Mado Smith, “Corona Silvestre,” 2026. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. © Mado Smith

This week the Mennello Museum in Loch Haven brings back their Our Orlando group exhibition for a fourth year. It’s a snapshot of the state of our city’s visual arts scene, featuring current work from three very distinct Orlando artists, curated from their studios by the Mennello’s team. This year’s Our Orlando features Tasanee Durrett, Mado Smith and Martha Jo Mahoney, with four works each by Durrett and Mahoney and two pieces from Smith. The exhibition’s opening reception is Friday, and the show runs through late August. 

Our Orlando’s aim this year has shifted from a thank-you to Orlando artists to spotlighting emerging artists. This year the show is “focusing on a moment in an artist’s studio” from three carefully curated local creatives, explains Mennello director Shannon Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald and exhibition co-curator Flynn Dobbs visited each of the three artists’ workspaces before selecting pieces to highlight. “We’re showing major American artists throughout history,” Fitzgerald tells Orlando Weekly. “And we want Orlando artists to be included in that narrative.”

Martha Jo Mahoney contributes four abstract paintings characterized by bold colors and bolder brushstrokes. Three of her works — “Molly Girl,” “The Pond (Diptych)” and “Something In My Soul” — despite their kinetic undertones, have a calming and soothing nature, a perfect idyll for an ever-worsening news cycle. Mahoney’s works in Our Orlando, particularly her use of color, are influenced by growing up on Lake Conway. 

Martha Jo Mahoney, “Molly Girl,” 2024, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. ©2026 Martha Jo Mahoney

“Each piece begins with drawing, using color, brush strokes and mark-making to build loose assemblages that celebrate my ties to the city,” says Mahoney.

“I’ve been following Martha’s work for a long time. She’s a big part of the abstract painters working in Orlando at McRae Studio, and she’s been part of that language for a long time,” says Fitzgerald.  “She hasn’t had a museum show, and she’s working really hard. So I started, really, with her.”

Tasanee Durrett’s four works — “Beneath the Surface,” “Oceanic Origins,” “The Seed That Flourished” and “Endure Endure Endure” — explore the history of human relationships with natural resources around us through lush linework and florid illustrations, pulled from her Black Maritime series, in which she explores “the stories of Black captains, seafarers and coastal communities who shaped maritime trade and built lives around the sea, but whose histories rarely get told,” says Durrett. “I work with salt, raffia and silkworm cocoons to bring those stories up to the surface.”

“As an artist, I was able to watch what [Durrett] was doing over the last three years as she participated in our Bloomberg Philanthropies public art grant,” says Fitzgerald. “What’s exciting about her work is, in 18 months, she’s trying new tactile materials and really pushing her practice from materials to concepts.” 

Tasanee Durrett, “Oceanic Origins,” 2025, Acrylic and silkworm cocoons on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. ©2026 Tasanee Durrett

Mado Smith’s two pieces — “Dawn” and “Corona Silvestre” — combine striking oil painting with an almost collage aesthetic, creating intriguing juxtapositions co-existing as an otherworldly whole. 

“From a curatorial perspective, I was thinking he was really pushing himself in scale, from murals to two small sculptures, really looking at the flora and fauna of Florida, and that it needs to be preserved, and maybe he could do that through whimsical figuration,” explains Fitzgerald. “He’s exploring the mystic and spiritual in Florida landscape from a conservation place, not like a didactic place.”

For Fitzgerald, instead of treating this exhibition as a one-and-done local show, she sees Our Orlando inextricably connected to the museum’s mission of presenting new views of the arc of American art, but through a Central Floridian lens.

“I think all three of those artists are looking at that, so that’s a kind of regional perspective without being, you know, regional. I think our audience appreciates seeing American art through 250 years, right? We’ve showed Impressionism and social realism and certainly folk art and American Deep South, and to move it all the way up to what’s happening in our community with artists who make the decision to earn a living here and stay here — that’s important.”

Our Orlando: opens 6:30 p.m. Friday, May 15; show through Aug. 26 at Mennello Museum of American Art, 900 E. Princeton St., mennellomuseum.org, $8.

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This article appears in May 13-19, 2026.