New BellSouth Directory Features WPA Keys Artists

The new BellSouth Florida Keys/Key West Real Yellow Pages directory is now available. In partnership with BellSouth, the Monroe Council of the Arts provided artwork and descriptive text for the cover and inside pages, and the current directory features paintings by members of the celebrated Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists group. The cover images, from left to right, are:

an untitled work by Henry LaCagnina, the last living artist of the WPA Keys group, and a fifth-generation Italian church painter who counts the Ford and Mellon families among his collectors; and

The Old Western Union Building, painted about 1935 by Adrian Dornbush, the Dutch-born director of the WPA Keys group (this latter work from the collection of Key West attorney John M. Spottswood Jr.).

On page 48 of the directory appears a watercolor by WPA artist Avery Johnson titled Cottage and Palms, along with an informative essay on the unique WPA art program that rescued the Florida Keys from the Great Depression and transformed the region into the cultural tourism destination we know today.

The Monroe Council of the Arts wishes to thank Henry LaCagnina, Jack Spottswood, Nance Frank (whose Gallery on Greene in Key West sells LaCagnina?s work), WPA scholar Malcolm Ross, and BellSouth?s Lee Peterson for their generous cooperation in this annual celebration of the arts in the Florida Keys.