Key West art program gives students gallery space, sales share

At the Key West Art Center on Front Street, Somerset Island Prep students stepped into a working gallery this week with a simple deal that gives them real stakes in the island’s art economy: they keep 65% of any sale, while the gallery keeps 35%.

The ArtSpark program turned the nonprofit center at 301 Front Street, in the Mallory Square area, into a hands-on classroom and exhibition space. Students met twice a week with working artists, learning in the same room where local work hangs year-round and where visitors can buy pieces from more than 50 Florida Keys artists. The student show opened May 7 and runs through May 15.

Christina Joy, director of the Key West Art Center, said the goal is to show students what it looks like to be a working artist in the community. Each week, a different local artist comes in to teach a different medium or technique, including watercolor and spray-paint work, giving the students direct exposure to how art is made, priced and presented.

The setting carries unusual weight in Key West. The building was originally constructed in the 1890s as a grocery store near the waterfront, later became home to the first WPA art project in Key West, and has housed the art center since 1960. The center says that history is part of its mission to safeguard Key West’s identity as a city of artists while keeping space open for new ones.

That makes the student show more than a school event. It gives Monroe County high school artists a public venue inside one of the island’s best-known art institutions, a place where sales can translate into encouragement and where a first exhibit can happen in front of tourists, neighbors and potential mentors rather than in a classroom hallway.

The program is backed by grants from the Community Foundation of the Florida Keys, the Florida Keys Council of the Arts and the Key West Woman’s Club. The support comes as the Community Foundation recently distributed a record $895,721 to 73 nonprofits across the Keys, underscoring how competitive and visible local arts funding can be in a small community.

The center’s broader educational mission also shows up in its Martha Watson Sauer Scholarship, a $2,500 award for Monroe County high school seniors pursuing studio art. Sauer, a WPA artist and early Art Center member, arrived in Key West during the Great Depression at age 24. Her permanent exhibit at the center ties today’s student artists to an earlier generation that helped define the island’s creative life.