Tom Gargiulo, Palm Coast’s ‘Unwavering, Steadfast Champion’ of the Arts for 25 Years, Dies at 83

As an artist, Gargiulo was as prolific as he was voluble, the eclecticism of his art as if powered by an enthusiasm that wouldn’t quit. As a patron, his generosity had no bounds. His Gargiulo Art Foundation started the Flagler County Artist of the Year award almost a quarter century ago, not only crowning artists but giving them high-visibility shows and exposure in media. He picked out young artists like JJ Graham and made sure their work had buyers and their galleries survived the tougher times, literally renting them for art shows if that meant ensuring their survival.

He originated Palm Coast’s sculpture garden in Town Center’s Central Park, running fund-raising drives through the foundation to make sure sculptors got their due. He originated the annual Bike and Poetry shows that fused expression like so many colors on canvas. He bought innumerable artists’ work just to give them a lift, and continued what he’d always done since he was an art teacher in the Bridgeport, Conn., school system: he talked art, lectured about art, organized symposiums about art, and either sponsored others’ shows or hung art of his own at places like Daytona State College and the public library in Palm Coast and Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. He never stopped imagining new ways to give local arts an enduring foundation, whether through an arts association or through his own foundation, whose regular newsletters provided the most continuous art chronicle in the county. The last issue’s ink, announcing the latest Artist of the Year–Dex Westphal–has barely dried.

There was something “bulletproof” about him, a description local artists and members of his family use to describe him. The arts community gasped when Gargiulo, biking along Pine Lakes Parkway, was struck by a car and gravely injured in August 2014. He went through several surgeries. For a 76-year-old man, it was not a minor challenge. But there he was a couple of years later, re-appearing at any and every art function with Arlene Volpe at his side, his companion of what would have been nearly half a century this year: just as the Palm Coast arts scene would not be nearly as lush as it became with Gargiulo, Gargiulo and his foundation would not have been nearly as Medici-like without Arlene Volpe, foundation to the Foundation.




The couple had settled on moving to Palm Coast decades ago when they’d had enough of Connecticut’s weather. “They also knew that there was no art community here and they wanted to come and try to build an art community out of nothing,” Greg Volpe, one of Arlene’s children whom she and Tom raised, said.

In his last newsletter, Gargiulo described Arlene as “my soul mate for half my life” and “the driving force for the arts in Flagler County.” But Volpe, 81, has been going through serious health challenges of her own. Gargiulo devoted a page in the newsletter that described those difficulties, writing in the first person of his own “tears streaming down my face” as he anguished over Arlene’s struggles. It was the heartbreak that would precede another.

According to Greg Volpe, Gargiulo had gone to AdventHealth Palm Coast for knee surgery. There were complications. He was recovering at the hospital on Saturday when he had a heart attack and was stabilized. He had another the next day. Thomas Gargiuolo died between noon and 1 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 13.




“I’m not devastated, but I’m shocked to lose my friend, and I’m mourning losing my friend,” Messersmith said. “But in that I knew he had the faith that what him and Arlene had established would carry on, and so I’m in. And I know others are in.” Just this morning Messersmith was in a conversation with an environmental planner at Palm Coast government, discussing the coming installation of the second major sculpture in the city’s Sculpture Garden at Central Park that Gargiulo conceived and funded. It’ll be Messersmith’s own “The Skater,” following on the inaugural “Burro With Bird on Shoulder” by artist Copper Tritscheller, unveiled in March 2019. It’ll be the second of a planned five sculptures in the garden, though the fate of future installations, like so much else in the Gargiulo portfolio, is now facing some uncertainty.

Greg Volpe, who was with his brother Bob and their mother at the parental home this morning, surveying the immensity of the art work and other legacies Gargiulo left behind, said the local arts community will be involved with what happens next. “We want to talk to the local artists and the Artist of the Year representatives for our Gargiulo Foundation,” he said, and come to a common understanding about what to do with the work. “We would probably donate to local colleges, universities, any kind of corporate places. We’re going to see if we can have some showings and some gallery openings and see if we can actually sell some of this stuff. But we really want to get a hold of the artists and get their opinions on what the best route is going to be for that.” A memorial is also likely, with some of the art on display and artists talking about his legacy.




JJ Graham is probably the artist Gargiulo took to most closely in Palm Coast because the two men’s temperaments and aims were so similar, as were their artistic sensibilities: they both had en entrepreneurial verve, always pairing the importance of art with the importance of disseminating it to a wide public, they both share that compulsion to create, to debate, to talk for hours on end about the work, and Gargiulo, who’d had his own gallery–that’s how he first met Messersmith: he’d asked him to come over to see the gallery he’d just opened in a strip mall in Bunnell 23 years ago–saw in Graham the continuation of his own endeavors.

Graham made a big mark in the art community when he opened his Hollingsworth Gallery at its old location at City Marketplace in 2008, shaking the local art scene out of its representational lethargy with his own abstract expressionism and his monthly shows featuring the more cutting edge side of the palette.

Graham had crossed paths with him briefly at a Linda Solomon show, but it was shortly after that that “he just grabbed me up,” took Graham to a chamber meeting and started channeling people to his gallery. “So I was just kind of whisked away by Tom,” Graham said. “And then afterwards, he took me by his place and I got to see his work. And then I realized Tom is very underrated. Tom was a painter, and he’s an artist, he walked the walk, and I was almost in tears, seeing all of his work, because it was so in sync with a lot of my ideas and thoughts about how to paint.”

Today Graham was in tears, speaking about the friend and patron he called an father figure of sorts. “There are a couple times where he just really had my back. I would’ve went under, if it weren’t for Tom,” Graham said. “And that’s something that he said to me. He said, I don’t want to, you know, tell you what to do or be your leader. He’s like, ‘You’re making the right decisions. I just want to be behind you in case you need a little bit of a push.'” Graham breaks down, pauses, continues: “And that’s kind of what he did. He was just one of the few art fathers that I have been fortunate enough to have and I’m just, I’m going to miss him. There was a huge role that I think he played in this community.”




Graham, Gargiulo and Weldon Ryan, an artist and a former president of the Flagler County Art League had had one of those epic conversational debates around 2010 that led to reimagining the local art scene as something of a cooperative association. “He had some great ideas about unification of all of the arts and trying to make us flourish in Flagler County,” Ryan recalled. “It was about art, building a community, cultural things to fit in to make it really flourish. Tom felt it was very important that art thrive, and the only way to really have a full-body society as far as art and Flagler, we needed to really ignite the arts, bringing all of the art associations together to come up with some projects. I think one was the sculpture garden.”

Gargiulo ended up supporting the work of Weldon and Richlin Ryan (an artist in her own right) at Bethune-Cookman. “He was so full of energy and so much enthusiasm to get things rolling,” Ryan said. “Whatever ideas he had, he was exciting all the time. He really wanted to make things happen.”

Rick de Yampert, an artist and journalist (he is FlaglerLive’s arts and culture writer) interviewed Gargiulo many times. “He gave me a few of his small pieces over the years, and I really treasure them now,” he said. “In his retirement years, he could have just laid back and created art, gone fishing. But he chose to be a champion of the arts and walk the walk, as well as just talk the talk. And when I look back on that, of course, Arlene was his partner in art crime, quote unquote. They made a wonderful team. He was the first to say that he couldn’t have done this without her.”

At times Gargiulo would lightly talk to de Yampert about his age, the consciousness of a certain longevity as if making him wonder how far he could push it further. “It was a reminder like, wow, there is this second and third chapter, or fourth or fifth chapters in life, and he spent his really well.”

Gargiulo surprised de Yampert, as he did many artists, buying some of de Yampert’s crow-themed work, which has had its own exhibits. “They were in some of his shows, and he gave them purchase awards. So he was supporting me as an artist,” de Yampert said. “Any creator wants to be appreciated. And he extended that to me, and it was, I don’t know, it was, maybe surprising is not the word, but I was kind of surprised because he’s dealt with JJ Graham and Weldon Ryan and Peter Cerreta and Richard Schreiner. I mean, all these area artists who deserve to be in museums. And then here comes Rick with his little Mr. Crow photos that he digitizes and prints on campus. And he was just as enthusiastic about my work as he was those top flight paint slingers. And so that he had a big heart.”