Crealdé donates lake exhibition to City Hall

Winter Garden City Hall’s Commission Chambers are lined with framed artwork created by students and instructors at Crealdé School of Art — photographs and paintings that document the history of Lake Apopka and depict the people and culture of the communities that dot the lake’s perimeter.

Peter Schreyer, the project leader, photography instructor and executive director at Crealdé, and plein air painter Tom Sadler curated the collection of art in 2017. The pieces were on display in 2018 in several locations — at Winter Garden City Hall, the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation, the Winter Garden Library and the Orange County History Museum.

And now they are back home permanently at City Hall.

Crealdé and Schreyer donated “The Lake Project: A Documentary Exploring the Land and People of Lake Apopka” to the city of Winter Garden at the Aug. 8 City Commission meeting.

The gallery project now hangs in the Commission Chambers at City Hall. The exhibit consists of 45 archival photographs and oral histories and nine paintings of Florida’s top landscape painters. The exhibit explores the relationship between Lake Apopka and the diverse people who have called the shores of Florida’s third-largest lake their home and place of work.

Schreyer said he wanted to donate this collection to Winter Garden because the city owns many of his other artwork and it seemed like a logical home for the pieces since so much of the content came from the local community.

“While the exhibit is about the whole lake … clearly Winter Garden is the biggest town,” Schreyer said.

He said he convinced his board of directors it was best to put the collection where it was originally located. The condition of the donation was a majority of the lake collection had to be on permanent display where viewing was free for residents.

“The city of Winter Garden already owns 29 of my archival pieces, mostly on the second floor, near the mayor’s office, and a few of them are in conference rooms,” he said. “They cover about 40 years of the city.”

Another 28 pieces of Crealdé artwork are on display at the Maxey Community Center, in east Winter Garden, which depict the people of the historic black community.

“The lake project is different in that it was done all at the same time and by a lot of different artists,” Schreyer said. “It cost about $30,000 to produce this entire project, and Crealdé received a grant to pay for all the production.”

The nine paintings were created by professional plein air painters. Originally, the artists committed to keep their work in the exhibit for two or three years, and then they had a choice of donating the painting to Crealdé. About half of them gave their original artwork, Schreyer said, and the other half of the paintings are chicles.

There are 45 photographs in the exhibition taken by 12 student photographers and two instructors.

“They’re all seasoned photography students, and they’re all just thrilled to be part of this permanent display,” Schreyer said. “It’s a dream of every artist to have his artwork on permanent display.”

Schreyer has a passion for documenting community history through the camera lens, and he has embarked on numerous projects featuring Lake Apopka. This particular project brought together many elements and many different groups of people who call the perimeter of the lake home, including farmers, black communities and new development, he said.

“I think it’s one of the most comprehensive documents, where the good and the bad has all been brought together,” Schreyer said. “(Through) the photos and paintings, we’re trying to show the beauty of the lake and historic preservation but also addressing the abuse and the conflict.

“The lake is home to all these people, and the lake is what brought everybody there,” he said.