Miami's Streets Transform Into a Gallery at the Annual Coconut Grove Arts Festival

MIAMI – Beneath the blazing sun, the streets of "The Grove" were reclaimed by a vibrant landscape of art, artists and art enthusiasts alike at the 61st annual Coconut Grove Arts Festival. 

Barbara Rose has been in attendance since the first Coconut Grove Arts Festival in 1964. Experienced with the Miami heat, she was armed with a white towel in a plastic bag to soak up sweat. 

“I've been coming since I was a senior in high school,” said Rose, 79. “It was on Commodore Plaza and the main highway. It was a tiny show, but it had fine fine art. I continued after marriage and introduced my sons to the Coconut Grove Arts Festival when they were babies, and the tradition has continued. I think that it exposes us to different cultures, different perspectives, different tastes, and it's wonderful to look at, and I can attest to it because I buy them.”

For Debo Groover, a mixed media artist who lives in Tallahassee, this is her seventh year in attendance at the festival, but she treats it like it’s her first.  “This is one of the biggest art festivals in the country, and it's really hard to get into,” Groover said. “Artists come from all over the U.S. to do this show.” 

In a process that took multiple years to perfect, Groover uses colored polymer clay, which is run through a pasta maker, to create images she describes as “Sophisticated Naive,” illustrating the childlike, humorous version of animal life that she depicts. 

“When it first started, I was gardening and I saw seven birds on a tree, and I thought they're doing something we're not invited to,” she explained. “They must have been having a wedding up there or something.”

With Coconut Grove being the original art district of Miami, the executive director of the festival, Camille Marchese explained how they keep the prestige of the festival alive.

“We have an extensive vetting process,” Marchese said. Artists submit their applications in the summer.  The application includes four images of their work and one of their booths. We employ five judges from around the country to review and score each application. We invite the top 285 artists to attend. The artists here are all working artists, not hobbyists. This is how they support themselves, pay their mortgages, and send their kids to college.”

The artists appreciate the care and the hype with which the festival is planned each year. “One of our artists dubbed us the Superbowl of Art Festivals,” said Marchese. 

Across the hundreds of tents, it was hard for Woody Jones not to stick out. In his 42nd year attending the festival, dozens of attendees huddled around his intricate and humorous 3D dioramas based on stories others commissioned him to tell. Between talking to entranced festival-goers, he shared his artistic passion with MediaLab@FAU.

“Stories are what people tease you about; your stories are you; you may become a doctor, a lawyer, whatever, but all that stuff you do in your life, that's how you get to be the person you are, and those are the stories I try to tell with my work. Generally, the stories that are my favorite are the ones I get to tell next.”

Marge Luttrell, a former high school art teacher, tells her artistic stories through an old medium that's experiencing a revival. Luttrell, who first attended the festival in 1984, returned this year exhibiting her encaustic art, a medium that started in ancient Greece and one she is helping bring to modern times. 

“Encaustic is a medium that's made with wax and resin, and I make all my own paints, and I paint on wood. And every time you put a color on this medium, you have to fuse it with a blow torch.”

Combined with the painstaking process of this ancient medium, Luttrell has a calculated approach to the stories of her paintings, basing them all on Greek mythology. 

“I've been to Greece 18 times, and I've done residencies; I just love Greece; it's a pretty amazing place. On the back of my paintings, I do all of the research so that they're all documented, and you have their names.”

In a brief conversation, Luttrell’s passion for the arts was palpable. “Go and do what you love,”  she said with a knowing smile. “The arts will set you free.”