by Nick Angulo
The pathways that led Erica Prince and Melissa Delprete to South Florida, and into a mutual orbit of art, will look familiar to any local transplant with a story to tell about how they got here. But the bond between these two artists runs deeper than geography. Prince, a full-time faculty member at Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, and Delprete, owner of mtn space art gallery in Lake Worth Beach, have found life experiences in common and intersecting views on art and the value of building community around their work.
Now they’re collaborators in Prince’s first solo exhibition at mtn space: “It Takes YEARS to Grow a Pineapple,” a collection with two distinct but overlapping strands. One consists of colorful, often tropical mixed media images that grew, in a manner of speaking, out of real plants transformed by Prince’s process.
The PureHoney artist of the month explains: “They begin as monoprints, where I essentially make arrangements out of actual plants and then smash them through a printing press. So they begin as ghost images of plants that have been literally like blown apart and deconstructed.”
“I mean, in one sense, I’m making a composition, but in another sense … I don’t know what it’s going to look like,” Prince says. But the smashed-plants template for these annotated works is only one step toward finished compositions.
“It becomes a starting place for me to respond, and solve the puzzle of the arrangement,” Prince says. “It begins with these parameters that I have limited control over, but then it’s about illuminating them and bringing them to life through drawing afterwards.”
The other strand of Prince’s “Pineapple” work is a series of vase-like sculptures that seem both approachable yet otherworldly, their weird, corporeal shapes — like alien hanging fruits or hearts with extra valves — sometimes echoed in Prince’s dreamlike floral illustrations.
Prince and Delprete met through a mutual acquaintance: past PureHoney artist of the month Tara Booth, who was a student of Prince’s when Prince was in Philadelphia teaching at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture. “She and I just kept popping up in the same circles,” Delprete says. “And I really liked her work.”
Delprete paid visits to Prince’s studio and included her in last year’s mtn spaceship group exhibition (“mtn” is short for mountain). Though the two lead separate lives, Delprete says she also felt a sense of alignment with Prince in areas beyond art. “She’s a mother and I’m a mother, and we’re both artists, and we’re both navigating, creating and making in this time of caring for another person.”
That other person, for both Delprete and Prince, was an ailing parent nearing the end of life. Delprete says her late, “extremely entrepreneurial” father, had always urged her to really commit to her artistic ambitions, including the possibility of being a gallerist.
When she resettled here after living and teaching ceramics in Seattle, Delprete says she didn’t want to stand up a “vanity gallery” showcasing herself. But an opportunity to take over a storefront on Lake Avenue — the original mtn space location — presented itself, and Delprete jumped.
mtn space today occupies a small, flat-roofed building a short walk away on North M Street. From there, Delprete presents works by emerging and under-represented artists who show a deep and disciplined commitment to their craft. She also wants mtn space to register with the viewing public as a place of inclusion.
“Some of the larger art galleries, they’re impressive and beautiful, they’re showing amazing work. But there’s this sense where it’s not as welcoming as I’d like,” Delprete says. “That was always, part of my mission: How can we make a space that is still elevated but approachable?”
She’s found the area hospitable for her pursuits. Prince agrees that Palm Beach County is a good fit for artists and gallerists alike.
“I feel like things are changing very fast,” she says. “I’m involved with New Wave Art Wknd, which is like a residency program that is about the culture of West Palm Beach an art center. And The Bunker is here, and there’s incredible galleries that have moved here. So it feels like things are happening.”
Erica Prince’s “It Takes YEARS to Grow a Pineapple” runs March 26-May 9 at mtn space in West Palm Beach. erica-prince.com, mtnspace.com ~ Sean Piccoli
