Art loft is brought to you by.

Where there is freedom.

There is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

Art loft.

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, the Art of the Florida Keys, we explore a Key Largo gallery in disguise.

Meet a singer songwriter in Islamorada.

Learn about the makeover of a marathon mainstay.

Sculptor Lauren P McCollum welcomes us to her Stock Island studio and we head to the Tropic Cinema, Key West home for independent film.

Key Largo is a surprising island.

Traffic melts away and a fishing village and restaurants emerge.

It's here where we find an art gallery tucked into an unexpected space.

The second you come over the bridge and you enter in, it's just a, um.

They're like, where's the lobby?

They're like, this is the lobby.

They're like, really?

This is so beautiful.

And then they start to ask about the artists.

And, you know, we kind of guide them along the way, and we always walk our guests to the room and try to get them involved in the rest of the galleries that are in the keys as well.

My name is Catherine Lyons, and I'm the general manager at the Kona Kai Resort Gallery and Botanic Garden.

And I've been here for close to eight years.

Joe and Ronnie.

When they first came from New York, they fell in love with the property, turned it into the Kona Kai Resort.

We have 14 rooms and suites, and to enhance guests experiences, they decided to create the gallery and the Botanic Gardens.

That was probably give or take maybe about 27 years ago.

And then we are now recently under new ownership and management.

So it's been very exciting to get all these new artists back in here.

What we're trying to do is to promote artists.

I'm part of the Arts Council of the Florida Keys and to keep the artists alive.

And, you know, we built scholarships through that council, and it keeps the visitors that are coming around the world excited about the artists that we have here.

You do not need to be a registered guest to enjoy the gallery, but it's good to check in and then we can guide you to where to go and, you know, show you the art and the garden.

Beverly Borland and Pauline Goldsmith, which they reside in Coral Gables.

They are amazing botanical artists.

Beth Carmen Stein, she is actually from New York.

She's doing all the pottery.

What a creative mind and very involved with promotion of arts in the Florida Keys.

We also have, of course, Jack Kelly, the biologist, and we're very happy to have him here in the gallery as well as Jen.

She does some amazing artwork for animals.

When people do search for us, they do the gardens and the gallery pop up, which is interesting for them to see that.

And they're looking for accommodations on the water.

So it does attract people due to the art and the fact that we are an adult only property as well.

Just makes for a very unique visitor that's here to decompress and relax and enjoy the arts and the gardens, along with all the amenities that the keys has to offer.

Isla morada is home to a vibrant arts community with a monthly art walk, galleries and artist studios.

And if you listen closely, you'll almost always hear live music somewhere, and there's a good chance it's singer songwriter Leah Suter.

It's a special group of of individuals who have lived down here.

And we love this town.

And we realize when we've left and gone somewhere else, how amazing and unique the keys are.

And so many people work their entire lives just to get down here.

And we were blessed to live here and grow up down here.

Being a keys kid is it's like a badge of honor that we all wear.

I love to be called a singer songwriter.

I pull from a lot of different influences, so I love folk and bluegrass music, but I also love top 40 country music as well.

I grew up with that and the songwriting, as well as looking up to women who played guitar and singing.

I feel like my style and why I do music is so much those influences in my life these days.

I definitely love to like, lean into the acoustic singer songwriter with some of like the more country flair, but I tend to play music from a variety of genres, so a little bit of everything is influenced.

In there we stand two ships.

I have a.

Lot of pride being from this town.

I love the keys.

I born and raised here, literally born on the island.

So I have so much pride saying I'm a conch.

It's such a unique, uh, community that supports art and music and expression.

There's no way I could be doing what I do without the support of the community and their love of live music, as well as the musician community that we have down here.

We have so many talented people who we all are all there for each other.

Being from here, I think has really taught me about who I am as a person and as a musician.

You know, you come to the keys, you got to slow down a little bit, take a look at the beautiful Paradise that's around you.

So I've learned to just be a laid back person as well as a laid back musician.

So I just try and enjoy myself, make sure everyone is relaxed, enjoying themselves as well when I perform.

Um.

The keys is an amazing, amazing place, which is what has kept me here.

You say I know something special when I see it.

I hope you meant me.

Your life changes.

It's.

And things don't go as planned.

Oh, what a discovery.

It's almost too.

Good.

I want it to be true.

Someone like you.

Only comes.

Once in.

A blue moon.

A blue moon.

So maybe the stars aligned.

And it was finally time.

I found.

You.

It was crazy how we stand.

Two ships from two lands would come to collide.

Cause on the sea there's storms and people fall overboard.

But you're by my side.

It's only.

Oh so good.

I wanted to be true.

Someone like you only.

Comes once in.

A blue moon.

I blow my.

So maybe the stars align.

And it was finally time.

I found you.

Oh.

I found you.

I found you.

Oh.

Down you.

I found you.

I found you.

I found you.

Like you found me to.

Janice Nagle first came to Marathon's Shady Palm Art Gallery as an artist.

Now, as its new owner, she's helping the gallery turn over a new leaf.

Every day is a new palette.

Outside in our environment, the colors change every single day.

The water is a different color every single day.

The colors are just spectacular a sunrises and our sunsets are amazing colors underneath the waters of our fish, our birds, our skies.

And it shows in all of our artists work.

And that's where they get their inspiration from.

Janice Nagle, and I am an artist and the owner of Shady Palm Art Gallery and live in a local color art gallery.

They're both located in this same building.

So Shady Palm has been around for quite a while, and I had my artwork here at Shady Palm Art Gallery, and when the owner decided to retire, she came to me and said, Janice, do you want to buy Shady Palm Art Gallery?

So here I am and it is a dream come true.

Um, it's just exciting to be able to help other artists the way that they helped me in the beginning.

And that's really what I'm looking forward to, is expanding, helping local artists.

This was actually the first piece that I've ever painted.

It was out of boredom after Hurricane Irma.

This was a photograph that I took of my husband's charter boat.

Um, and I found a tin with my grandmother's paints and the photo on the floor of my garage.

After cleaning up a little bit and my grandma spoke to me and said, paint.

So I did.

So that was originally the first painting that I started and ultimately finished after a while.

Um, and this is where all of this began.

All the local artists just said, don't stop painting, keep going, and I did.

I tried different mediums.

I started with acrylic.

Then I went to watercolors and and batik, and I just kept going.

So and it's really been a lot of fun for me.

Um, and it's fun watching myself grow.

And that's what I want to instill on other artists here, is watching them grow and giving them the opportunity to to just become wonderful artists.

And that's that's why I'm here.

We have 57 local Florida Keys artists.

Everybody is here in the keys, so everything has originated here.

We have a wide variety of artists.

We have metal artists, we have multimedia recycling artists, we have acrylics, we have wood artists.

Some of our artists work with oils and acrylics.

And it's just a large, um, display of art that we have here.

And everyone is just a little bit different.

Our visitors spend a lot of time here.

We have our classroom.

We repainted the outside.

We've added about 1000ft to the art section of the gallery.

We've moved our custom frame shop and we added my art gallery, living a local color here as well.

So we're really two beautiful galleries for our visitors and locals to explore.

We're trying to bring more attention to marathon for the art community.

We want to expand on those art classes, and we're inviting, you know, artists from the keys, not just our art gallery, to come and do classes for us as well.

We want to do some events and also let everybody know that our artists are here and to support the local art, because it's really important.

They're one of the smallest businesses and they do so much from their heart that they deserve that attention.

Up next, we stop at the Stock Island studio of sculptor Lauren P McAloon.

Here, she talks about her latest body of work based on vessels and her journey as an artist bullied by community.

Lauren McAloon.

Lauren Proctor.

McAloon specifically.

Um.

And I'm a sculptress.

Been here for about 30 years.

I work in a variety of materials.

Um, more recently have been.

Really honed in on the base of most of the work of being a boat shape.

Um, or vessels.

And so I call them vessel series.

And they've been coming out from me for the last, I'd say, ten years.

And this is a very specific this exhibit is a specific body of work within.

That vessel series.

My studio is located on Stock Island.

The next quay up going towards Miami from Key West.

Um, quite a few artists are out here.

I'm in a compound called the Stock Yard Studios, and there are stone workers, woodworkers, painters, assemblage artists.

So it's a really good community here.

Um, we kind of leave each other alone, but also pop in on each other.

And if I need a critique or, um, they're everybody's always happy to help.

I come from a family that's very uses their hands a lot for doing things extremely creative.

Um, my mother was a painter.

Father was an architect, but also could pretty much do anything.

I had an incredible childhood growing up, and since then have dabbled.

One of those people that's knows a little bit about a lot of things.

Worked on boats for a while.

Um, building boats for a while.

Um, fishmonger for a while here in the keys.

And, but I realized all of it kind of fed into, um, a sense of design and, um, three dimensions as opposed to two-dimensional work is my joy.

And here in the keys started to take it seriously.

I had a piece accepted when I first learned welding for a sculpture, Key West, which used to be an annual exhibit out at Fort Zachary Taylor and then different other venues.

And when that piece was accepted to be shown, I kind of started really thinking seriously about it.

Um, the boat series, the boat, the vessel series that I've been working on pretty much for the last ten years started with starting to learn about ceramics, and I literally dropped a piece of clay through a not well, he dropped it and it elongated out and I was like, whoa!

And then I purposely threw it and continually and depending on the clay body and the how malleable it was, um, different, the boat shape would come out.

And I've been playing now with that for quite a while, and then taking them apart and putting them back together, adding things to, um, reference basically what I'm thinking about.

I'm migration.

It's immigration.

But with the apostrophe it's pronounced I'm migration.

And that is a reference to the fact that we all, by force or by choice, have migration or immigration in our personal histories.

And that's really important for people not to forget.

The reaction to the exhibit has been overwhelmingly positive.

I'm actually humbling.

So, um, a lot of people have seen my work over the years.

One piece here, one piece there.

But to see a quantity and a number of pieces and all within a theme within the vessel series, uh, had surprised a lot of people.

I think they were like, whoa.

And but a lot of people were waiting to see the pressure was big time, waiting to see what I was going to do after having left the studios, having time now and having this incredible space, um, to work in people, I was able to go big and bigger than I ever been able to before, and that was a lot of fun.

The rudders, um, those are off of the Dry Tortugas back when there was the wet foot, dry foot policy.

So they're all bent.

Because getting close to any type of landform, you didn't go slow.

You.

Read up on land, and so all the rudders have this bend in them from going up on land.

And they are each one is so different from another.

And for to me it just is amazing that people put their trust.

In something that looks so simple to get them all the way across.

They're just amazing.

I mean, the rope was on it still.

I have a few others.

One had carefully stitched leather.

Um, on the handle, but.

I mean, they're all different.

They're all home made out of what people could find.

My hope that conversations that would instigate conversations about personal migration, immigration for people happened, at least at the opening, you know?

Where's your family from?

Um, well, my family came on the Mayflower.

Oh, mine came two years ago.

And people, especially with the current, um.

Situations with immigration and migration all over the world, has been right at the forefront of a lot of people's mind.

And here was a space to, um, have it be okay to have a conversation about it.

And that that was really heartening to to see happen.

If it keeps coming out, then I'm just going to keep doing it because I really enjoy it.

Um, there's other things I've been playing with the palm fronds.

Um, the royal palm fronds.

I've been collecting them for a while now because they, some of them come down and they're extremely dress like, and I really like that.

So definitely now I have the space to continue working with them.

I would sometime I will get enough of them that I like that I want to make all these, you know, dancing dresses all in a circle.

You know, people always ask, what do you like about us that makes you stay?

And, you know, most generally the answer is, well, I like the water.

You know, I like the weather, the people, of course.

And for me.

Environmentally, it's the sky.

The sky here is just phenomenal.

And people wise, it's one of the very few places I've ever lived where people don't pigeonhole you.

They allow you to.

They truly allow and support you to change on your own personal journey.

You know, when I came here as a fishmonger, they supported me at that.

Um, and then morphed into spending more and more than the facilities manager, the studios, and that there was great support for that and my artwork.

I mean, it's overwhelming the support for that, for that change.

And I've never seen that anywhere else where people truly support a person's journey as it changes over time, as it's inevitable it should.

And to me, that's what The Keys has done.

In Key West.

Tropic cinema is the home of independent film.

It recently rolled out the red carpet for an Oscar viewing party, where we caught up with executive director Carla Turner to learn more about the tropics mission.

We hear stories from people saying that they would not want to be in Key West without the tropic.

We have a huge community base.

I'm Carla Turner and I'm the executive director at the Tropic Cinema.

We are a non-profit.

This year is our 20th year anniversary.

Our mission is just to provide the community with stories from people.

We do all kinds of indie art house films, independent foreign language films, stories that they wouldn't that the community wouldn't hear otherwise.

I love to hear people come in and say, I just want to walk through.

It's such a beautiful movie theater.

It's such a great experience.

I've.

I've loved the ambiance there.

Our founders just had this.

They wanted Art Deco.

They hired an architect and a designer to come in and kind of guide them on.

You know what?

What it would look like in the colors.

And and we have stuck with it.

I mean, we're not going to let go of our original neon, the neon sign people keep wanting us to move to LED.

We're not going to we're going to keep all of the original colors.

And yeah, everyone loves it.

Everyone thinks we're old, but we're really not that old.

So the Oscar party is always fun.

It's kind of more of a gift from the Tropic to our community.

It's definitely more of a party.

Um, it's just kind of a thank you for coming in and watching all these films that you've seen all year long, and we love to do the Oscar ballots and tally that up for the people who are really into it and think they can figure it out.

We're most successful and we draw most excitement by offering events.

So we do a lot of talkbacks.

I think people enjoy seeing the movies and hearing the stories, but they also enjoy having a conversation after the movie about how they felt.

This was really the first year we came back to doing event-based programming, where we're paying filmmakers to fly in and talk about their films.

We're just going to dive deeper into that.

We're going to continue to support new filmmakers coming in and showing their films that haven't been seen yet on our screen as a premiere.

And we're just going to keep investing, investing in our filmmakers.

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Art loft is brought to you by.

Where there is freedom.

There is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

And the Friends of South Florida PBS.