‘400 years of life:’ Que Throm and Cicero Greathouse defined querencia

MAITLAND, Fla. – Art is one of several simple ways a person can live forever.

It also depends on luck. Immortality would not be so rare if hard work or determination was all that it took, and being forgotten would, for once, not be worth fearing.

As a result, there was only one Qurentia Throm and one Cicero Greathouse, both of them artists and adventurers fond enough of Orlando to have spent many years here not only living, but creating, and how lucky we are that they found each other.

Que was born in 1935 in Plains, Georgia, raised anecdotally close to if not in the same neighborhood where the Carters lived. Her most profound impact is said to have been her 38-year career as an educator, what started with teaching art at Colonial High School in Orlando until becoming a charter faculty member at Valencia College in the late 1960s. A learner as well as an educator, Que earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art and art history from Shorter College, a master’s degree in art education and a Ph.D in higher education administration from Florida State University, not to mention her studies in India, Norway and New York.

She retired from Valencia in 1995 after having been appointed the department chair of Visual, Performing Arts and Humanities, and bestowed the honorary title of Professor Emerita. Following a brief tenure at the University of Central Florida, where she had become the William Jenkins Endowed Chair of UCF’s Art Department and created the Partners in Art in Visual Education program, she spent the rest of her life creating art and exploring.

Cicero was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1950, where his father, U.S. Army Maj. Cicero Bryant Greathouse, had been stationed. The third of his name, Cicero’s nomadic military-family childhood is thought to have influenced his aptitude for travel later in life. Before those days however, his family would settle in Orlando and send him to Colonial High School, where he graduated before joining the U.S. Marine Corps, serving in Vietnam and receiving a Purple Heart after being injured June 3, 1969, by a rocket-propelled grenade while on patrol about 9 miles northwest of Cam Lộ.

He returned to Florida and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Florida Atlantic University in 1975. Come 1989, Cicero was at Walt Disney World, where he became a Senior Art Director for Walt Disney Imagineering. Credited for fine work at Disney’s Animal Kingdom — helping create such things as the Oasis exhibits and the now-defunct Discovery River boats, as well as having some measure of involvement at Tokyo DisneySea and a project or two at the Magic Kingdom — Cicero would retire in 2005 to spend more time with Que.

An exhibit honoring Que and Cicero opened in July at the Art & History Museums of Maitland, where the artists made their mark as frequent visitors and inspired creators on top of being part of the Maitland Art Center itself at different times. The art center’s tribute to them — “A Bright Light from the Embers: A Story of Love, Art, and Place” — will be open through Sept. 29.

When I visit the art center, I like setting out from far enough away that I can walk through Quinn Strong Park.

My friends and I made a short film there in high school. We built a fake cage with plumbing supplies and waited for a rainy day to portray our main guy as Kafka’s hunger artist, writhing away in as many different shots as possible.

It had begun to rain again when I passed those same spots we scouted, so that’s what I thought about.

Inside the building now, Cicero’s “Myanmar 1” draws your attention portside. With that momentum, if you continued past the poster for Que and Cicero’s 2002 “Duo” show on your right — and to the left, one of the many garments Que collected during her travels, this one noted for sporting the flowery designs she sought to fill her studio spaces with — you’d end up in a room with blueprints and renderings. There’s also a bust of Jules André Smith, who created the art center, but I bet he’s always there. Rather, the blueprints and concept art on display are for Que and Cicero’s Orlando home and an expansion to the art center’s classrooms, to be funded in large part by a donation from Que’s estate, respectively.

Blocky bronze wind chimes from the estate hang from the ceiling of the first room, where an untitled Que Throm piece — a flaming, bleeding sacred heart — faces an enlarged birthday card.

Cicero died in 2019, and Que in 2022, both due to cancer.

“We knew Que. We actually met Que in 2019 after Cicero passed away. She reached out to us to hold a memorial here,” said Danielle Thomas, the art center’s executive director. “They had both been involved with the art center for decades at different points, but they hadn’t really been very engaged for the couple of years leading up to his death. More of their time was increasingly spent down in Mexico, but when we reconnected and kind of learned their story and their connection with the site, the memorial turned into an exhibition that was up for a month in 2020, and then she joined our board. She was on the board for about six months before she was diagnosed with her illness.”

The art center was originally meant to be an artist’s retreat, and only that. A little campus of studios, gallery partitions and green spaces sealed off from the public. André Smith created it in 1937 as a space where artists could dedicate themselves completely to experimental and explorative art forms, Thomas explained.

Cicero himself would eventually use André Smith’s original studio as an artist-in-action when he was granted a residency in 2012. The upcoming expansion — to be called “The Que Throm and Cicero Greathouse Education Studios” — will complement the already-established Cicero Greathouse Fund, which goes toward preserving the art center’s historical grounds.

“When Que passed away, she made a very nice donation to the art center for the purpose of expanding our art school. We have extended property behind the original art center where we’re able to hopefully have construction of this building,” said Katie Benson, the art center’s exhibitions manager. “It will expand the art school to have more classes, hopefully have some more students, as well as making our campus turn back to its original intent, having more artists in residence as well.”

The jury’s still out on what the expansion will cost. According to Thomas, Que’s estate is still being settled, yet her contribution is expected to be substantial enough to get the job funded alongside what’s already been acquired through an Orange County TDT Cultural Facilities grant.

For now, besides how access to the new classrooms is set to be off Jackson, what’s known for sure about the expansion is how the classrooms will look, as well as the fact most ceramics programs in Central Florida have a wait list. That’s according to Thomas, and it’s something the new studios can help with.

“The main building will be an administration center, the work of Que and Cicero will be kind of permanently on display. It’ll also be flexible, so it can be used as classroom space if we need it, it can be used for youth or summer programming if we need it,” Thomas said, gesturing to imitate sunlight showering through the render. “This classroom here is going to be a painting classroom, so it’ll have high windows, so it’ll really let the light in, and then these classrooms here, the three of them, it’s a ceramics classroom, which is the one that we’re seeing the biggest demand for.”

Cicero and Que got together when he was 45 and she was 60, marrying some four years later in 1999.

I’ve heard it said that to fall is love is to create a religion with an infallible god. It sounds so nice when it works out, and for them, it was like something meant to be.

They had actually met decades earlier. A close friend of theirs, who we’ll meet later, told me that Cicero fell in love with Que while he was her student in junior high.

From what Thomas has heard — as well as Orlando Sentinel art writer Matthew J. Palm, who got a tour of Cicero’s 2020 tribute exhibition in Maitland by Que herself — Que, smiling, would say she didn’t recall Cicero during those art classes.

“According to interviews with her that we’ve read, she didn’t remember him when they reconnected all those years later, but certainly they would have been aware of each other during that time. They were both artists working in Orlando. It’s a pretty small world,” Thomas said. “According to the story we’ve heard, there was a party, and she walked in, and he was there, and he declared on the spot that he would marry her, and they were together for 25 years.”

Deeper now into the gallery, biographies and artifacts of Cicero’s life occupy the left wall, likewise on the right for Que. More of Que’s garments dressed mannequins posing near a carousel slide projector, humming and clacking through pictures of their travels.

Que’s side included tin breastplates, “Healing Armor” — she created them in response to her battle with breast cancer, which she won. It was pancreatic cancer that would eventually take her life.

Cicero’s side was comprised almost entirely of his belongings. Three glass cases of military memorabilia and Imagineer trinkets included his Zippo from Vietnam, an iconic burgundy Imagineer hardhat and a pile of Disney’s oval nametags.

Seeing Cicero’s belongings on display like this, I remembered how I had begun researching this story two years ago without even knowing it.

Their home on South Mills is magnificent. I know this because I was there, helping to conduct the estate sale in August 2022 after Que died. It was raining then, too.

A stocky landscaped driveway directs entrants along the property’s southern edge, encouraging the driver to look dead-on at a chimney that dominates and centers the dwelling and its grounds. Cicero designed it with the art center in mind, ergo the brick step motifs. I still speculate about whether the fact it was designed by an Imagineer is the reason it manages to look so massive despite having a modest 3,871 square feet of living space, at least according to property records.

While ultimately it may have been an architect’s job to turn Cicero’s vision into reality, he was in charge of naming the property. Cicero called it “Casa Querencia.”

Querencia is described as a metaphysical concept, like nostalgia, and it lacks an exact English translation.

Querencia is the reason being with your friends makes you feel 10 years younger. It’s the feeling of being drawn to your home, to where you’re supposed to be, and it’s multiplied by your capacity for love. The closest thing to a proper noun that’s ever widely been called “querencia” is the spot in the ring where either the bull or the bullfighter may retreat to collect themselves. Isn’t it fascinating that either the bull or the bullfighter deserves that spot, depending on who you ask?

Helping out with the estate sale, I recall the one thing that’s always been the same for every mansion we’ve worked to each one-story cinderblock home in every Florida suburb, how first entry was made through a garage, already arranged like how you’re used to seeing. Two or three rows of fold-up tables each draped with bedsheets and filled to the brim with baubles, though most of the surface area was taken up by books in this case. I immediately found a glazing wheel that I later bought for my best friend’s girlfriend, now fiancé, as well as a block of speckled clay for her, but to this day she has yet to make me that fruit bowl she promised. No hard feelings.

Exploring, it began to feel like I was arriving to the carnival too late, when it’s twilight and all that’s left are shadows, footprints and other silhouettes. Evidence, you could call it, that there was once a lot of fun here, a lot of love. Looking past what had already been price-tagged and lined up, you could stand there and imagine Que and Cicero were just in another room. An ofrenda for Cicero, which would have been the first thing I saw if I used the front door and its hand-shaped handles, was taller than I am.

When you’re inside this place, there’s no mistaking why the home looks so large. It’s very tall, and there was proof everywhere that friends were hosted, books were read and art was made. Love had filled this home, right up to those high ceilings.

At the art center’s exhibition, the final room was something special.

A portrait of Que and Cicero adorns the wall opposite two chairs they once shared, and an almost planetary gravity draws you toward a gigantic collage at the far end. Picture a queen-sized bed covered in photos, only vertical. A love letter had been enlarged and mounted to the wall beside it.

Benson pointed to photos that Cicero had taken of the ground, what she said he would use as studies for his work as an Imagineer.

“Even him just photographing textures on the ground of where they were tied into when you’re in Animal Kingdom, you really feel like you’ve been transported to this place. So it’s just his attention to detail, you know? There’s so much fascination with Imagineering,” she said. “I think it might have been overwhelming to talk to them about their story.”

Overwhelming, she said.

Right of the chairs, messy aprons and cans filled with paintbrushes peer through a window abutting their marriage prayer, and between them lay several travel journals, scrapbooks and sketchbooks, which guests are encouraged to pick up. All I saw were the pictures at first.

I mean to say it wasn’t my first time in this room. I had visited a couple of days earlier while wearing one of Cicero’s old windbreakers, and it was in this room I realized how badly it fit me.

Overwhelming.

You could drown in the love radiating from these pictures of Que and Cicero, and of construction sites, shrines, pets, churches, hillsides, forests: their life. Far more was explained to me during the second visit than what I was asking myself then.

“One of our museum attendants and some of our part-time staff helped put together that photo wall and one of the things they noticed in it is that the way Cicero photographs Que and the way Que photographs Cicero are very, very different,” Thomas said. “If you look at the Cicero photos, he’s very kind of glamorous and posed, but if you look at his photos of Que, he’s just taking pictures of her any moment, like every moment was worth capturing for him.”

Danielle opened one of the sketchbooks, another one of their trips abroad.

“This was one I discovered earlier today, Katie,” she said. “I don’t know if you saw it, but it says, ‘Cicero leaving graffiti in the forest. Bad Cicero.’ It says, ‘I’m so proud,’ and then if you look at this, it says, ‘C+Q.’”

It was a measure of love you could drown in. While I was there alone, the saddest and most desperate songs I’ve ever heard began to play in my head as the twilight, shadows and footprints of the dead carnival embossed my view like a frame. It was the overwhelming feeling that I would never have what they had.

Get a grip. Sit down and pick up one of those binders. My choice contained recollections of a trip to India in 2004.

I’ve been on trips like this, I tell myself, even with people I’ve loved, but I always felt torn between making memories and recording them. I used to say that I would wait until finding a place to rest before writing, regurgitating my memories of the day like a drunk finding a sink, but Que and Cicero appeared to take things in stride, even gracefully. There were drawings, blank stationary from the Grand Heritage Hotel of Udaipur, even dried leaves in here. The crushing weight of this humanity was unabated, and I was falling toward the core of a gas giant, nay, a black hole of memories that didn’t belong to me.

Flipping through, there was an email that had been printed out and slipped into a plastic cover, page 1 of 1.

“Dear fellow jet-lag sufferers,” it read. “Sorry these addresses took a few days to get together. My mind is in a daze filled with thoughts of our extraordinary time in India. Judging from the handwriting on the address list you all filled out, more than a few of you were in a similar daze (too much opium?) when you completed this form. Please check your name on this list to make sure the particulars are correct. If not, just hit the ‘reply to all’ button with corrections. India was a remarkable experience. We will never forget it. Thanks to all of you for the memories. XXXX Kahren.”

I remembered a fable from college of a student struggling to write an essay about an old building. Their professor suggested that they pick a single brick to write about instead. Puzzled at first, the student later submits a glowing essay about the brick, something new and creative that they never would have been able to create without narrowing their gaze. The moral of the story was that limitations are actually very good for being creative.

It was apparent based on the sheer number of photographs that the collage, as big as it was, didn’t even scratch the surface of the life Que and Cicero shared. I picked my brick then, my limitations, and within a few days found myself waiting for 11:30 a.m. in a quiet conference room at work, when I had agreed to call Kahren after successfully leaving a message with her apartment complex in Pittsburgh. Prideful in her absence from social media, she was hard to find.

“India itself is extraordinary, and I have never seen such, sort of, extremes, from extreme opulence to extreme deprivation, in one place at one time. I have never seen so many people between where I was and where I needed to be,” she said of the trip with Que, Cicero and others, organized by the late woodblock artist Carol Summers. “There was this one time Carol Summers says, ‘We’re going to cross this street,’ at this big boulevard in New Delhi, and we just start. There’s no traffic lights, there’s no traffic people, there is seemingly chaos because there are cars and buses and bazillions of motorcycles and tuk-tuks and cows and chickens and rickshaws, and halfway across this street, Cicero looks at Michael and me and says, ‘We’re gonna die here.’”

Kahren Arbitman, Ph.D, was a close friend to Que and Cicero both. Former curator of the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh, later the director of the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and then the Cummer Museum of Art in Jacksonville, the published art critic and historian retired in 2001 and built a home in Winter Park with her husband, Michael, which is when and how she met our subjects.

“We were both building homes at the same time — their home in Thornton Park and ours in Winter Park — and we had the same landscape architect. The landscape architect liked our stucco pattern on our new house that we created, and told Cicero about it, who was looking for something interesting, and he came over and photographed it and actually took rubbings of it, and that’s how we met him. Immediately we met Que, who within a week had invited us to an event that was being held at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna beach,” she said. “They picked us up, and that was the beginning of a friendship.”

On their art, what Kahren described as Que and Cicero’s lush abstracts were a focus of her 2008 book, “Picturing Florida: From the First Coast to the Space Coast,” though she informed me of artists’ tendency to not talk much about their work. Instead, many will tell you, “It’s all in there,” leaving things more to your own interpretation. What I do know for sure is that Cicero loved landscapes, specifically Florida’s, and that Que loved flowers.

“When I talk about works of art, I am most interested in conveying what the artist intended. Not that I’m standing in front of the thing and whatever I feel goes, whatever I see, and that is all right and I like when people do that — if, you know, they see happy, they see sad, they see angst, whatever — but my job as an art historian is to try to put that work in context, the artist’s time, place in their lives, political leanings, religion, all of that,” she said.

Kahren described Cicero as thoughtful and very careful when he spoke, and Que as very well-grounded, a very sincere friend.

Compliments, too, were in store for Casa Querencia.

“Their home is the only home that I would have ever traded for the home I built in Winter Park. It was sort of a reincarnation of an earlier home that they had, I believe, in Maitland. I never was in that home, but the arrangement of the spaces was quite similar, and it was an artist’s home. It had that wing that was just their studios, and later they put in the pool, and it was a home that Cicero designed down to the last window sill, every twist and turn, every piece of floorboard, every material. They did it jointly, but he really was the designer,” she said. “It was their joint idea and his design that created that house.”

I heard tell during the estate sale that certain pieces of furniture even had to be lifted to the second floor with a crane, given the only other way up was a spiral staircase. That second floor was calm, residential space with a view overlooking Lake Emerald. Matching Knoll Diamond chairs held down a hide rug in the reading room, where nearby, Cicero’s degree from FAU had been shoved into a paper bag.

Not everything can be saved during an estate sale, which I have always said are exercises of obligatory utilitarianism. Paper things are always the first to go, but in this case it can’t be said that Cicero didn’t at least put that degree to good use. I’ve got a journalism degree framed in my own office, but I don’t think I’d mind much if it were thrown away after I’m gone. I’d be dead, after all.

Danielle was with the group that had come in before us to secure much of the art — as well as those bits and pieces from Cicero’s careers — that’s now on display at the art center, but so much was still left. She had told me in the museum that the folks sitting on Que’s estate described her as not being sentimental, but the sheer amount of Cicero’s things that we found stood in firm opposition to this theory. His clothes, books, drawing, awards, art supplies, even his half-filled scratchpads like we all have; everything was still here, like he had never left.

I found two VHS tapes among it all. One was a recording of WESH’s coverage when Animal Kingdom opened in 1998, and the other said “IMAGINEERS IN PARIS” with blue pen ink.

To the best of my knowledge, this is a copy of a home video filmed and narrated by retired Imagineer Michael G. Kennedy, who accompanied Cicero, Que and some others to Paris, France, from Oct. 6-13, 2000.

It’s a great tape. Watching it is truly like sharing a little vacation with them, and as a facetious part-time photographer myself while on any trip, it made me think of all the times I lined up a great shot without ever considering who would see it.

The tape is two hours long. You get to visit Disneyland Paris, Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre, summit the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, pass up restaurants along the Champs-Élysées to find pizza instead of something fancier; all in all, the sort of things Imagineers apparently get up to while on holiday.

Things eventually slow down. Everyone finds themselves in what looks to be a makeshift classroom at the Disney Newport Bay Club. The ceilings are far lower than they were in Que and Cicero’s Orlando home, which itself wouldn’t be built until 2003, but I digress, these folks are there to draw and paint, whether on an easel or their knee. Those watching the tape will eventually realize the upcoming hour of footage shows artists essentially working out, literally brushing up on their craft. Practice makes perfect, and though I am biased, Disney’s Imagineers during my childhood were flaunting that perfection.

Back now to that story Palm wrote for the Sentinel, where there’s a detail he learned of Cicero’s Imagineering career that I couldn’t go without including.

Think of Kilimanjaro Safaris. You’ve ridden it before. You may even remember when it used to feature the original poaching backstory complete with the gunfight, but what hasn’t changed? The one thing that catches your eye and reminds you of the first time you heard, “Jambo, everyone!”

According to Palm, Imagineers Cicero Greathouse and Joe Rohde were responsible for the permanent “ruts” in the mud and clay on that ride. Not only that, but as Cicero was a perfectionist, Palm reports you can look closely and see children’s footprints.

It’s so simple, and I’ve always been convinced that this one detail is among the most creative I’ve seen at any theme park. To think I’ve learned this after already beginning to profile Que and Cicero is bizarre.

As far as what I found on my own, those with a keen eye may locate the tribute to Cicero at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It’s a sign that says, “Cicero Art School,” nestled close to a thatched dining space.

I’ve gone ahead and digitized my copy of the VHS tape to the best of my ability. I’m still in the process of reaching out to Kennedy, if perhaps he’d like to see it again.

Much like the photo wall, that one trip to India represented such a small part of Kahren’s relationship with Que and Cicero that she eventually questioned why I wanted to know so much about it.

They actually took two trips to India and another to Morocco among the rest of their many memories. She and Que would go to San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico, where they both ended up buying homes and spending six months out of every year living among the rest of the expatriates.

“We’re at a party and I’m standing next to Cicero, and someone asked him what he does, which normally people don’t do in San Miguel because, frankly, no one cares what you did, which is what’s so lovely. But anyway, he said he was a brain surgeon, and I did not respond to that,” she recalled. “Whoever it was, left. I said, ‘Cicero, a brain surgeon?’ He said, ‘You know, every gringo comes down here, picks up a paintbrush and calls himself an artist, so if they can be an artist, I can be a brain surgeon.’”

It was the same anecdote that Kahren used as the intro to her tribute to Cicero — “Ars Longa Vita Brevis” — which Que had asked her to write for the exhibition in Maitland following his death.

“Ars Longa Vita Brevis” is Latin for “Art Long Life Short.” The more I researched Que and Cicero’s story, the more I became obsessed with this idea that what one creates can outlive them, vicariously extending their own life.

I had saved a big question for this part of the discussion. It related to a journal entry I found in one of the scrapbooks, this time from 2008.

Cicero writes, “Buddha was here.”

“His woods, his sleepless life, ancient life, as the vigilant guide, leader, helper. 400 years old. I know a man who is his devotee.... and after being here... 400 years of life does not seem impossible, does not seem deranged or even abstract.”

Cicero Greathouse, 2008 travelogue (excerpt)

400 years of life. I’m aware that several figures in Christianity were said to have lived for twice as long, but I still haven’t found such connections when it comes to Buddhism. Still, I thought instantly then — before ever meeting Kahren or even deciding to write this story — about this concept of permanence involving art, one of several simple ways a person can live forever.

I asked Kahren if she thought this was the enlightened artist talking, or just Cicero.

“I don’t know how to answer that either,” she replied, after I had already asked her an incredibly vague question about what kind of dreams she had after the 2004 India trip. Colorful ones, she said.

“Artists leave behind a legacy that the rest of us don’t, you know? Pieces of art are now in museums that are thousands of years old, forget 400 years, and there’s always that possibility that a piece that one creates is handed down from generation to generation and lives on even many times after the artist’s name is forgotten, but the work is still there, standing as a sort of icon of beauty and wonder, and people can still react to it, respond to it,” she said.

Nobody expected Cicero to die first, Arbitman said, adding Que showed great strength then.

“Her illness was diagnosed not that long after he died, and his cancer was a bad one, and painful, and so it must have been extremely difficult for her to watch, but she wasn’t a weeper or a wailer. She was more resigned to, ‘This is the way it is,’ and then she got this focus. I think, more than anything else, that’s what allowed her to keep going. She’s going to do it for her, but also for him. She threw herself into the exhibition at Maitland (...) that, happening right after he died, focused her attention then and moved her out of that kind of inertia that losing somebody like that would naturally cause,” Arbitman said. “She was given six months to live, maybe a little more if she went through all of these treatments, and she said, ‘I am not spending what is left of my life with my head in the toilet. I don’t want any treatments,’ and she then set about to make every minute that she had left count, and she did it. She had two years left, not six months.”

I asked Kahren to reflect, for me, on what it was like to have such good friends for so many years.

“When you get older, you will discover that you always have new friends, but they never replace what I used to call ‘old friends,’ except now that’s somewhat pejorative being as old as I am. Longtime friends. Those are just the friends you can go to for anything. You don’t ask, you don’t have to ask, you just have to need, and they will be there. That’s what it feels like to have great, longtime friends,” she said.

My final question for Kahren was simple, though it took several more days to come up with it and even longer to find the proper humility.

I’ve been baffled before by interpersonal relationships. Whether they work out well or end badly, I’m liable to not understand either outcome. What stands out most is, of course, the feeling of unrequited loss when something that you thought was going well suddenly catches fire, but there’s another that I find twice as heavy despite being half as real. I feel it when my best friend’s parents hold gettys in their backyard. With me there, holding my wine glass, I look around at the longtime friends that they were able to keep, and I can only think about how incapable I am of the same, even though it’s all I want. The same lead blanket of emotion that smothered me at the photo wall.

I asked Kahren if she had any advice for making friends.

“Friends? Join interest groups, take art classes, volunteer at social services, stay off the internet and connect face to face, be open to ideas that don’t necessarily mesh with yours (but never compromise your values),” she wrote. “To have good friends, you have to be a good friend. Acquaintances become friends with continued positive interactions. Remember, nobody starts out as friends. You ‘become’ a friend.”

Katie, Danielle and I visited André Smith’s studio on my way out, the one Cicero worked in 12 years ago. I had begun blanking on good questions this late into the interview and was focused, at the time, on just taking pictures. I remarked only that the space was small, simultaneously shady and well-lit, and felt as old as they say.

Walking away and back to the lobby, the rain was getting worse. Falling water influenced thoughts of erosion and I finally asked another decent question: What happens to all of these paintings, these photos and belongings, when this exhibition ends?

“Some of it we’re accessioning into our collection, and it’ll be displayed in the new education classrooms, and then some of the works in the exhibition are for sale, so that they’ll go into the homes of people who knew them, where they can be enjoyed,” Danielle said.

Museum storage and artifact preservation is serious business. If the art center plays its cards right, whichever pieces that aren’t bought will likely end up in a safe place where they can stay put for years, maybe even 400 years, without deteriorating.

The world will turn and burn as new life replaces old, but whether in these works of art, the pictures, their friends’ memories, slideshows and scrapbooks, the theme parks, even in what has been and will be created as a result of their great contributions to Orlando, Que Throm and Cicero Greathouse, who found their querencia in each other, will live forever.

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