EXHIBITIONS

Whether you’re assembling marks on a canvas, curating a tropical garden, or prioritizing the people that matter most to you, sometimes the best way to get at the big picture is to take it one piece at a time. For this year’s open members’ exhibition, we invite artists to join The Studios in taking it easy and being kind to ourselves, by focusing on the little things.

For well over a year, against a backdrop of headlines consumed by the pandemic, Ohio-based printmaker Nicholas Hill has scanned the paper each day for people glimpsed in the backgrounds of news photos, then foregrounded them as raw, brush and ink drawings across the paper’s surface.

Known as an illustrator of children’s books, with over 40 years of titles under his belt, Christopher Santoro’s seemingly effortless range extends to elegant abstractions, witty design, and tightly rendered visual puns that just might make you snort with laughter.

The sure-handed and well-loved Director of Fine Arts at College of the Florida Keys is also one of the area’s strongest ceramicists, with a collection of recent work combining organic and abstract forms in her distinct style.

Ballast Key is a backcountry island seven miles west of Key West. It was owned by David Wolkowsky, a friend of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Wolkowsky died recently at 99. Under the guidance of the Nature Conservancy, the island was donated to the National Wildlife Refuge system to become a backcountry research station. South of Southernmost is a photography project that documents the arc of the island’s story as it reorients from the human to the wild.

For over fifty years, Judith Murray and Robert Yasuda have been highly respected proponents of abstract painting in New York, throughout the United States, and internationally. During that time, they’ve spent part of the year in the fabled neighborhood of SoHo New York and the rest of the time in the Florida Keys. In their first exhibition in Key West, Murray will present vividly painted canvases that emphasize her sculptural brushwork alongside Yasuda’s shaped and carved panels of subtly modulated colors.

In her recent works on paper, Tyler Buckheim Trosset reaches across time to touch the past, combining the tactility of rubbings from liquor bottles and monuments with tightly rendered graphite drawings based on historic photos of fishing boats and discarded military ID’s.

The most exciting auction of the year is also one of the year’s best group exhibitions, with a carefully curated roster of veteran and emerging Keys artists. As ever, 100% of the proceeds benefit artists, both directly to the ones on auction, and through grants by the Anne McKee Artists Fund.

Koenig’s ambitious, meticulous, fantastical paintings and works on paper are inspired by her close study of eastern spirituality and Jungian philosophy. Monkeys, elephants and peacock feathers are fused into kaleidoscopes of color and pattern, offering themselves as guides to a higher consciousness.

On the eve of Key West’s 200th anniversary, we celebrate two of the ingredients in our island’s secret sauce: our cultural roots in Cuba, and our arguably irrational love of baseball! A who’s who of Key West and Cuba’s most accomplished artists celebrate America’s pastime, at The Studios and other venues.

Combining assemblage and encaustic wax painting techniques, Kostmayer’s latest shadowboxes draw on architectural elements – mouldings, finials, railings, and more – in a series of abstract compositions that are as gently loving as they are elegant.

Trained as a furniture maker by master craftsmen, and as a folk quilter by his grandmother and other artists, San Francisco-based artist William Rhodes uses his talents and empathy to give voice to African American histories and communities before they are lost to time. His exquisite wooden sculptures incorporate neon slogans, historic photos, and other ephemera. His fiber works include a pair of quilts made in Fall 2021 with members of Key West’s Bahama Village community.

German artist Heidi Thiessen fell in love with Key West in the 1980s and never fell out. Her tender series of dreamlike paintings on found wood pieces – mostly of people and scenes from Bahama Village – combine the virtuosity of a renaissance artist with the strange directness of folk art.

Burnham’s maximalist installation of folded, layered and intertwined drawings is like stepping into a pop-up comic book that’s as disorienting as it is exhilarating. Burnham is based in Maryland, where she is a tenured professor, and boasts a resume of exhibitions and collections across the country and beyond.

Writer, comic, fashionista and stealth tricyclist Kevin Assam takes phrases overheard at parties, gay bars and dubious back alleys, then prints them in neon colors like a modern-day Warhol, finding poetry in the absurd.

As a painter, stage designer and award-winning filmmaker, Hird explores the unifying elements in humanity’s collective myths. Using a multicultural vocabulary of colorful patterns and symbols gathered over years of travel, she describes the symbiotic relationship between earth’s systems with large canvases, intimate assemblages and dreamlike animations.

A mermaid plays the lyre with a boat on her head. An anthropomorphized cat considers her next move. A dragon smiles with its tongue out like a happy dog. Effio’s charming raku and concrete sculptures appear like characters from a children’s book, leaping into three dimensions.

Appleby’s wall-sized cyanotype prints are juxtaposed with plants, oolite and found objects in an immersive installation meant to have you gaze again at the world around you, with praise, consideration and collaborative energy.

With warm colors and decisive lines, veteran Miami artist Meme Ferré paints with the confidence of a woman fully engaged both with the world around her, and the canvas she faces. Her large abstract and semi-abstract compositions contemplate big questions: ecstasy, determination, vulnerability and change.

We close out the season with a celebration of the fruit that brings us joy – like holding sunshine in the palm of your hand – and an annual reminder of why we love our island home. In the same spirit, our summer group exhibition is a celebration of the creativity all around us, as our family of artist members share the fruits of their labors (mango-inspired or otherwise), with something for every taste.