It’s not good-bye but au revoir for the Flamingo Clay Studio, 15 S. J St., in Lake Worth, which has called that city home for the past two decades.
Despite a heroic fight to save their studio and gallery space, the studio has received an eviction notice effective June 7.
The nonprofit artists’s cooperative, founded by artist and activist Joyce Brown, 80, also runs the Clay Glass Metal Stone Gallery and offers free art lessons, services and classes to children, teens and anyone interested in learning art and ceramics.
Due to circumstances beyond their control, a confluence of economic issues in the city where many of the mom-and-pop businesses, including restaurants, antique shops, art galleries and consignment shops have been forced out, due to rising rents and real estate trends, the gallery is collateral damage.
The space was founded in 2005 by 25 professional 3-D artists, formerly of the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, with a mission to provide affordable 3-D workspace and gallery space for 3-D artists, many of them low-income.
“We believe culture creates community,” Brown says. “That’s why we’ve been focused on providing access to 3-D arts, art events and arts education for the most economically disenfranchised within our community.”
Before the pandemic hit, Brown had both the current building, the gallery and a 4,000-sq.-ft. studio of 80 working artists where she offered workshops, studio space and opened the gallery space for events.
One of their signature events was the Peeps Show each Easter, where artists used marshmallow Peeps candy to create original artworks. When the studio building was sold, Brown consolidated the studio space into the gallery space, limiting the numbers of artists that could effectively use the space.
Always a priority for Brown, she continued to focus on the teens in the community and offer them free art lessons throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. When the landlord of the building, Rachel Gwinn, died suddenly in 2017, the building’s ownership was in jeopardy because the studio was not in her will.
Gwinn had been charging Brown only the cost of her insurance and taxes, making the space accessible for a consistent group of approximately 40 artists to work in the studio and exhibit their work in the gallery. Artists included Lake Worth Beach residents Sarita Rajpathak, a graphic designer, Liz Capozzi and multimedia muralist, design artist and ceramicist JoAnn Nava, among others.
“Rachel had not only offered to give us the building on J Street, but was going to purchase the warehouse on F Street and give us a mortgage,” says Brown. “Unfortunately, the estate was in a charitable trust and when she died, it became the property of her attorneys.”
Last summer, Brown and her supporters partnered with the Community Foundation to raise funds in the hopes of buying the building from the trust and received a $100,000 challenge grant, which they met.
Unfortunately, Brown says, the offer was withdrawn, leaving the studio with no further options and many code violations to deal with from the city.
What she will miss the most, Brown says, is working with a diverse group of kids.
She still hopes to organize a group of teens over the summer and film some “get out the vote” PSAs in Creole and Spanish to mobilize voters à la Sara Silverman for the upcoming election. She notes that for the previous presidential election in 2020, her teens helped register 5,000 first-time voters.
In the meantime, Brown is busy packing and making arrangements to put items in storage, selling other art supplies, equipment and furniture and donating some of her kilns to the Miami-Dade County public schools to be used for parts.
They plan to hold a street fair before their eviction date and sell some of the items, so the artists can recoup some money. Brown laments the changes taking place in downtown Lake Worth Beach and notes that many storefronts are empty and there is a lack of pedestrian traffic on the streets.
Two of the artists who will find it hard to say goodbye to Brown and the space she created are Joan (no last name), 65, from West Palm Beach and musician and woodcarver who goes by the name of Thomas Two Thumbs, 60.
Joan, one of the artists, discovered the Flamingo Clay Studio when she was down on her luck and living on the streets. Originally from Jamaica, Joan lived in New York and said she worked in the Wall Street area before relocating to West Palm Beach.
When she stumbled upon the gallery, she wasn’t sure what clay had to do with creating art, but wanted to learn how to make jewelry and ceramics. Her beaded bracelets and necklaces and brightly colored pottery in yellows, bright blues and greens reflect her Jamaican heritage.
“Joyce gave me the opportunity to learn to make ceramics and sell my work in the gallery,” she says, noting that her beaded jewelry sold out during the city’s Street Painting Festival in February.
Two Thumbs is also a regular at the studio.
Playing music since he was 14, he plays guitar in two bands, Mad Potter and Whiskey Varnish.
“The Flamingo Clay Studio has been a port in the storm,” he says. “It’s such a good group.”
“Losing the studio and gallery is a real shame,” he says. “Joyce has cultivated a real family here. Everybody helps each other out and I know we will all keep in touch and figure something out.”
His wood carvings of Florida life are colorful, happy and whimsical, depicting beach scenes, flip-flops in the sand, iguanas and portraits of dogs.
Brown says there are still many items for sale, including ceramic pots, sculptures, jewelry and paintings.
For herself, Brown plans a week off, but she is not yet ready to give up on her life’s work.
As a child, her father gave her a wooden box filled with oil paints, and she copied the works of Covarrubias, Picasso, Renoir and Degas. She later earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art from Temple University.
“I will take a week off to clean my house,” she says. “Then, back to work to find an affordable, safe place to bring teens to. I want to give them the option of art in their lives and the option to ask for what they need to make their lives better through the arts.”
She hopes also to find a space that will allow low-income artists to continue to affordably create their art.
Then, she says, “I may take another day or two off to clean my house again.”
A red-diaper baby, Brown has a colorful background. Following a family tradition, she peddled cloth to the Amish, was a concert producer and social activist. She says she was trained by Martin Luther King Jr. and once had Pete Seeger sleep on her living room floor.
Friends and family are encouraging her to write her memoirs, “so that might happen, too,” she says.
And, while she didn’t plan for this interlude, Brown says she is not yet ready to give up on her life’s work and mission.
“Like a phoenix, we will rise again from the ashes,” she says.
From her mouth to God’s ears.