It's as sweet: GAVLAK Palm Beach 's 'Tupelo Honey' evokes the hot days of summer

Even for longtime Floridians, the summer months are often something to be endured, to be gotten through rather than enjoyed.

But a new exhibit opening this week at Gavlak Palm Beach urges people to take a good look at Florida's sweltering season and appreciate its singular magic.

"Tupelo Honey," which opens Friday and runs through Oct. 5 at the gallery, 340 Royal Poinciana Way, features works by 18 artists exploring “Southern summer as it ebbs and flows from day to night,” the gallery said in a prepared statement.

The exhibit, curated by Eloise Janssen and Bethani Wells, is named not specifically for the classic Van Morrison song and album from 1971, but for the honey itself, which is made from the blossoms of the Ogeechee tupelo gum tree prevalent along the waterways of Georgia and Florida.

Janssen, a communications gallery associate, said she recently designed an Instagram post based on the Morrison album cover, but for the show, she and Wells "wanted a title that captured the whole of summer, so we landed on 'Tupelo Honey' because it is specific to Florida and it’s delicious. It has a wonderful golden hue; it’s summer in a bottle. It’s very viscous, sticky, and super-sweet, and leaves a wonderful taste in your mind and memory."

Featured artists include Lindsay Adams, Jose Alvarez (aka D.O.P.A.), Andrew Brischler, Deborah Brown, Taina Cruz, Marc Dennis, Judith Eisler, Braxton Garneau, Manuela Gonzalez, Taha Heydari, Nir Hod, Nancy Lorenz, Maynard Monrow, Anthony Sonnenberg, Awilda Sterling, Betty Tompkins, T.J. Wilcox, and Rob Wynne.

“During the season, you never really take time to go to the beach, or to take time with friends and family. It’s just event after event,” Janssen said. “So we really wanted this show to be a safe space to highlight and emphasize the beauty that summer holds, even if it is very hot.”

The exhibit divides the art into two categories: Days and nights. Summer days are the subject of the art in the front gallery, such as work by Tompkins, whose “Bottoms Up” (2000), painted on a frying pan, features a partly nude woman on a lush green landscape who gives new definition to the adjective “cheeky.” Then there is Alvarez’s “Song of Freedom (Daniela Garcia, The Light Within You),” a multimedia piece from 2022 featuring feathers, collage and colored pencil brought together for an explosively colorful sun.

The rear gallery evokes the nighttime, with Brown’s “Dark Horse” (2019) depicting a nude woman standing next to a horse and two dogs near a shore in moonlight. Dennis’ “Sanctuary” (2022) offers an unusual still life of rotting fruit and vegetables on a black background, and Lorenz’s “Midnight Velvet” (2021) is still simpler, with delicate lines of palladium and gold leaf on black velvet.

This art is distinctly contemporary, and visitors should not expect a show of traditional Florida landscapes replete with egrets and royal poinciana trees.

"By just working with Bethani and looking at our inventory, we kind of compiled all these works to capture the feeling of summer," Janssen said. "So you’re not going to see a direct landscape or a sunny day on the beach, you’re going to see Andrew Brischler’s drawing of a blue eye that has that rich blue that you get in the sky in the middle of summer. Or Jose Alvarez, whose ['Song of Freedom'] has a mica background, so it catches the light, so it’s just like the sun.

"it’s not going to be representational per se, but each person is going to be able to find their own little moment of summer," she said.

Several of the works are by emerging artists, including Adams, Cruz and Heydari. Also on the way up is Gonzalez, who like Wells and Janssen is a Dreyfoos graduate.

"Her work is really incredible in how she treats the canvas and how she plays with traditional notions of painting," Janssen said. "Bethani and I had the opportunity to consign a work from her and have it in the show, so she’s an artist who’s not represented [by Gavlak] but we’re really proud to show her work."

Gonzalez, 39, immigrated to the U.S. from her native Medellín, Colombia, at 13. After Dreyfoos, she studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and then Yale, where she earned a master's in painting. She lived and worked for 12 years in New York, until a bout of long COVID and the effects the pandemic had on her art community led her to return to South Florida last year in search of a new artist network.

"In New York, it's everywhere," Gonzalez said. "But I knew it was there in South Florida. I just had to dig a little bit."

Now working out of Lake Worth Beach, and with a solo show scheduled at that city's MTN Space in January, Gonzalez came to a very different understanding of summer from Medellín, known as the City of Eternal Spring for its temperature, which varies relatively little over the year. Florida, she said, is the land of perpetual summer, but she finds it beneficial to her creative process.

"I like it. I feel there's like something about the color saturation and the expression of the aesthetic that warm places have in common," she said. "I'm really inspired by that, by the vibrancy of color, the playfulness, the saturation of the light — I feel all those things are present in my work because of my upbringing in Florida. It's inspired me to really turn up the color."

Gonzalez's work is evocative of home textiles, though it's not an assemblage of found objects. She stretches canvas, then works fabric into it, and paints from observation onto it.

"So you're actually looking at a representational painting inspired by quilting, inspired by geometric abstraction," she said. "I'm really interested in textile technology and the visual legacies that come from weaving, from quilting, from any kind of textile making, and how much that's had an impact on contemporary painting, and specifically abstract painting."

There is a "nostalgic element" to her paintings, in that the patterns she references often come from textiles seen in her family's photos. But there also is a strong element of social commentary.

"There is a lot of political motivation behind it ... A big part of what I'm trying to do is not only highlighting the connections between painting and textile-making, but to kind of go back and acknowledge everything that painting as a tradition owes to aesthetic traditions that have traditionally belonged to women and people of color, and indigenous cultures," Gonzalez said, adding that her "very rigorous training" at elite art institutions has led her to reexamine those hierarchies in a way that she believes "feels very relevant to the society we're living in today."

Two other artists whose work will be on view at Gavlak's Los Angeles gallery have pieces in the show: Canada's Garneau, whose work focuses on his Afro-Caribbean heritage, and Sonnenberg, an Arkansas-based sculptor and ceramicist whose newest exhibition asks the question: Can objects be queer?, Janssen said.

Ultimately, she said, the hotter months give people time to enjoy a season with a different rhythm.

"It’s very fast-paced during the season. In Palm Beach particularly, life revolves around it here, " she said. But the summer is "really a quiet time, so you get more time to look around, to appreciate your surroundings in this beautiful place called Florida," Janssen said.

If you go

The opening reception is set for 5 to 7 p.m. Friday; artists Jose Alvarez and Manuela Gonzalez will be in attendance. The gallery is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 561-833-0583 or visit gavlakgallery.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: GAVLAK Palm Beach's 'Tupelo Honey' exhibit evokes hot Florida summers