As a place of social gathering, swimming pools define the haves and have-nots by dividing who has access and who toils over them. To animals they’re just watering holes; to humans, a symbol of status and leisure. They can provide invigorating physical stimulation, while also serving as a place of solace, respite or meditation.
These thoughts are just a few that rise to the surface while viewing the Mennello Museum of American Art’s summer exhibit Pool Party, a group show where sensual glamour bumps up against social awareness, featuring emerging artists like Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Derrick Adams and Lynn Gomez alongside internationally renowned talents including Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha and Alex Katz.
Pool Party is triumphantly idiosyncratic, one of the most interesting shows in recent history. How did this show come about? What planted the seed? Orlando Weekly spoke with Mennello director Shannon Fitzgerald and featured local rising star Ericka Sobrack for details and insight on the party.
Shannon Fitzgerald: I created the exhibition over the years; I conceptualized it off and on, thinking of pools and their evolution in the imagination of artists, and the phenomenon became more “American” the more I thought about it — beginning in the 1950s, through the 1970s — for delivery of promise, success, leisure and wealth. I started my research with the SoCal movement, [David] Hockney and other artists who sought out promise, open spaces and minds and ultimate creativity among beauty — and then again, places of respite and retreat: Palm Springs, Palm Beach, the Hamptons.
Orlando Weekly: This tracks — it’s less tiki and kitsch, and more like The Graduate, The Swimmer and White Lotus. The pool and leisure as an existential device.
Ericka Sobrack: The Pool Party theme is deceptively lighthearted — on the surface, it evokes leisure, luxury and the idealized American lifestyle. But that’s exactly what makes it such rich ground to explore more complex, even contradictory ideas.
How does your piece fit into this?
ES: My piece deals with vulnerability in spaces that are typically perceived as safe or idyllic. I’m interested in the quiet psychological tension that exists within these environments — the subtle undercurrents of voyeurism, the sense of being watched or exposed. Pools, to me, feel simultaneously familiar and alien, everywhere and nowhere. There’s something distinctly American about them, but also melancholic, even haunted.
Pool Party includes some heavy hitters in the art world. How does it feel to be exhibited among them?
ES: It’s truly an honor to be part of this exhibit, especially alongside artists like Hockney, Katz and Ruscha. Their work has had a huge influence on how we understand space, identity and the American landscape, so being included in this context is both surreal and deeply meaningful. I’ve studied and admired them. Their work has influenced generations, and it’s a thrill to be part of that dialogue, even in a small way.
One thing about identity and the American landscape in Pool Party is that it includes a wide swath of points of view from all communities.
SF: I have long worked with artists of color, as well as several individual artists, discussing and writing about the trans-Atlantic movement and the real fears, associations and stereotypes surrounding African Americans’ relationship to the ocean, water and pools. Early conversations — beginning two decades ago — with Keith Piper, Pope.L and most poignantly Radcliffe Bailey, about water and the Black diaspora, focusing on Black leisure and joy, inform much of Lamar Peterson’s work, with whom I also worked, akin to Adams’ work.
I saw a tiny [Jay] Lynn Gomez in Xican-a.o.x. Body [at the Pérez Art Museum Miami] about the Latinx and Indigenous experience across America, and I knew I wanted to include her manipulated collages about labor and identity from found magazines—a nod to women and collage as a medium.
I have been following some of the more senior artists since the early 2000s and in school/training before that, and I knew I wanted to locate [Joel] Meyerowitz and [Slim] Aarons. I was looking at Stephen Shore’s road trip work, the hotel pools from the 1970s onward — he and Ruscha on the road, very Americana.
Like the way sunlight glistens off water, Pool Party slowly mesmerizes, even more so after repeated viewings. On the surface, the show sounds crowd-pleasingly commercial, and it is, but executed with an urbane eye and a sense of adventure. It’s as much about sun and fun as it is a social-studies observation that invokes self-reflection, and at the same time is subversively funny in the style of Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick.
Sobrack, in describing her own work, sums up the exhibit: “It challenges the traditional imagery of American suburbia. Not interested in nostalgia, more drawn to what’s unspoken, what lingers beneath the polished surface of the so-called American Dream.”
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Mennello Museum of American Art
This article appears in Sept. 3-9, 2025.