The Monroe Association for ReMARCable Citizens is a non-profit agency serving differently-abled adults. Over the past several months, MARC clients have had to take extra safety precautions and self-isolate to protect their health. During that difficult time, many have found art-making to be a perfect outlet. This collection of paintings by MARC clients shows the highs, lows and in-between felt by this community during a most unusual time.

With works ranging from pop-inflected paintings to postmodern ceramics, the five artists here all straddle the threshold of abstraction. They also share a common history, each connected to Bennington College in the 60’s and 70’s, and in various ways to the national art scene, and to Islamorada where the art luminaries Jules Olitski (Lauren Olitski’s father) and Larry Poons (De Luccia’s husband) lived for many years.

Culled from her ongoing Gym Series, Albritton’s colorful, awkward, and very funny paintings ultimately offer a profound commentary on the lengths people will go to in search of the perfect body.

If being mostly housebound over the last year has taught us anything, it’s been new ways of connecting. We’ve explored the world virtually, scheduled screen chats with loved ones, and opened our eyes to old injustices and hidden treasures that were around us all along. For our winter members’ exhibition, we invite artwork about wherever you are – whether it’s the view from your window, or from your mind’s eye.

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.

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.

David 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.

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.

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.