The emergence and growth of a city's artistic community is an uplifting thing—for the city, for its residents, and certainly for artists. And when that city is in the throes of renaissance, it's exciting to see its cultural heart and soul growing right along with its streetscape. That's what's happening in downtown Sanford, home to the newest visual arts venue, Gallery on First.
But Gallery on First is a great deal more than art on the walls. It's also studio space for eleven artists. The gallery concept was conceived by art collectors Howard and Robin Marks of Longwood. Housed in a building they own in downtown Sanford, Gallery on First combines a contemporary folk-art gallery with working studios—thereby not just exhibiting art but creating a vibrant environment in which more art can be made. By bringing together the gallery expertise of established art dealer Jeanine Taylor with some of the area's best-known and highly talented artists, this unique gallery adds a rich layer of color to the downtown tapestry.
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Robin and Howard Marks |
Groundwork
Howard and Robin Marks spend a good deal of time in Sanford. Robin, a self-taught artist, has been working at her mosaic tile business, The Mosaic Station, for the past two and a half years. Howard is an attorney, and although his firm is in Winter Park, legal business brings him to the Seminole County Courthouse often. Sanford and its history have always fascinated him. "It's a port town with a railroad, and the buildings are tremendous," he says. "[A few years ago] we bought a building and started fixing it up, and just got fascinated with the town."
Then in early 2004, the Markses acquired the 16,000-sq. ft. Hotchkiss Block building that houses Gallery on First. The building, which forms an L, encompasses 211 E. First St. through 217 S. Palmetto Ave. The Gallery space itself is the site of the former Manuel Jacobson's department store and is on the National Register of Historic Places. (A thrift store occupied the building when they bought it.) They originally planned to rent it to retail tenants but realized it would be ideal for an art gallery. Not that the couple had the time to run a gallery's day-to-day operations. That's when they thought of Janine Taylor, a friend who operated the Jeanine Taylor Folk Art Gallery.
Howard and Robin Marks are collectors of modern and Pop art as well as vintage Americana such as carnival coin-operated pinball and fortune-teller machines, and circus side-show banners and other signage, which he considers as original folk art. They had been collecting for ten years when they met Taylor at her Park West Folk Art Gallery in Winter Park in 1997. Taylor introduced them to a wide range of contemporary folk and outsider art, which they felt was a good fit with their existing collection.
When they approached her in the spring of 2004, she was wrapped up in a project for the Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, North Carolina. But that project was postponed, and so she contacted Howard and Robin to say she would hold her fall show in the building. But hurricanes put a major damper on that show. But by this time, Taylor was intrigued. The three sat down and agreed on an operational plan for the gallery.
Ruby C. Williams, an artist Taylor represents, was having a show at the Anacostia Museum, a branch of the Smithsonian. Taylor made plans to go a day early to visit the Torpedo Factory in nearby Alexandria, Va.—a successful visual arts center in a reclaimed, renovated torpedo factory, which includes 84 working studios and six galleries. When Taylor came back and told them about the Alexandria venue, they decided to add working artists studios to their gallery plan. And the Gallery on First exhibit-space-cum-studio concept took shape.
At the time the Markses purchased the First Street building, they saw Taylor only occasionally; they still purchased art from her, although she closed her Winter Park gallery after 9/11.
They wanted something that would make a statement and lend energy to downtown Sanford. And that is when the three—all native Floridians—combined their passion for collecting and promoting Florida artists, and their business savvy to make it happen. The result is Gallery on First.
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Jeanine Taylor |
Local color
Jeanine Taylor is not a painter. In fact, she has never tried painting, but she is good with fabric and loves to decorate. She speculates that if she were to ever become an artist, she would probably be a mixed-media fiber artist, "something that's a little more forgiving than painting," she says.
While she has no formal art education, art has always been part of her life. Her evolution from someone who enjoys art to someone who promotes art, specifically folk art, is a result of her upbringing, her travels, and the people she met along the way.
Taylor was born in Miami. She graduated with a degree in education from Florida State University and taught school in Highlands County, a rural area with agriculture and cattle among its major industries.
After 14 years of teaching, she parlayed that experience into a new career as an educational consultant for a Fortune 500 company, training teachers to use computers. She later became a salesperson for that company, doing a great deal of traveling through her Florida, Georgia and Alabama territories. In the course of her travels she began to realize that many Floridians. don't have a strong sense of place. "Miamians considered themselves Floridians, and Key West Conchs were Floridians, and in the Panhandle they're Floridians," she says. But overall, Florida has become such a melting pot that she felt that, in general, there wasn't a strong sense of culture and heritage.
She compares that to what she saw while visiting and socializing with relatives in Louisiana and Texas: people talking about some of their more popular regional artists. "They'd say, 'I just bought a piece from such-and-such,' and everyone would know who that artist was . . . and I thought, 'We have artists and writers here in Florida too, but they aren't obvious to new Floridians, and they are not embraced by the majority of the state." That's when Taylor decided to do something about it.
"I felt that there could be an interest in this, and that I might be able to start a business out of this," she says. "So I was still traveling as a salesperson, and I began collecting. My business was going to be art, literature, and indigenous food items. She was traveling for her sales job more, collecting more, and being pulled further and further apart by the two. She knew she couldn't do both, and in 1996 she quit her sales job and decided to make the leap.
Florida folk
Taylor opened the first phase of her business at Browsers Barn in the Longwood historic district. She rented a 500-sq. ft. unit downstairs and called it The Florida Emporium. This was about the same time the City of Orlando announced plans for the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art.
"That was a huge reinforcement for me," she says. "But, I didn't limit my business to folk art. I was working with some very fine artists . . . indigenous artists who could be called Florida artists." Not just landscape artists, "but someone who incorporated the culture and history, an artist like Christopher Still," whom she met in Tarpon Springs in 1995. "He incorporates the history of Florida in his oil paintings—every little thing has some meaning to it," she says. The State of Florida recently commissioned him to do several huge murals in the Capitol building. "He is sort of the state's 'resident artist,' and I had identified that element in his work back then."
Also of long-standing interest to Taylor is the landscape art of the The Highwaymen, a group of African-American artists tutored by A.E. "Bean" Backus, an established white artist, in Fort Pierce in the 1950s. The Highwaymen, probably Florida's best-known landscape artists at the time, sold their paintings along the road—hence the name. This group was important to Taylor because "the Highwaymen have become what I wanted us to have. We now have an art history here in Florida."
After leaving her sales job with some trepidation, Taylor was now seeing signs that her dream of running a contemporary folk art gallery might actually pan out. She recognized that she could spot talent early on—as in the case of Christopher Still. The Highwaymen's popularity bestowed upon Florida an art history of its own, and the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art was soon to open in Orlando. This is also the same time she heard about the Outsider Art Fair in New York, and in January 1997 went to see what it was all about. "I saw art collectors walking out of the Puck Building on Houston St. with folk art under their arms like it was going out of style," she says. And that's when she knew she was on the right track.
So much so that in March of 1997 she moved her business to Winter Park to gain more exposure. She found a house in the Hannibal Square area, which fit in with what she was trying to do to promote and develop culture and history—a sense of place. And she changed her gallery's name to Park West Folk Art.
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The front room of Gallery on First is the new home of
Jeanine Taylor Folk Art. |
Gallerist
When Taylor held her first show at the Park West Folk Art gallery, the initial group of collectors who came—Howard and Robin Marks among them—knew contemporary folk art and knew what she was trying to do. But, "for the next year or so, I was pretty much 'evangelizing' [about contemporary folk art]". She held a series of shows that allowed the artists and collectors to meet. "I think that's what started building a fascination [in me] with who these artists were, and fostering an understanding of what contemporary folk art is." She adds that the Mennello Museum was a tremendous resource that "legitimized what I was doing, because many of the artists who they were exhibiting were artists I was hanging in my gallery, and that is exciting for a collector."
One bit of advice Taylor always gives to novice contemporary folk art collectors is "You need to buy art that appeals to you. If you want to buy art as an investment—that's fine. But if you're buying art for a home collection, don't be intimidated by anyone else's taste, and learn everything that you can about the artist. The art should stand on its own aesthetically, but much of it has to do with who the person is—what's behind the art. In folk art, they have incredible stories. They have lived lives that are very different from ours."
Prior to the opening of the Mennello in 1998, director Frank Holt started acquiring a folk art collection for the museum—and purchased many of those pieces from Taylor.
"When I first decided that I was going to specialize in contemporary folk art, I heard that there was a nest of folk artists in Polk County," she says. "So I got the information, and met each one of them. Then I realized that if there are five artists in Polk County, there must be many more across the state." She soon learned that there was a colony of potters north of Atlanta. "When you pursue an interest, it tends to grow and grow. One thing leads to the next."
Of course, one doesn't just become an art dealer, especially a folk art dealer, where new work is hard to come by and sometimes requires knowing the artist personally. That trip to New York helped her identify what was being collected. The magazine Raw Vision also helped. That plus many hours of research.
"I had to hone my eye to see who would be marketable in Florida." she says. "South Florida is not the Deep South anymore, and Central Florida is becoming less and less [so]. I knew I had to diversify." She did shows in Atlanta, and "I knew I needed a Web site to connect with collectors around the world." About half of her contemporary folk art sales are local; 25 percent come from online sales, and 25 percent from out-of-town shows.
The artists
What sets Gallery on First apart is the caliber of the 11 artists who have studios here, giving this gallery a vibrance unlike any static exhibit space. The artists work in various media, and are at different points in their careers. Some are established, some are emerging, and some are re-emerging.
Many of the artists are or were art instructors, such as Diana Ferguson, Pam Glose, Mary J. Gray, Robert Leclaire, Sharon B. Muldoon and Jay Spalding. They and the other artists work in their studios with doors open—literally—making them accessible to visitors, allowing for interaction, and in that way actively engaging the public in the arts. Glose, for example, asked one young visitor to help her select colors for one of her pieces.
The Gallery on First artists have diverse backgrounds, both within and outside the arts. Barbara Farrell, for example, is the owner of the real estate firm Barbara Farrell and Associates. Robin Maria Pedrero is the Arts Administrator for the Seminole Cultural Arts Council, and Terry Hummell is the Arts columnist for The Orlando Sentinel.
Another way the artists become accessible to visitors is through classes and lectures. Glose will teach a silk painting class in September. And on Wednesdays in October, Taylor will host a free Brown Bag Lunch and Learn Series consisting of three 90- minute sessions: Introduction to Folk Art, Hidden Treasures (Florida Folk Artists), and Starting and Enhancing a Folk Art Collection.
Unveiling
The gallery's' grand opening will take place on September 8th in conjunction with Alive After Five, a monthly celebration of downtown Sanford.
Gallery on First's opening will feature blues singer and guitarist Ruth King, a, regular front-porch performer at The House of Blues. And among other goodies to see, hear and taste, the gallery will be serving Moon Pies and cold bottles of Coke—staples of a Jeanine Taylor gallery opening.
"In the last three years, the face of Sanford has changed," says Howard Marks. "There are people moving in who are looking to redevelop the area, to bring more arts and culture to the area, but still want to keep the small-town feel of it. We're very excited about the direction it's moving in."
"This gallery is something new for the people in this area who have been here a long time." says Robin Marks. "We're excited about seeing great things happen in Sanford, and we're passionate about doing something to develop the arts." Gallery on First: Howard and Robin Marks' "great thing" for Sanford, for the arts, and for art-lovers across Central Florida. S
Bill Ernst is a lover of art and the publisher of Seminole magazine.
Gallery on First, 211 East First Street, Sanford; 407.323.2774, jtfolkart.com.
DINING
