For visual artist Angelica Clyman there may be no place like home.
Her oil painting, mixed media sculptures, and printmaking are both inspired and influenced by her hometown of Hollywood, Florida.
“Being in South Florida for the past 42 years, I’ve just seen a lot of really rapid changes, a lot of rapid development,” says Clyman. “So, there is this feeling that things are not always going to be the way they are. And that’s really been a part of how I grew up here.”
Clyman, a recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Grant, says watching this change piqued a quirky interest in what things used to be—even before she started making art about it.
“I was always wondering what was here before. I would be in, say, an Italian restaurant and I would wonder why there are little fish on the plates. And then I’d start asking, ‘Was this a seafood place before?’ It’s just always what I was interested in,” she says. “I don’t know if I would have been making this kind of work if I wasn’t from here watching all of the big development boom.”
Although Clyman’s background is in painting and sculpture, her work has become multidisciplinary. Using different materials, her art aims to tell the story of a place or express some of the memories associated with it. She is particularly interested in places that are not celebrated for their history.
Stadium” at the Rosemary Duffy Larson Gallery. (Photo by Mauro Rueda)
(Photo by Angelica Clyman)
“We often think about really important places that have big plaques on them. Historical places. But I feel like a lot of our memories can be from really mundane places,” says Clyman.
Clyman, who is an adjunct professor at Broward College and director of the Rosemary Duffy Larson Gallery, has even done a piece about the long-gone Eckerd’s Pharmacy. A pharmacy chain that was known throughout Florida.
“We have all of these memories in these very mundane places, but when they’re gone, they’re gone,” she says. “And I feel like they’re not remembered or celebrated and so much of my work is about that.”
She’s done pieces about both South Florida retail and natural spaces, including the abandoned Broward Fashion Mall and the Tom Gaskins Cypress Knee Museum, which was a roadside attraction featuring the knotty outgrowths that grow from the roots of cypress trees.
For Clyman it all starts with a place, either a place she remembers or one that is suggested to her. Then she starts researching.
“I start looking up pictures. When did it open? When did it close? Why did it close?” she says. “I’m always really curious about what led to the downfall of that place.”
Once set on a place, she begins collecting photographs and buying things from eBay that belonged to it. Then she visits, even if it’s no longer there or has been abandoned.
“Sometimes it’s condos or a shopping center now, or an empty parking lot. And I go fully experience that place and take a lot of photos,” she says.
Although her work started as oil paintings on wood, she now let’s her experience at the place help her choose the medium.
“For another recent piece, I visited the Miami Marine Stadium, which is all crumbling concrete,” she says. “So, I knew I had to do something with concrete.”
With the use of so many mediums, Clyman, whose background is in painting and sculpture, says that there is certainly a learning curve.
“There’s a lot of trial and error every time I make something. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll remember what I learned for next time’, but maybe there won’t be a next time in the same way. So, it’s very exciting, but it’s very challenging,” she says.
However, Clyman says that she enjoys the challenge to keep growing and that the grant award from the South Florida Cultural Consortium will help further develop her artistic practice.
“I want to keep expanding and learning and creating more and this definitely helps,” she says. “It’s not a stopping point. I feel like it’s going to give me the next boost to create even more exciting work.”
The South Florida Cultural Consortium, established in 1988, is an alliance of the arts councils of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties. It has awarded over $4 million in grants to more than 300 artists. Artists Kandy Lopez and Roscoé B. Thické III also received grant funding this year. As part of the award, Clyman, Lopez, and Thické will share their work in an exhibition at Florida Atlantic University in 2025.
Clyman was also selected in August by Pompano Beach Arts as a 2024-2025 Artists in Residence at Bailey Contemporary Arts Center.
Clyman, who is excited to have a dedicated studio space during the 8-month residency, says that her work is not intended to make a statement on development. Her work is firmly rooted in nostalgia, even for places that she may not have experienced.
“That nostalgia may or may not be real, but I think we sometimes yearn for something kind of impossible,” she says. “It deals with memory and the fragmentation that can come with memory,” she says. “The work is dreamy and, hopefully, makes people curious about what came before.”
