It was not so many years ago that Flagler County and Palm Coast were brimming with a very different art scene that included the Flagler County Art League, JJ Graham’s Hollingsworth Gallery and Salvo Art Project, the Palm Coast Arts Foundation and the Gargiulo Art Foundation, whose money helped seed and spread public art works like Paul Baliker’s resting “Panther” at the entrance of Palm Coast from the Hammock Dunes Bridge, Copper Tritscheller’s “Burro with Bird on Shoulder” in Palm Coast’s Central Park, and the flock of bronze “Flight of Life” great blue herons forever in flight at Waterfront Park.
Just months before the pandemic, arts organizations were thriving and crying for more exhibition and performance art space. After Covid, it was all gone.
The decades-old Art League and the Palm Coast Arts Foundation didn’t survive the pandemic. After two moves, Salvo Art quietly faded (JJ Graham is now at an artists’ retreat in Mississippi). Tom Gargiulo, who’d not slowed down despite a serious bike crash in 2014, died at 83 in February 2022. His foundation did not survive, and his life companion, Arlene Volpe, who had been the quiet organizational force behind the foundation, left a few weeks later for North Carolina, close to her family, as her memory was gradually deserting her.
Arlene Claire Volpe died on Oct. 4 in Apex, N.C., her family announced in an obituary. She was 85.
“I loved her dearly,” Graham said today. The Foundation had played an essential role in launching and maintaining Graham’s Hollingsworth Gallery when it began at City Marketplace in 2009. “I will miss the radiant kindness that she bestowed so generously. Not only me but also to fellow creatives. She was truly precious.”
Volpe wrote and disseminated the Foundation’s newsletter for years, turning it into a chronicle of local arts. She supplemented the publications with frequent emails to local artists, patrons and organizations, back when gallery openings were a monthly event and the Jacksonville Symphony’s Picnics and Pops an annual feast for the ears in Town Center.
Volpe would champion them all, along with City Repertory Theatre from its fledgling days in 2010, and of course the annual naming of the Flagler County Artist of the Year, in which she played an often deciding hand: Peter Cerreta was the first in 2000, he’d be followed by, among others, Baliker, Jane Sbordone, Graham, Weldon Ryan, Richard Schreiner, Christine Sullivan, Diana Gilson. Jan Jackson would prove to be the last Artist of the Year, in 2021. (It is a matter of time, or should be a matter of time, before the three-year-old Flagler County Cultural Council re-discovers and appropriates the Artist of the Year tradition: Volpe would not have let it fade had she had the capacities to prolong it.)
A Rhode Island native, Volpe was the oldest of 11 children, according to her obituary, and a second mother to any of them–as she would be to the local artists young, old or in between. She’d worked at the CRL Business Company, at Columbia Records, and taught in Connecticut’s Head Start program, raising three children along the way plus her two younger brothers.
“For the bulk of her career,” the obituary reads, “Arlene worked as an indispensable asset helping to run the family-owned business, Wood Avenue Body Shop, in Bridgeport, Connecticut with her father, uncle, and several of her brothers. After “retiring” to Florida with Tom, her partner of nearly 50 years, she continued to act as an administrator and artist representative for the Gargiulo Art Foundation in Palm Coast, Florida, which she helped establish. She was well respected by colleagues and admired for her work ethic and integrity while making significant contributions to the Arts in Florida.”
There would not have been much of an art scene but for the Gargiulo Art Foundation, which fueled creativity with its money and energy. Its demise continues to be felt. The vibrancy of those years when Graham, Gargiulo, Volpe, Weldon and Richlin Ryan, Cerreta and a few others made art eventful in Palm Coast has not been replaced since losing the cardinal points Gargiulo and Volpe represented.
Stephanie Salkin says
Alas, for all that was lost. FCAL, too, was a major player, led by such wonderful people as Ann DeLucia, Bob Ammon, Liz Monaco, Joan Mangano, Weldon Ryan, and others before my time.