The Island's Creative Center

The Studios of Key West supports artists, inspires creativity and builds community.

For nearly twenty years, The Studios has been gathering the artists, ideas, and creative energy that flow through this island — and reflecting them back into the community through exhibitions, performances, classes, residencies, literary programs, and shared experiences.

Our galleries have welcomed internationally recognized artists alongside emerging local voices. Pulitzer Prize winners and first-time performers have shared the same stages. Music drifts down from rooftop concerts. Students meet working artists for the first time. Neighbors run into each other at exhibition openings, classes, and bookstore events.

Part cultural hub, part gathering place, The Studios aims to make creativity visible, accessible, and part of everyday life in Key West.

By the Numbers

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100+

Creative workshops offered annually, from ceramics and painting to writing, music, and digital media.

Artists in residence selected each year from hundreds of applicants around the world.

Exhibitions presented annually across our galleries.

667

Local artists featured across exhibitions, performances, workshops, residencies, and community programs.

1,000+

Students welcomed through Schools @ The Studios and Youth & Community Programs each year.

Free concerts and performances presented annually on Hugh’s View and during First Thursday Open Houses and Glow Hours.

An Idea Worth Building

Arts patron Peyton Evans had seen what artist colonies did for the places that had them, and saw no reason Key West couldn’t have one of its own. She sent fourteen of the island’s best artists and writers to renowned residencies around the country with one instruction: come back and share what you learn. The Studios of Key West opened in the historic Armory on White Street not long after, built out of what they learned.

An octagonal white and yellow cupola with a steep shingled spire rises from a gray rooftop, overlooking the tin roofs and treetops of Key West under a deep blue sky.

The Armory Years (2006-2014)

Local artists took studios upstairs and worked there daily. The first artists in residence arrived in 2007 and kept coming. Monthly openings became events people planned their month around; a concert series started, then plays, then classes. Every year more neighbors turned up, and every year we could do more because of it — until the building couldn’t hold us.

Early studio artist Deb Goldman sits cross-legged on the floor of a sunlit studio, surrounded by tall curving wooden rods that arch overhead, with patterned sculptural panels mounted along the walls.

The historic Armory in Key West: a two-story pale yellow clapboard building with twin pointed cupolas, an arched gable, and a second-floor balcony, seen from the street corne

A Building of Our Own (2015)

Thanks to the support of our generous donor base, we were able to purchase and renovate a landmark in the heart of Key West — a 16,000 sf former Masonic Temple by Henry Hohauser, the architect behind South Beach’s Art Deco district, and the only building of his on the island. Spacious, sturdy, suffused with light. We doubled our programs in it: nine studios for local artists, four galleries, classrooms, and a 200-seat theater.

Exterior of The Studios of Key West at 533 Eaton Street in Key West.

Architect's rendering of the Scottish Rite Temple in Key West, drawn by Henry Hohauser & Associates, showing a streamlined Art Deco building with a stepped tower and curved second-story wing.

Room for Everyone

The campus has grown outward and gotten better from the inside. Hugh’s View opened on the roof in 2019, a creative space in the sky with a canopied stage and one of the best views on the island, free and open to the public. This year we completed a renovation of the Helmerich Theater below it — new seats, new sound, new light. Concerts, cabaret, staged readings, conversations: the island’s living room.

A trumpeter and a singer perform on the canopied Kitwald Stage at Hugh's View while an audience watches from cocktail tables, with the water visible beyond the rooftop railing.

A performer in a dark suit sings into a microphone on a small stage as a seated audience watches from cabaret tables under pink and purple light.

Room for Artists

The Carriage Trade next door had welcomed guests since before 1882 — its owner once shepherded Hemingway to Cuba, made Key lime pies for Truman, and chatted with Tennessee Williams. When it came up for sale, supporters helped us buy it. After a $2 million restoration, it reopened in 2024 as the PEAR House: four residences and a banyan-shaded courtyard. Today, nearly forty artists from around the world come each year to develop new work.

Explore the Program

An artist works at a table in a bright white studio at the PEAR House, with a line of paintings clipped to a wire on the wall behind her and a hanging bundle of dried roots to one side.

Exterior of the PEAR House, a historic white Key West home with green shutters and a covered front porch.

The Next Generation

Investing in the next generation is one of the most important things we do. Schools at The Studios began in 2019, bringing students through the galleries to meet working artists and make something themselves. Last season we added Key West’s Title I schools and covered transportation — and reached 963 students, 51% more than the year before. Summer camps, recitals, poetry prizes, and paid high school internships round it out.

A group of schoolchildren sits on a gallery floor listening to an artist who gestures as he speaks, with framed artwork on the walls behind him.

Three children stand smiling on a sunny sidewalk in front of an orange and green Old Town Trolley, one giving a thumbs-up.

An Island Institution

Twenty years on, a three-year strategic planning process helped us refocus and rededicate ourselves to the work we’d been doing all along, with a newly minted mission statement: support artists, inspire creativity, build community.

A painter works at an easel on the sidewalk, capturing the curved Art Deco facade of The Studios of Key West that stands behind him.

Two children in navy school shirts lean over a table, absorbed in an art project with colored paper and drawing materials in front of them

Let the Light In

As The Studios celebrates its twentieth anniversary, the original idea still feels remarkably simple: create space for artists, invite people in, and let creativity become part of everyday life in Key West.

Immersive art installation filling a stairwell with hundreds of suspended blue, white, and translucent rectangular pieces, casting layered geometric shadows across the walls and stairs.

Let the Light In” in bold black letters, centered around a radiant burst of thin pastel-colored rays in soft blues, greens, pinks, purples, and yellows on a white background.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

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