Many people reading this blog are already familiar with me being in Homestead Center for the Arts. If someone is new, our situation is we lost all our art galleries in the Real Estate Bust that started in 2008. We held onto a couple and then they relocated as well. We then partnered first with the Capri Restaurant and their Gallery Room to do exhibits about every three months, then one other restaurant which unfortunately didn’t survive the COVID-19 closures. There is also a City of Homestead Artist in the Spotlight program that uses the extensive wall space in the Seminole Theatre and our artists are often featured.

Anyway, our very talented volunteer Ellen Reese suggested we try Facebook Live for one Capri exhibit since we had not been able to hold receptions during COVID. It worked fairly well and even though we had our first in-person Meet the Artist reception Thursday (May 15th) for the exhibit, “Birds”, Ellen suggested we do another Facebook Live show 30 minutes before the in-person. Other than we didn’t appropriately take into account background noise as some people came early, it went well. We had three of our artists on camera and I gave a quick bit about each artist for the others. We would have had two more on camera, but a heavy rain storm blew through delaying them. They did arrive for the in-person portion so that was the most important thing. This format is allowing a greater reach, especially as we have a number of artists in Kendall and Miami and the drive down can be a real pain at times. I think we’ll maintain this and see if our reach continues to increase.

The two pieces shown here are Hubby’s photo of three white pelicans in the Everglades (we usually see only the brown ones), and a parrot by Ada Catala done in a technique of “piecing”. It is what it sounds like of doing a collage with tiny pieces of paper. Most of our artists have a page in our Gallery at https://homesteadcenterdorthearts.com

Two Pieces HCA “Birds”Exhibit at Capri Restaurant May 2021