Mount Dora Center for the Arts

Me and Mary Nessler, Mount Dora Center for the Arts 1985

Organizing the Festival

In 1981 Tommy and I exhibited in the Mount Dora Art Festival. We always thought that was something special. I don’t remember if Tommy won anything. I, of course didn’t, because in those days our work was very similar and they would go for men first anyhow. I was, actually, interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel after the Maitland Art Festival about how my experience had been exhibiting as a woman. In that Festival, Tommy didn’t even enter and my work was judged and everything as if it was his. Unbelievable. So, I started using Betsy Arvelo and never went back to Buzbee for anything that had to do with art. Even though the pieces were marked and entered as watercolors on Arches paper, they claimed they were mixed media. It was a mess.

In 1983, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare type of MS so I sold everything in the Dominican Republic and moved back to the USA to take care of my daughter. That is when I met Harlow Middleton. He and I ended up being in a relationship for several years. And he was, at the time the City attorney, part of the Cultural Council who ran the Art Fest, and had a law firm downtown.

That next festival, Tommy and I designed and made silkscreened T-shirts and sold them. We got to understand how the Fest worked, and what was going on. At some point, Harlow convinced the Cultural Council who ran the Fest, that I would be a great asset since I was an artist, a designer, I had just come from a a real Art Village, etc. So, I became their art and promotion advisor.

The first thing I advised them to do was to incorporate. They didn’t own the Fest because they had never done any of the things you needed to do in order to do so. This is why we were able to sell T-Shirts that said Mount Dora Art Fest on them. They needed to start protecting all the parts of the Fest. They needed a logo, a look, a feel, etc. which I designed for both the Fest and the Cultural Council. They now owned their Fest and they were beginning to understand promotional materials, etc.

In 1985 Harlow and I found out that an art piece had been stolen from the Mount Dora Chamber of Commerce. It turned out that the Fest had a Purchase Award for the Best In Show. This piece then became part of the Fest’s art collection. Great idea. Except, that they didn’t have a safe place to keep the collection and it had been displayed in the Chamber of Commerce for many years. The pieces were getting damaged, or worse, stolen. So, Harlow and I came up with the idea of the gallery to house the collection. The council approved it and we found the location where the Mount Dora Center for the Arts lived since 1985. Once we had the space we realized that this was also a great opportunity for the town to have an art gallery and an office to finally organize the entire Fest in one place instead of old people’s shoe boxes in their closets. It was starting to be known as an artsy town and this was just a perfect opportunity to do something like this.

The gallery started as the Cultural Council Art Gallery, then became the Mount Dora Center for the Arts. What started as an amazing opportunity for the “artsy” town of Mount Dora, and me at the time, in just a few months became a political warfare. In those days there were people in town who thought they should be running things and since they weren’t asked they were against it. Then there was the group that made up the Cultural Council: a group of retired people, which is why I had been hired to try to organize all of the files for the Art Festival in one office. They were all asked to bring me all their files. This then became an issue. Some refused and took a bit of convincing. When they did, there were applications that had never been processed, checks that had never been cashed, artist’s slides that had never been returned, etc. It was a miracle the fest had been happening in spite of the lack of a coherent organization. I took over all the Art Festival Files and organized them in one filing cabinet, so we were finally off to a good start.

How The Art Was Chosen

In those days, the Cultural Council would meet in the Lamp Post (a great restaurant in downtown MD in those days, owned by Will Smathers) to jury the entries a few months before the Fest. Other than myself there was one more artist in the group, Gary Hopcraft. The rest were all merchants, lawyers, etc. which made for a not so great choice of artists. In those days, the artists in town would measure how bad the festival was by the amount of duck and geese paintings they allowed in. We rated it as 1-10 fowl. Innovative and modern work need not apply. If they got in it was because one of the merchants pushed for a niece or friend to get in. The old timers still use that term and ask: how many fowl was it?

Advisor for the Mount Dora Art Fest

So, as their advisor, I came up with the Fest branding and started coming up with ideas to better promote the festival. I suggested that we did a poster. I was told that they couldn’t afford it. I had successfully promoted Altos de Chavon – an artist village in the Dominican Republic – using silkscreened posters and couldn’t see why we couldn’t go the same direction. I asked the Council if they could afford just a couple hundred dollars for the price and I started the Mount Dora Art Festival Poster Competition. We offered $300 for the contest price and spread the word. This allowed us to run 200 silkscreened posters for promotion printed on cheap paper, and 100 limited edition, signed and numbered, printed on fine art papers. The better posters were signed by the contest winner and they would be sold during the festival for $30. The proceeds from the sales would go into paying the printing and next year’s contest prize. The posters were a complete success and everyone of the signed posters was sold. I still get a pleasant surprise when I go to my doctor’s office in town and see that they have a collection of those silkscrened posters. The first year we only had three entries, the next year, we had a larger contest prize and ten people entered. And so on. At some point the center stopped silkscreening the posters and went to offset. I think they lost the art feel, but I had nothing to do with it by then.

I also started calling people I knew in Orlando. I ended up promoting the Fest in all sorts of ways. Called radio stations, newspapers, etc. I got people to find out about the Fest. It was everywhere! Not bad for a very shy girl from the D.R.

I am very proud to say that the first year the Fest went from 60,000 to 150,000 attendees. Not bad for a little bit of advice. They were on their way to being one of the largest of the Fests in Florida.

Art Director for the Mount Dora Center for the Arts

It was agreed that I would become the Art Center director and help put together exhibits and do a lot of the festival marketing and PR. We sanded, painted and cleaned. My friend Michael was a huge help. Harlow even more. He went out and got sponsors for everything: rugs, lights, hangers, and more. I contracted my friend, Jeff Herbs, who was a great carpenter in town, to build several structures that I designed: a few pedestals that were capped on both sides and could be used as modular pieces, pedestals, or tables. And two other pieces that could be used as very large sitting spaces, but turned on their side could act as desks or bars for openings. My friend, Kiloren, who was a famous seamstress for Rock ’n Roll Stars like Billy Idol, sewed a huge banner that I painted with the words “The Gallery” for the front of the building and a whole bunch of pillows for the seats. Everyone in town was so excited that we had a lot of help hanging shows, etc.

Since we were going to have the gallery anyhow, I got the idea of offering the space to up and coming young artists that had not had an exhibit any time we had the space available. If there was a sculpture exhibit, I could have them on the walls or vice versa. I also wanted to bring Museum-quality exhibits to the gallery to introduce the town to museum level exhibits. Being an artist and having so many artist friends, I called on some to exhibit at the gallery. I ended up with a great exhibit calendar. That first year we had quite the line up of upscale exhibits: Gary Hopcraft (a friend local artist and part of the council had been a great help with everything and dealing with the council) was the first artist to exhibit. Robin Ambrose who went on to become the director of the Morse Art Museum had the second. Then Mary Nesler who worked as an artist for Disney for years and was a great artist, Ann Parker and Avon Neal who did lots of work for National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution, Stephen Jepson a local potter, followed. We had contests like the images of Mount Dora–a contest of area photos and historical exhibits like the postcards of Mount Dora exhibit–vintage, hand-panted postcards of Mount Dora collected by several town residents. In no time I had a two-year exhibit schedule.

This was light years before computer, the Internet and Facebook. We also started the Art Council which would meet once a month at the gallery. This was open to all artists in the area that wanted to come. We got to meet quite a few more artists this way.
The center opened its doors in 1985. It was well received. People loved the idea of the center and felt that it was very necessary in the town since Mount Dora was know as an artist town and yet, we had no galleries for artists. We had some amazing exhibits and many people attended the openings.

However, things were not so nice in the background. I had problems with the council’s treasurer. Even though I was donating most of my time and I was supposed to be working 4 hours a day and ended up working full-time and only getting paid for 4 hours, and I had a toddler at the time who had been very ill, this woman would not pay me. Then the politics started. It was time to leave. I don’t know why it is that all creative things start with the creatives with great ideas, then the non-creatives take it over and then it gets political. All the creatives run for cover. Things go from bad to worse. It was announced that the gallery was closing due to lack of funding. There were people downtown going out of their way to say terrible things about the gallery and how glad they were it was closing.

The John & Mable Ringing Museum of Art

Because the gallery was closing, I started looking around to see where I was going to go next. In the January of 1986, my mother-in-law called to tell me she had cut out a newspaper ad for a job at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. They were looking for an Assistant Exhibit / Graphic Designer. I should check it out. I made an appointment and my friend Michael and I headed to Sarasota for my museum interview. I met with the Chief Designer and had a wonderful portfolio review. We hit it off. By the time I got back to Mount Dora, that afternoon, I had a message in the “answering machine” saying that I had been hired and asking if I could start on Monday. I said yes. That job changed my life. Unbeknownst to me, he was contemplating a job as the Art Director for the Atlanta Museum of Modern Art and was very happy to have found me because he knew I could take over his job.

Out of the blue, Harlow announced that there was a benefactor who wanted to help save the gallery. This benefactor (Ken Mazik) was giving the gallery $2000 a month for a year, $1000 of which was supposed to be for a full time salary for me to stay as the Director. Unfortunately, I had already agreed to go to the Ringling Museum where I would make a little more, had health insurance and other benefits, and was going to be working in things that I could have never imagined were going to have such a huge impact in my life. I never looked back. I had done all I could for the gallery and the Fest by then and it was time to move on and for Mount Dora to figure out the future of the gallery. People started stepping in to help.

The center had some very rocky years, but, after a while, it started moving towards the right direction. I not always agree with what goes on there since they have moved so far away from the original idea, but, it is thriving and has become an educational center, and an art force in the community. It is like children, you have to let them go out in the world and hope for the best.

Photos