The Art Guild of the Purple Isles

The Art Guild of the Purple Isles started in 1966, when a small group of artists began meeting at Bernice Shambaugh's studio in Islamorada as the Purple Isles Fine Arts Guild. They put on their first Keys art show in February 1968, broke away to go independent in 1974, widened the membership to include photographers, and shortened the name to AGPI. Sixty years on it is more than a hundred artists working across every medium, and it functions as the center of gravity for visual art in the Upper Keys.

For a visitor, the useful thing is that the guild's work is on public walls rather than locked inside a membership. Six shows run through the year: a water-themed exhibition at the History of Diving Museum, a garden show at Garden Walk, the AGPI Annual Judged Art Show, a Wildlife of the Florida Keys exhibition, a summer show, and year-round hanging displays at the Tassell Medical Arts Building and the Key Largo Chamber of Commerce. Guild photographers run their own meetings and field trips around the Upper Keys, and painters hold plein air sessions outdoors at locations up and down the island chain.

There is also a weekly open thread worth knowing about. Creative Tuesdays are gatherings at the Key Largo Library, where members get together to work on projects and talk, and the guild runs member demonstrations monthly through the season plus short tutorials over Zoom. Through the winter months they take a booth at the Morada Way art walk in Islamorada, which happens on the third Thursday of each month and is the easiest place to meet guild artists in one evening. The guild also supports art education in local schools.

Plan around the calendar. Guild meetings run on the first Wednesday of the month from November through April, and most of the programming follows that same season, so a January visit will find considerably more going on than a July one. Membership is open to artists, and the guild's site is the place to start if you want to join rather than just look.