Press release

Mario Sanchez: Memories Of and For Key West

Key West Artist Mario Sanchez, who began his career by selling sketches on brown paper bags in barber shops, later was revered as one of America premier folk artists whose polychrome bas relief carvings have been valued at more than $50,000. Mr. Sanchez, a lifelong resident of Key West, died April 28, 2005. He was 96. “It was Sanchez’s almost photographic memory of his childhood in Gato Village, the Cuban American section of Key West, that fuelled his work,” said Claudia Pennington, executive director of the Key West Art & Historical Society, which has more than 50 Sanchez works in its collection. “His intaglios are the most accurate historical portrait we have of life in the city from about 1920 through 1950. Much of what we see in Mario’s carvings has disappeared, not just the individual people and the buildings, but the spirit of life in those days. That’s what comes across in Mario’s work.” “In his hands even individual fish in a bucket take on unique personalities and seem ready to flop over the side,” she said. “Mario was able to breathe humor and life into the dogs, fruit carts, trees, buildings and even clouds. His intalglios bring back a simpler time when funeral processions included brass bands, Comparsa dancers mamboed up the street, mules pulled trolley cars and even chicken thieves ran from police with their purloined prize tucked under their arm,” she said. Mr. Sanchez once commented to an interviewer that “In Key West you don’t have to create the characters. They already are there.” Even the clouds in Mr. Sanchez work had meaning. A perceptive viewer can see in them fish, boats and other things reflecting the dreams of mortals below them. Mr. Sanchez’s medium was wood bas relief carvings called intaglios. His subject matter was his memory of childhood places, people and events. His method was to first draw a scene on brown paper, then trace it onto a red cedar board and finally to carve it into a third dimension and finish it with bright colored enamels. Until he became frail in his later years Mr. Sanchez often could be found in his “studio,” beneath a Sapodilla tree carving with a Sears chisel or a piece of broken glass using a meat tenderizer barrowed from his wife Rosa’s kitchen as a mallet. The paints he mixed himself and applied with dime store brushes. All were neatly stored in a 1937 wooden Cheese box. Often he used a large rectangular lid from a pasteboard box as a hat to shield him from the sun. He called it his Angola hat. Mario was born Oct. 7, 1908, the son of second generation Cuban immigrants. His father worked as a free-lance educator reading to cigar factory workers and at one time operated a small store. As a youth Mr. Sanchez earned money shining shoes and picking up on gossip, which he sometimes put into plays performed by a local acting ensemble. One of his later carvings shows him as a boy working at his shine station. He later attended business school and worked for a time during the depression as a shipping clerk in Key West Navy yard. During the 1940s, before the island was peppered with art galleries, artists sold their wares on the street or in barbershops and bars where people gathered. In 1954 he took a job as a janitor for the East Martello Museum and lived in the rear with his wife Rosa. Jeanne Taylor, then curator of the Art & Historical Society, which ran the museum, recognized Mr. Sanchez’s talent and persuaded the Society’s directors to pay $480 for six Sanchez intaglios, his first major sale. In the years that followed another curator, Louise White, also took an interest in Mr. Sanchez’s works and sold many through her own Kiosko Gallery. In 1960, during the filming of “Operation Petticoat” the film’s star Cary Grant bought several pieces, two of which can be seen in the hotel lobby scene of a later film, “That Touch of Mink.” Ms. Merrill bought a Sanchez carving of Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” which she gave to Spencer Tracy who starred in the film of the same name. After Grant’s death, his widow sold two of the paintings to the Art & Historical Society for $10, 000. In the ensuing years Mr. Sanchez achieved much local notoriety and even recognition from the mainland where during the 1970s he won first place in the Poinciana Art Exhibit in Miami for one of his Key West Funeral carvings, another theme he repeated. During 1970s, he was featured on ABC television and in National Geographic Magazine. In 1981 he was the subject of a Public Television special on folk artists and in 1990 he was profiled by the Florida Endowment for the Humanities as one of 11 historically significant Florida figures, a list that also included explorer Hernando Desoto and Jose Marti, leader of the Cuban Independence Movement. A year later he received the Florida Heritage Award from the Florida Folk Life Council. But Mr. Sanchez preferred to slough off fame saying, “You know how famous people die? They die hungry or they shoot themselves,” an obvious was reference to another Key West legend, Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide with a shotgun blast in 1961. He recognized late in life that he could enjoy his notoriety, saying, “This is a very rare thing. What is rare about it is I am still alive. Many get no recognition until they are dead and buried. I am watching all this happen. I’m smelling the roses before I kick the bucket.” Of his work, Mr. Sanchez had adopted as his motto: “Se que mi modesto arte no se bueno, pero gusta,” or “I know my modest art isn’t good, but it pleases.”

From the extensive research and writings of Steven M. Pratt.

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