Rita Troxel and Fred Troxel: Earth and Bone

Thursday, March 4, 6-8pm

Rita Troxel has called the Florida Keys home for more than five decades, arriving in Key West with fellow college graduates in 1974 to help establish Greene Street Theatre. Her lifelong involvement in the arts has included work as an actress, particularly at the Red Barn Theatre, as well as service as Film Commissioner for the Florida Keys & Key West. Rita was present at an early brainstorming session that helped shape The Studios of Key West—where she also met her future husband, Fred—and later served six years on The Studios’ board. Deeply rooted in the cultural life of the Keys, Rita now creates ceramic sculptures and found-object assemblages with Fred, combining clay, bone, metal, and natural materials to reflect on vulnerability, resilience, memory, and the cycles of the natural world.

Fred Troxel is a longtime Lower Keys resident, retired dentist, artist, adventurer, and self-described “old hippie” who first fell in love with the Keys while attending SeaCamp on Big Pine Key in 1965. He returned permanently in 1977, building a restorative and aesthetic dentistry practice that combined technical precision with an artist’s eye for individuality and form. His creative life extends well beyond his profession: Fred co-founded the Lower Keys Underwater Music Festival, is a world-champion bonefisherman, an eleven-time Burning Man attendee, and an enthusiastic traveler and collector. Together with his wife, Rita, he creates ceramic sculptures and found-object assemblages that bring clay, bone, metal, and other materials together in explorations of nature, impermanence, memory, and transformation.