LISTENING TO OUR ANCESTORS
MORE THAN PICTURES ON A WALL
by STEVEN M. PRATT

Photos courtesy of galleryongreene.com

Not only is Mario Sanchez among the country's greatest living folk artists - perhaps THE greatest - he also is a significant historian who has preserved in wood and paint the detailed story of early 20th Century Key West. Those who visit the Key West Museum of Art & History at the Custom House will walk into Mario Sanchez's culturally diverse Key West - a society of street vendors, musicians, dancers, nuns, kids, gossiping women and chicken thieves - in a major, new exhibition, "Listening to Our Ancestors." Guided by a state-of-the art audio tour of music and narration by some of Sanchez's colorful characters, museum patrons step through the arches of Old San Carlos Institute (recreated according to Sanchez's paintings) into the island city as it was in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Stroll an old Key West street and sit at a bench outside the Gato Cigar factory, where Sanchezıs father once was el lector (the reader). Visit the recreated Sanchez studio under a sprawling Sapodilla tree to learn how Sanchez created his famous bas-relief carvings, the intaglios. "Mario has a wonderful sense of color. He always mixed his own paints," said Nance Frank, guest curator of the exhibit and longtime friend whose Gallery on Greene represents the artist who spent most of his life in Key West. "Sometimes he creates his own pigments using egg yolk for banana yellow and coffee grounds for dirt. He sometimes incorporates kitty litter into his intaglios to suggest gravel or fine coral marl." Frank selected more than 50 original Sanchez artworks, many rarely shown publicly, and spent hundreds of hours interviewing the artist about his work and what it was like to live in Key West during the first half of the 20th Century. Volunteer scholars Brewster Chamberlin and Annette Liggett incorporated her research, along with other oral histories from the period, into the archives of the Key West Art & Historical Society. The result of this collective effort will be available to researchers who study the island's history. "Through his art, Mario has given us some of our most accurate historical images of Key West from the early days when he was a young man shining shoes to working as a comparsa drummer or playing dominos with old friends in what was a rather isolated island community," said Claudia Pennington, executive director of the Key West Art & Historical Society, which operates the museum. That was an age when Key West truly was one human family with people of many ethnic and religious origins. There were Cubans, black and white immigrants from the Bahamas, Irish, Italians and Jewish immigrants from Europe. A rich, multi-cultural society developed on the island that can still be seen today. To compile the materials for this exhibit, museum staff members pieced together a jigsaw puzzle using Sanchez's artworks as well as Sanchez documents, photos, audio tapes in which he describes the people in his carvings and a film clip of him at work. "Each person who appears in one of his painted woodcarvings was a real person," said Pennington. "In the exhibition, you meet and hear Crawfish Jack, who sold lobster and bolita lottery tickets from his wheelbarrow. You encounter Monkey Man, an Italian who came to town with the circus and stayed." Key West characters, in Mario's hands, make history human, she said. "Some of the venues he depicts - the Custom House, Hemingway's home, San Carlos, the Light House, Southernmost House, East Martello - still look like they used to." "Others, like Mary Immaculate Convent, the Cuban Club, the interior of the old Gato factory, houses and storefronts, exist now only in his artwork," said Pennington. "Listening to Our Ancestors" is more than pictures on a wall, she said. "We invite visitors to walk along a recreated street and hear the authentic merchant calls of the Monkey Man, the Spanish Lime Boy and Crawfish Jack. We want museum guests to sit on the tobacco factory benches like the dozens of cigar rollers who worked while Mario's father read to them from classic novels. We want people to look at Mario's actual brushes and easel as they learn how he created his carvings." Norman Aberle, curator of the society's exhibitions, selected six characters from Sanchez's paintings to illustrate life early Key West. Freestanding, life-size figures represent the diverse population of those days. Visitors can use digital audio headsets to hear their stories in the distinct accents that were part of Key West's cultural mix. During its run, "Listening to Our Ancestors" is designed to serve as an educational opportunity for art and history students. Through the Art & Historical Society's education department, island school children in study of old Key West and Mario Sanchez interview parents and grandparents about the past, then write their own puppet play using puppets they create to resemble some of Sanchez's favorite personalities. The plays are to be performed at three elementary schools, the Museum of Art & History and on television.Sanchez, no longer able to work at age 96, began his art career carving fish on small pieces of board he gave to friends. Some sold. Today, his intricately carved and vividly painted intaglios of Key West scenes fetch as much as $60,000 from serious collectors. His unique, untrained style and warmth and humor of his creations have earned him international recognition. Not least among his strong points is strict devotion to detail, which gives great historical significance to his work. "When Mario carved a storefront, that meant there was a real store," said guest curator Nance Frank. "If you see a sign that reads Biff and Flores Grocery Store, you know it was an actual sign and that Biff and Flores were real people." Those who take the audio tour hear how a man once asked Sanchez to carve the black funeral procession passing in front of the Cuban Club on Duval Street. Sanchez declined the commission, because he knew the city cemetery was in the opposite direction of the Cuban Club, which meant such a combination of people and events would never occur. As the artist once explained, "You can't just invent history." "Listening to Our Ancestors" kicked off with a gala benefit Saturday, March 19, at the Custom House and will run until 2006.