Opening Reception: A Matter of Time: A Studio Visit with Rima Jabbur

Celebrate the opening of this new exhibition with music and a food truck on our beautiful National Historic Landmark campus!

Celebrate the opening of this new contemporary art exhibition with music, food from a food truck, a cash bar, and honoring our featured artist Rima Jabbur.

Admission, to this event is FREE! However, donations of any size are gratefully accepted with your order or at the event, in order to support our many free community programs.

--

About the Exhibition:

The National Endowment for the Arts estimates that more than 340,000 Americans work as fine artists. Yet an Art Basel & UBS study of over a quarter of a million artists found that just four percent were the primary focus of exhibitions at nearly half of US institutions. For the rest, the arithmetic is unforgiving: decades of devotion to a practice that will likely never bring fame or financial stability. So, what keeps an artist at it, year after year, hour after hour, from the earliest days to the end of a life, still wrestling with the same questions?

A Matter of Time answers through a studio visit with painter Rima Jabbur. In 1997, just out of her MFA program, Jabbur had her first solo museum exhibition at the Maitland Art Center. Thirty years later, she returns with an exhibition shaped by three decades of work. In that time her paintings have been shown around the world, including in 2009 group exhibition curated by the Louvre at the Musée Ingres in Montauban, France. Yet success has not quieted the self-doubt that follows her into the studio.

On October 30, 2026, Danielle Thomas, Executive Director of the Art & History Museums of Maitland, visited Jabbur's studio in Winter Park. Their hour-and-a-half conversation, recorded and transcribed, forms the foundation of this exhibition. Thomas stands in for the visitor, opening a door onto the private, largely invisible life behind the finished painting.

What emerges is a portrait of an artist bound to her studio. For Jabbur, it is where she confronts and processes the world, and its solitude is not an escape from life but a way of engaging with it more fully. The work advances through revision, uncertainty, and the willingness to begin again, all in pursuit of that rare and fleeting moment of transcendence, when a painting and the experience of its making reaches beyond what she consciously intended.