From Winslow Homer's Watercolors to The Studios of Key West

Key West's art scene didn't start with a gallery opening. It started with a boat trip. Around the turn of the 20th century, Winslow Homer, already one of America's most celebrated painters, came down to the southernmost city and fell for its light, its boats and its people.

Homer's Key West

His 1903 watercolor "Fishing Boats, Key West," now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows a vessel that looks more Bahamian than American, a nod to the Bahamian sailors and turtlers who shaped the island's working waterfront.

Homer returned to the island in "Key West, Hauling Anchor," at the National Gallery of Art, and painted "Key West, Negro Cabins and Palms" in 1898, now at the Brooklyn Museum, documenting the Black workers who made up a large share of the island's population.

Homer didn't paint the postcard Key West. He painted the working one.

Building a modern art colony

A century on, Key West still pulls in artists, just with more infrastructure behind them. The Studios of Key West opened in 2006 as a nonprofit built on a simple idea: send the island's artists and writers off to study at established residencies elsewhere, then bring what they learn home.

Today TSKW occupies the former Scottish Rite Masonic Center at Eaton and Simonton Streets, a 1951 building holding the island's largest contemporary exhibition space, artist studios, a rooftop terrace called Hugh's View, and a residency program that draws applicants from around the world.

A living tradition

Between TSKW's rotating exhibitions, open houses and the small galleries scattered through Old Town, Key West has quietly built the kind of art ecosystem that doesn't need a Homer to justify it anymore. Though it's fair to say he started the conversation.