by Kirby Congdon…….

The town of Key West makes you step back and look at it. This writer spent a summer in an art colony in Maine as a pot-and-pan boy in the kitchen to be able to stay there. I didn’t assimilate the need or the drive to be a creative person for decades. But I see it all around me now.

This past season Auwina Weed and Joseph Lowe provided us with a keyboard concert for organ and piano very recently (April 28) using the auditorium at the Peace Covenant Presbyterian Church as a public studio. Twenty people came and one felt they had done so not because they should but because they could. The gathering was like a get-together in a private living room. These two artists had no program to advance. They only wanted to exercise their own commitments for its own sake–that is, to be heard.

A couple of days later four more musicians, The Key West Saxophone Quartet gave another concert. One of their pieces was a complete symphony, transcribed, by Albeniz. That takes hours of rehearsals as it does for any orchestral presentation. There was no entrance fee at the Presbyterian Church on Duval.

The Gato Building has had an ongoing presentation of visual work also by local talents. Nance Boylan arranged for a public reading of her own work at a gallery, once more on Duval Street. All these events were within one week.

One can only conclude that while Key West is a tourist spot, it is also a self-sustaining art colony. In a hectic world as ours is, this kind of activity, surviving on its own, obliges one to pause for a moment and appreciate its spontaneity and its concern for not only talent and culture but for civilization itself.