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.