In a photo on a wall amid the wood-paneled, cabin-like charm of Barnhill’s Cafe, Bar, and Grille in Flagler Beach, a leering Ozzy Osbourne – that late Godfather of Heavy Metal – looks like he’s spied a bat to munch on.
While Ozzy is joined by other photos – 16×20- or 16×24-inch images printed on metal – of music stars such as Tom Petty, Taylor Swift, B.B. King, Rush drummer Neil Peart, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of Kiss, and more – the most un-Ozzy photograph in Barnhill’s hangs on the wall across from the Prince of Darkness: it’s an award-winning, postcard-perfect photo of the beach and the Flagler Pier, titled “Flip-Flop Summer.”
The pics are the work of New York City-born photographer Sayre Berman, one of the newest members of GOLA, aka the Gallery of Local Art that’s housed in a large, bungalow-ish building at 208 South Central Ave. in Flagler Beach, adjacent to Barnhill’s. Berman is just the third GOLA artist to exhibit in Barnhill’s, which only recently began showcasing the works of GOLA members.
Both venues are owned by Marge and Ted Barnhill, who were high school sweethearts in Nashville and have now been married for more than a half-century. After visiting family in Flagler Beach for many years, the couple bought commercial property in the area decades ago, even as Ted continued teaching as a professor of finance at George Washington University in Washington. D.C.
The couple opened GOLA in 2007 when, Marge says, “I was already 60.” For several years she commuted from DC one week a month to oversee GOLA, until Ted retired and the couple relocated to the area.
While a number of Flagler County galleries over the years have been opened by artists, Marge admits: “I admired people that did art, but I couldn’t even draw anything that looked like anything.” Rather, she adds, her motivation for GOLA was that she “felt like Flagler Beach would really benefit to be a little bit more of an artsy place.”
So, she says, “I depended on my artists to do the artwork.”
These days, Flagler County as a whole is much less of an artsy place than it was as recently as 2020, given the number of multi-artist venues and arts organizations that have shuttered in the past five years, including the Flagler County Art League (a victim of the Covid shutdown), the Gargiulo Art Foundation (following the death of co-founder and driving wheel Tom Gargiulo), JJ Graham’s Salvo Art Project, the Palm Coast Arts Foundation, and Lisette Otero-Lewis’s Galleria d’ Arte. (See: “Grim Year for Local Arts as 3 Big Organizations Vanish and Palm Coast Drops Grants to Lowest-Ever Level.”)
That would seem to make GOLA one of, if not the last multi-artist, art-specific venues standing in the county (as opposed to single-artist galleries, or such a venture as Expressions Art Gallery on Colbert, an exhibit space housed in the offices of Grand Living Realty).
Yet such a “last gallery standing” perspective doesn’t resonate with Marge Barnhill. Ask her how important GOLA is to the current local art scene, given the significant diminishing of art spaces, and she says: “Where I’m standing, I think it’s more important to the local artists involved (rather than to a collective scene) and it always has been, truthfully and honestly. Someone in the art scene once called GOLA ‘the Walmart of the art scene in Flagler County,’ and I thought it was quite insulting. Basically, I just go about my business and have for 20 years, doing what I believe in and what I want to do, and I just haven’t really involved myself in the art scene because I want to promote the local artists.
“I want them to come in, but I don’t want them to be in there for their whole life. If they do, that’s fine, but some of them have gone on to show in Miami and St. Augustine. My purpose is to provide a venue for people to see what’s in Flagler Beach. I’m not out to make money on the artists. I’m not out to make them be part of this particular venue – certainly not that it’s the last venue standing. It’s basically to help the artists.”
As for that “GOLA is Walmart” accusation: However one may assess the speaker’s comment, it draws attention to a divide frequently inherent in local art scenes and local art galleries across the nation, a divide that (in this writer’s 40-year career as an arts and entertainment journalist) is whispered about among art insiders but is rarely acknowledged openly: Is this or that venue an art gallery, or an arts and crafts gallery? Is the work on exhibit art or craft? Is it the work of an artist, or an artisan?
One interpretation of that commentator’s epithet – an interpretation that rightfully bridled Marge Barnhill – is that, akin to Walmart, GOLA offers unexceptional goods (that is, unexceptional art) at cheap prices.
But, of course, art – like beauty and pornography – is in the eye of the beholder.
And so, some judgy art critics and art patrons may sniff the presence of craft works and feel like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart contemplating obscenity, and confess they can’t define the difference between art and craft, “but I know it when I see it.”
For Marge Barnhill, any such artist versus artisan divide is off the radar of GOLA’s mission.
GOLA’s diverse roster of creators/creations includes playfully surrealistic painter and multimedia artist Wendy Webster-Fierro, painted rope baskets by Debra Cooley-Moore, the wildlife and nature-scapes of photorealistic watercolorist Lori Cona, leather artist Full Grain Smith, the now steampunk-ish, now mystical jewelry of Pat Kosmoski, the aluminum jewelry of “chainmaille artisan” John Michaud, animal and pet portrait artist Kathy Kirkpatrick, the local scenery and flora of English-born watercolorist and oil painter Mandy-Jane Lindsay, and many others.
Also, GOLA’s resident pottery and ceramic artists Don Davis and Audrey Scherr teach classes at the venue’s pottery studio. Scherr studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University and Kent State University, and created plein-air paintings on site in France. Davis received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, taught art at the university level and operated his own studio in Asheville, N.C., for a number of years.
“The function of the business isn’t to make money for me,” Barnhill says. “The function is to show off the artists’ work – show off what Flagler Beach can do.”
Enter Barnhill’s Cafe, Bar, and Grille. Though the restaurant opened in January 2024, it was only a few months ago that the Barnhills decided to make it an arts space too, although a limited one, for some of GOLA’s resident 90-plus artists: the café space is available for exhibitions by “what I consider our hanging artists, and not our people who are more on the crafty side,” Marge says, with no judgment upon those on either side of that equation.
For Sayre Berman, the café space was an opportunity to showcase her prodigious collection of musician photographs, while her cubicle-size space at GOLA features her other passion – photography of architecture, structures and, since she moved to Flagler Beach from Nashville, Tenn., permanently in July 2024, a number of beachy landscapes.
Berman’s passion for photography took root in the 1970s when she “bought a Canon FTb camera and I was shooting everything and developing my own black and white film.”
She earned two MBAs, one in real estate development from Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Florida, and one in urban planning from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, and photography took a back seat as she began doing eminent domain appraising, primarily for the Florida Department of Transportation.
Berman attended free rock concerts by Grand Funk Railroad, Asia and others at a Hollywood, Florida racetrack, “and nobody was stopping people from taking pictures, so I brought a camera and that triggered the interest in photography again.”
She began getting credentialed by Miami New Times, an alternative newspaper, to shoot concerts, and a serendipitous meeting with Billy Amendola, an associate editor with Modern Drummer magazine, at a Ringo concert was the seed that eventually led to Berman landing gigs shooting for that publication and other drum magazines.
Shortly after Modern Drummer asked Berman to interview as well as photograph drummers, she realized she needed to be a more informed, knowledgeable interviewer, and so circa 2008 she began taking drum lessons.
“I’ve never played with real people – I don’t play out,” she says. “I just put the headphones on and play along with songs.”
Berman went to photography full time in 2011. A move to Nashville in 2015 triggered her interest in architectural photography – she was especially spurred by that city’s iconic AT&T Building, which locals have dubbed the “Batman Building” for the way its peak resembles the comic book superhero.
“I wonder if photography as an art form is less appreciated these days because people have one of these (she holds up her cell phone) and think they can do it,” Berman says. “I don’t know that people realize you can’t do this with a phone.”
Ask Berman what fuels her passion for photographing musicians, and she mentions not the thrills and adrenaline rush of close encounters with superstars, but rather the technical aspects of a concert shoot, and the resultant aesthetic aspects.
“It has to do with the lighting,” Berman says. “There’s so much you can do with the lighting and positioning yourself where there’s a big spotlight – you get it right behind the person’s head and it makes that beautiful halo.”
The marketing director for Pearl Drums once remarked that her musician photographs “are images you can hear,” Berman says. “So that became my tagline.”
Since moving to Flagler Beach, she says, “My goal now is images you can feel. So when you look at those, I want you to feel the sun on your face. I want you to squint when you’re looking at my photos of the Flagler Beach Pier. I want you to feel you have to brush the sand off the bottom of your feet when you look at the flip flop ones.
“That is the challenge for me: to create photos not just of the beach and ‘Oh, here’s a pretty shell.’ I’m trying to create an emotion or a feeling.”
– Rick de Yampert for FlaglerLive
GOLA, the Gallery of Local Art, is at 208 South Central Ave., Flagler Beach. More info: flaglergola.com. Sayre Berman’s musician photography is on exhibit through Jan. 31 at Barnhill’s Cafe, Bar, and Grille, 202 South Central Ave., Flagler Beach. More info: barnhills.com.
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