Effusion Gallery

Effusion sits at 701 Duval and is the Key West outpost of a gallery that started in Miami Beach's Art Deco District in 2004 and added Downtown Miami and Wynwood along the way. The Key West space runs to roughly 4,000 square feet across two floors, stark white and deliberately uncluttered, which is a different scale from most galleries on the island and means the work gets room to land.

What is on the walls is pop-leaning contemporary rather than island scenes, and some of it is genuinely hard to walk past. Paul Rousso builds oversized sculptures of flattened, crumpled printed things, candy wrappers and bubble gum packaging and magazine covers blown up to several feet and rendered so precisely that your brain argues with your eyes. Anja Van Herle paints portraits encrusted with Swarovski crystals, including the celebrity faces everybody knows. Romero Britto's work is here, and so is colorful fiberglass sculpture and pop culture imagery that tends to make people laugh out loud rather than nod respectfully. There are also pieces reported to animate when you look at them through a phone camera, which is worth asking the staff to show you.

The price range is unusually wide for a gallery of this kind. There are small sculptures priced like a souvenir and major works priced like major works, and the staff are used to both kinds of visitor, so browsing without buying is not treated as a problem. The gallery has shown local and regional artists alongside the international names, and it has run open calls for Lower Keys artists in the past.

The practical advantage is the hours, and they are the real reason to put this one on a list. Effusion stays open into the evening every day and until 11:00pm on Friday and Saturday. Nearly every other gallery in Key West is shut by five or six, so this is the one place on Duval where you can look at serious contemporary art at a time of night when the rest of the street has moved on to other business. Effusion holds a Tripadvisor Travelers' Choice award.