an outdoor mosaic mural—the biggest project of its kind Crealdé has ever undertaken—was unveiled on the walls of the community
Visit the Crealdé School of Art at 600 St. Andrews Boulevard in Winter Park, call 407.671.1886 or www.crealde.org. Visit the Hannibal Square Heritage Center at 642 W. New England Avenue, or call 407.539.2680.