2016/17 season details coming soon!
Over the course of the past year, while back at home in Pennsylvania, images of crystalline waters and twisted mangroves have stubbornly pushed through former Artist in Residence Cynthia Back’s work. Now, Cynthia Back returns to Key West with a series of reduction woodcuts and collages based on the plants and homes she discovered during her month on the island.
Dave Dunn is known for his ability to turn anything that lands at his feet or fingertips— bike chains, tools, bolts, steel plates—into primordial creatures. His latest series has him repurposing hard metal castoffs into imaginative representations of the beings and beasts who rule the ocean depths.
Christine Fifer’s paintings and sculptures revolve around books – their history & their contents – all woven together with puns, puzzles, and didactic intent to both amuse and encourage conversation. Still life paintings of precariously stacked first editions are simultaneously realistic and surreal, prompting extended investigation. Leaping from the canvas, Fifer’s sculptures utilize actual books suffering from wear or neglect that have been repurposed to create playful and thoughtful sculptures in search of their own Renaissance.
Binard’s portraits combine painting with ceramic and mixed media to comment on the tension between one’s identity in the eyes of others, and the one we choose ourselves. Intensely personal, the pieces touch on Binard’s racial and cultural history.
Caldwell’s mixed media paintings capture the exuberance of an island bursting with color: the endless shades of foliage, the magnificent variety of flowers, the aqua-teal-turquoise water, and the billowing sunsets shifting from peach-pink to the blue-purple-indigo of nightfall.
Necklace designer Maxine Makover and photographer Michael Philip explore and amplify the many stories jewelry tells. Makover taps into this potential with her creative wearable art, while Philip’s classical contemporary photographic element captures the life themes—joy, loss, sensuality—portrayed by the wearer.
In advance of the popular annual auction, The Studios presents a preview of the works that will be available for bidding on February 17. With almost a quarter century of “artists helping artists” behind them, The Studios is proud to host the annual Anne McKee auction, where aficionados bid on contemporary and classic works to raise proceeds which help fund the vital grant program for Keys artists.
One of Cuba’s leading figures since bursting onto the scene as a young sculptor in the early 1990s, Esterio Segura is an artist and community organizer of volcanic talent and seismic impact, known for his sharp critiques of Cuban politics and society. Among many international commissions is his installation at Tampa International Airport of a flotilla of cherry red airplanes, with hearts for fuselages, symbolizing the Cuban diaspora that began with the Peter Pan children airlifted to the US in the early 1960s.
Photographer and media artist Jeane LaRance shares her work in a special exhibition benefitting The Studios’ scholarship program. LaRance presents a breadth of images–of her beloved Haiti, her adopted hometown of Key West and of Indigenous populations in the American West–captured and rendered with devoted attention.
Florida Prize finalist Robert Aiosa is a sculptor whose primary practice is wood-working, with the attention to detail and craftsmanship you’d expect from a woodworker. As an artist, however, he turns his focus on the built environment, to understand how buildings and neighborhoods are planned and transition over time. Since moving to Florida, his sculptures and installations add tropical flora into the mix, leading to conversations about the conflicts between built and natural landscapes.
Orisha: The Lost Saints is a photo series exploring the disappearing Santeria religion from the Florida Keys through large format portraits of local practitioners recast as the saints they worship. Large scale images shed a light on this fading tradition.
Self-taught artist Siegert utilizes her background in art therapy and social work to mine traditional figure and portraiture for glimmers of emotional depth and intimacy. Her acrylic, charcoal and graphite works capture the inner voice of her female subjects.
Katlin Spain pieces shapes of color together into large scale oil paintings influenced by her time spent in Key West. Bushes of bright flowers overflow from fenced yards, ripe fruit dangles from stems, and palms and poincianas overlap each other, covering the view above with different shades of green and vermillion.
Olga Manosalvas is known for her colorful paintings and sculptures which depict island dwellers, Mardi Gras revelers and voodoo queens with a distinct voice of the tropics. Her latest works explore a more monochromatic plane, capturing her figures in tones and highlighting sections of skin pigments and fabrics for added emphasis. These new color shifts provide a fresh vantage point to question the everyday.
Former Artist in Residence, Scott Ponemone began his current watercolor project, the “2 by 2” series, in 2017 as a way to focus on human interactions. Each painting presents the unique dynamic between two persons at the moment when Ponemone (the artist and a stranger) greets them and asks them to be models for his art. The subjects could be couples, friends, relatives or co-workers — anything that establishes a dynamic between the pair.
The dancers in Piscopink’s stunning photographs inhabit an ethereal underwater dream world, offering both an escape from the day to day, and a deep connection to nature, the human form, imagination, and profound spiritual forces.
Key West, an island steeped in mystery and movement, tradition and transformation, has no shortage of tales to tell. One particular era—the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—in the community’s storied past, defined Key West as a true artist’s outpost and muse to many. The forthcoming book, “Home at the End of the World,” is a collection of nonfiction, first-person stories and photos from this golden time of Cayo creativity. Stories and images will be on display.
The past year has pulled Nowak’s attention in a hundred different directions—a new gallery and a new baby, for starters. As always though, her painting practice has been a constant. With her latest endeavor JAG Gallery off the ground, which Keys Weekly describes as being “like a super cool younger sibling who somehow has clout and cred way beyond her years”, Nowak is ready to once again share her own incredible work with the community.
Wild Observations explores change in wildlife corridors, combining scientific research with artistic interpretation. The paintings, installations and photo-based works featured recount ecological and cultural studies of observations occurring in our wild places. These color drenched works include mammals, birds, botany and landscapes, some layered with correlated scientific data.
Artist Kristyn LaMoia sees the world from all sides. Her inaugural Key West exhibition explores how the space we see, what we experience, is informed by our subconscious. By delving into, what she terms as, “the absurd beings of our subconscious mind”, LaMoia invites viewers to experience a surreal inner world replete with fantastic, sometimes funny inhabitants. The clean, delicate style of her work balances her perceptions of a sprawling otherworldliness.
