Steve Diossy Marine Art Gallery

Steve Diossy Marine Art Gallery opened at 404 Duval Street in March 2025. Diossy is a self-taught artist whose subject is saltwater and whose register is comic: fish and dolphins and the people who chase them, rendered in hard color with a joke usually somewhere in the frame. If you have driven in Florida you have almost certainly seen his work without knowing it.

In 1998 Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution commissioned him to design the Protect Wild Dolphins specialty license plate. The alliance behind it says it went on to be Florida's number one best-selling specialty plate for more than a decade, and the proceeds fund marine mammal research and a round-the-clock emergency response for dolphins that strand or get tangled in fishing gear. Diossy sits on the board of the organization that administers it, and he has designed several more ocean-themed plates since, alongside collaborations with Wyland and Guy Harvey. He has been at this a while: at sixteen he took first place and presidential recognition for a sculpture of Michelangelo's Pietà.

The gallery carries original paintings and acrylics, limited edition canvas prints with a choice of framing, fine art paper prints, and then a long tail of things that are more fun than they are serious, which is in keeping with the work: apparel, beach towels, mugs and drinkware, stickers and decals, phone cases, bar sets, greeting cards, and vanity license plates, which is a nice circle to close given the rest of the story.

Check the hours before you walk over, because they are not the usual. The gallery is closed on Tuesdays, opens at noon on Sundays and Mondays and at eleven the rest of the week, stays open into the evening Wednesday through Saturday, and closes for an hour at five every day for happy hour, which is the most Key West operating policy in this directory. It also closes after Labor Day for a refresh and reopens at the start of October. Diossy's other gallery is in Vero Beach.