Press release

from the
KEY WEST ART & HISTORICAL SOCIETY
281 FRONT STREET, KEY WEST, FL 33040
295-6616 Fax: 295-6649

Attention:
News editors, news directors, features editors and programming directors. Please use the following item as a news story, public service announcement or community event. Pix available. For immediate release.

A tribute in photos by Benjamin Bruce to refugees' innovation

An article in the Miami Herald by Marc Caputo explains that Key West artist Benjamin ''Dink'' Bruce, 62, has photographed a small sample of ruggedly seaworthy boats crafted with salvaged metal and rejiggered car engines this winter when scores of cuban migrants came ashore 23 miles west of Key West.
In the coming months, the Key West Art & Historical Society plans to exhibit some of Bruce's photographs and the odds and ends he found, such as the shoes and boots neatly placed in the sand by the immigrants to take advantage of the U.S. government's wet foot/dry foot policy.
Bruce also managed to salvage a boat painted sky blue with an American flag bearing 11 stripes and 18 stars. But at nearly 22 feet long, the craft is too large to fit in the historical society's East Martello Tower, which already displays an old rickety raft that washed up in the 1960s.
The historical society's executive director, Claudia Pennington, said the museum was flooded with seven feet of water from Hurricane Wilma and doesn't have the money to preserve the vessel.
She said Bruce's photographs of the boats and the salvaged items tell a story that draws people in.
''A lot of people support this whole spirit -- this I gotta get out of here and live my life,'' she said. ``People are naturally interested when they see the boats. They find these odds and ends and they try to construct a story with it.''
Most of the boats Bruce documented resemble fishing smacks. The most elegant, a catamaran, was built with hulls stuffed with empty water jugs and expanding foam that was guided by a salvaged Dacron sail and a mast from who knows where. Some made it across with their one-lung engines or retrofitted Nissan car engines intact.
To read more of the Miami Herald Newspaper article and see the slide show of Bruce's photography CLICK HERE.

If you are a member of the media and would like to receive more information and/or pictures, please contact: communications@kwahs.org