Beth Kaminstein & Tyler Buckheim Trosset win South Florida Cultural Consortium 2023 Visual Artists Award

Beth Kaminstein

Tyler Buckheim Trosset

​The Florida Keys Council of the Arts is proud to announce that Monroe County artists Beth Kaminstein and Tyler Buckheim Trosset have been named the recipients of the prestigious 2023 South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Award. Beth Kaminstein of Islamorada, and Tyler Buckheim Trosset of Key West, were both selected to receive this esteemed, five-county artist fellowship.  
 
Tyler and Beth will each receive a monetary award of $7,500 and be included in an exhibition featuring the work of the 2023 recipients, which will take place at The Art and Culture Center/Hollywood at 1650 Harrison Street, Hollywood, FL 33020, October 14, 2023 - January 24, 2024. 
 
Beth Kaminstein graduated with a BA from Bennington College in Vermont, 1976 (Ceramics, Drawing, and Dance). Since then, she has enjoyed a rather diverse life living in Florence, Italy and then in NYC where she owned and managed her family’s hardware store, Kaminstein Bros. In 1989, she moved to Islamorada to have a family and continue windsurfing, among other things.  While living in Islamorada, she worked to create a playground in the park behind the library in Islamorada, worked with her late husband, Ron Levy, on creating the municipality known as Islamorada, Village of Islands, built and ran a private pre and elementary school which then became the Upper Keys first charter school known as Montessori Island Charter School. 
 
Tyler Buckheim Trosset lives and works in Key West. She received a BFA from Florida Atlantic University in 2012 with a concentration in painting. Her work focuses on the delicacy of graphite drawing and portraiture, using historical photos from the Florida Keys, layered with texture rubbings.  The work starts with transferring raised text, designs on glass liquor bottles, hand carved linoleum printing plates or textures from found objects. These unique textures give depth and detail to what will become the background.  Then, Trosset layers into the rubbings drawn portraits of people from the past, working from an archive of military pass photos, passport photos and other portraits taken in Key West from 1917 through the 1980’s. The photos are from a time before photography was part of everyday life and give a more honest portrait than are often seen in modern life.   
 
The Consortium, an alliance of the arts councils of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach Counties has conferred the artists with awards at either the $15,000 or $7,500 level. These awards are among the largest such honors accorded by local arts agencies to visual and media artists in the United States. Celebrating 35 years in 2023 (established in 1988), the SFCC has awarded over $4 million in grants to more than 300 artists. In addition to receiving the grant, the artists take part in an exhibition hosted and organized by a visual arts institution in one of the five counties.  
 
The recipients were selected through a two-tier panel process which included the participation of regional and national arts experts. The 2023 regional panel, whose adjudications are based on the evaluation of the artists' work as evidenced by the work samples submitted, included: Ariella Wolens, Bryant-Taylor Curator, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale (Broward); Carrington Ware, Artist, SFCC FY 20-21 Recipient, Professor, Florida International University (Broward); Véronique Côté, Galleries Director, University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University (Palm Beach); Helena Gomez, Curator, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, (Miami-Dade); and Elvis Fuentes, Executive Director, Coral Gables Museum, (Miami-Dade). 
 
The South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists is a cooperative project funded in part with the support of the Boards of County Commissioners of Broward, Miami-Dade, Martin and Monroe Counties and the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.