Tucked away on the ground-floor level of a Palm Beach condominium, a gallery run by an artist with decades of experience has a noble cause: supporting the next generation of artists.
Ellen Liman on Feb. 16 opened her new E. Liman Fine Arts Gallery and Studio on the T Level near Salute Ristorante in Palm Beach Towers on Cocoanut Row, just south of the Flagler Museum. The gallery is open by appointment only.
All proceeds from the sale of every piece of art go to the visual arts fund of the Dreyfoos School of the Arts Foundation. The nonprofit group provides support for the art and academic programs at Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, a public high school in downtown West Palm Beach. Liman sits on the foundation’s board.
“I just really think it’s a great opportunity for people to get a terrific picture and help the school at the same time,” Liman told the Daily News during a recent visit to her new space.
Liman previously owned and operated an eponymous gallery for more than two decades at the historic Paramount Theatre building across town. When she shuttered that space, 100% of sales went to the School of the Arts foundation.
The school and foundation soon will recognize Liman’s contributions by naming a wing of the Dreyfoos visual arts building in her honor. A second-floor space will now be the Ellen Liman Fine Arts Wing.
Liman’s support for the school, through her new gallery and years of donations, have been game-changing, said Christopher Snyder, CEO of the Dreyfoos School of the Arts Foundation Inc. The money raised through her gallery helps on a number of fronts, including paying for items on the school’s wish list and additional instructors and visiting artists, he said.
“We couldn’t do what we do in supplying this first-rate art and academic experience for public high school students without support from people like her,” Snyder said.
The wing named in Liman’s honor houses classrooms, a gallery, darkroom space and a space for printmaking, as well as areaws devoted to drawing, painting, digital media and a nature lab, where students can practice drawing figures using taxidermied creatures, Snyder said.
A sign to honor Liman will be installed before the end of March, and a ceremony will be held after the foundation’s April 8 board meeting, he said.
“She’s the real deal,” Snyder said of Liman. “She really, really cares about the art world. Truly, that’s where her heart is.”
Liman didn’t have to search long to find the spot for her new gallery and studio: She lives in Palm Beach Towers. “I live above the store,” she said, smiling.
The space has “artistic karma,” Liman noted. Before it was hers, it was home to an architect’s office, and a dance studio before that, she said.
“I just saw the space — a big, empty, white box, which is perfect for a studio-gallery,” Liman said.
She wanted to return to selling art in Palm Beach, to once again have a major presence on the island where she has found so much inspiration and support.
The works for sale at the gallery serve as a sort of informal career retrospective. There are a few early pieces, some from her mid-career and more dating from the past few years, she said.
Liman is known in part for her lush depictions of flowers. Recently, she began working on abstracts based on those flowers.
“It’s leaves from The Breakers,” she said as she gently ran her fingers over one of the paintings, in which she used sea grape leaves from the nearby historic resort property. “They were actually dead leaves. They were fallen, and so they were much more interesting than live leaves.”
Liman has been “very interested in texture,” working with acrylic paint and collages. Some of Liman’s collages are created from past pieces, she said. She makes copies of her paintings, then cuts them up and pastes them into new compositions with new touches of color and texture.
“I’m reorganizing and reconfiguring my own work, actually, into new creations,” Liman said. “As a working artist, it’s very enlightening and inspiring, because you also can play with it. Things you can’t do with paint, you can do with these paper shapes.”
Throughout her career, Liman has understood the importance of helping younger artists, she said. In her gallery at the Paramount Building, she constantly showed work by young and emerging artists. She sought them out and gave them a place to build their careers, she said.
The work that the Dreyfoos School of the Arts does with students is phenomenal, Liman said.
“There are very talented artists in that school. Hugely talented,” she said of the students. “But the financial need is enormous.”
The new studio space will not replace the existing longtime presence she has had on South Dixie Highway near the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, she said.
Paintings in Liman’s Palm Beach Towers gallery are available for a range of prices that can be negotiated, she said.
She also has a featured show on view through April 5 — “Creating Collages,” an exhibition of local artist Helen Salzberg’s work. In addition to her decades-long career as an artist working in collage, sculpture and painting, Salzberg also is a supporter of young talent. Liman said proceeds from the sales of Salzberg’s collages will also go to the School of the Arts Foundation.
For more information about the foundation, visit SOAFI.org or call Snyder at 561-628-4377. For more information about Liman’s gallery or to make an appointment to visit, visit EllenLimanArtist.com or call Liman at 917-774-0421.
Kristina Webb is a reporter for Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at kwebb@pbdailynews.com. Subscribe today to support our journalism.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Ellen Liman opens new Palm Beach gallery to support young artists
Reporting by Kristina Webb, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
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