THE SITUATED BODY: RECONFIGURING THE SYMBOLIC. JACOBO ALONSO AT THE ART & HISTORY MUSEUMS – MAITLAND
The Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida) welcome contemporary Mexican artist Jacobo Alonso in a new exhibition presenting previously unseen works.
The Situated Body: Reconfiguring the Symbolic, on view at the Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida) (A&H), brings together a significant selection of Alonso’s recent production. Drawing inspiration from Pre-Columbian traditions and from the Mayan Revival architecture of the Maitland Art Center, the artist reinterprets classical representations of the human form, transforming traditional practices of drawing and sculpture into expressive abstractions through the use of heterogeneous materials, ranging from soot on paper to reworked felt.
This exhibition marks the first time that Alonso’s large-scale works on paper produced using the fumage technique are presented alongside his vibrant sculptural works, some of which were created during his 2025 residency at A&H. The Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida) host an international artist residency program, within which Jacobo Alonso was in residence at the center last November.
It is well known that A&H founder J. André Smith had hoped to travel throughout Central and South America to deepen his understanding of the art and architecture of those regions, but was unable to do so due to an amputation. In many respects, the Maitland Art Center represents the means through which Smith created a way to “see the world” at a moment when he could no longer travel physically – a constructed and imagined act of journeying. The arrival of Jacobo Alonso from Mexico and the creation of site-specific works inspired by André Smith’s Research Studio pay meaningful tribute to the founder’s legacy, while also offering the local community an opportunity for symbolic travel through the exchange of cultural perspectives and ideas.
Reflecting on his experience, Alonso states: “My residency at the Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida) allowed me to continue developing my sculptural practice within a context deeply shaped by the site’s architectural presence and historical stratification. Immersion in the museum’s spaces and archives offered an extended opportunity to critically engage with material, scale, and spatial relationships, while simultaneously prompting a continual reassessment of my methods. The dialogue between the site’s unique history and my research on the body as object became a central axis of the residency. This environment encouraged me to explore new formal and material possibilities, pushing the work toward greater conceptual precision and spatial awareness. Ultimately, the residency provided the conditions to develop and refine a body of work culminating in the exhibition The Situated Body. Every body possesses its own geography and undergoes inevitable mutations that reveal the genealogy of its image and form: a territory intrinsic to the individual that traces the constellation of identity, while continually invoking an inherent structural instability.”
As noted by Dan L. Hess, Chief Curator of the Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida), in the critical essay accompanying the exhibition, the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty – who places the body at the center of perceptual experience as an active means of knowing the world – provides a fundamental interpretive framework for understanding Alonso’s practice. The artist translates this perspective into textile sculptures that challenge the classical canon, replacing materials historically associated with permanence and idealization, such as marble and bronze, with felt – a soft and unstable material – thereby foregrounding how bodily form is shaped by gravity, matter, and transformation. Through bodies that sag, compress, or expand, and through fumage works in which the body leaves an ephemeral imprint through contact and absence, Alonso investigates the body as a site of perception, trace, and continual redefinition. His work situates itself within the long tradition of figurative representation, reaffirming its value as a privileged means for interrogating the human condition on physical, symbolic, and conceptual levels.
The Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida) are among the leading cultural destinations in Central Florida and serve as stewards of a campus designated as a National Historic Landmark, founded in the 1930s by architect and artist J. André Smith. The complex includes an art school, artist residencies, rotating contemporary exhibitions, and multiple museums dedicated to celebrating the rich cultural heritage of Central Florida.
Jacobo Alonso’s exhibition, The Situated Body: Reconfiguring the Symbolic, will be on view through April 5, 2026, at the Art & History Museums – Maitland (Florida) / The Maitland Art Center, 231 W. Packwood Ave., Maitland, FL 32751.
