Current Exhibits
Tara O’Neill: Bodies in Motion
September 3 – November 21, 2020
Naples Depot Museum
The Naples Depot Museum is pleased to present Bodies in Motion, by Tara O’Neill. Throughout Tara’s artistic life she has endeavored to capture singularly perfect moments, to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary, and offer them as an antidote to the sensory overload that permeates modernity. Between the rising and setting of our sun, shadows shift over sand and sea, flora and fauna; beach buckets fill and empty, twilight whispers, dawn peeps. No two days can ever be the same.
Through this collection, Bodies in Motion, she offers a celebration of our shared humanity: a gesture so tender and common as toweling one’s hair dry; the escaped delight of children at play; hands sailing elsewhere inside the rhythm of music; the ultimate exultation of defying gravity. We are extraordinary even at our most ordinary.
All Collier County museum locations offer free admission.
Trading Posts of South Florida
September 1 – November 28, 2020
Museum of the Everglades
Before there was a road connecting Florida’s coasts and even before the railroads had made their way to some of the larger towns on the frontier, trading posts and general stores throughout South Florida were doing a brisk business in pelts, plumes, and hides supplied by indigenous hunters and pioneer settlers. These local commodities in turn fed the fashion trends in major cities like feathered ladies’ hats and alligator skin shoes and luggage. As populations grew and the landscape changed, so did the ways goods were bought and sold.
Trading Posts of South Florida focuses on locations in Collier County (the Storter General Store in Everglades City, the McKinney and Smallwood Stores in Chokoloskee, Brown’s Landing in Immokalee and the W.D. Collier store on Marco Island), but the exhibit also explores other stores further afield that were equally important to regional trade during the early days of statehood. Starting out as the designations for trading posts, names like Stranahan, Brickell, Burdine and Raulerson remain a part of the lexicon of South Florida place names and businesses today.
All Collier County museum locations offer free admission.
Never No More: Storter’s Southwest Florida
September 15 – December 5, 2020
Marco Island Historical Museum
Never No More features original drawings, paintings and sculptures by fisherman and folk artist Robert Lee Storter. Born in 1894 in Everglade (now Everglades City), he died in 1987 in Naples. His grandparents were some of the earliest settlers of the area, and the Storters were responsible for a many local firsts. His uncle, George Storter, founded the first general store and post office in Everglades City. His father was Robert Bembery Storter.
Robert Lee Storter was primarily known for his skill as a fisherman and guide in Southwest Florida. However, he was always creating art and documenting his world as he saw it. He was a self-taught artist with a focus on his daily life: fishing, wildlife and the areas in and around Naples, Marco Island and Everglades City. His lifetime spanned an era of incredible change in Southwest Florida from a frontier land to millionaire’s playground. His artwork documents these monumental changes, especially focusing on their effects on the land and wildlife.
All Collier County museum locations offer free admission.