Here's Neith... Nevelson!

Coconut Grove, located in South Florida, has never failed to attract a colorful group of celebrities, artists and intellectuals.

While of many of these come and go, some have remained longer than expected and, as it is with the artist Neith Nevelson. Her story, like the story of most of us, is a combination of failures and successes. It would be almost impossible to tell the story of Coconut Grove without telling the story of this unique human being; an artist that in the past has been both lauded, and then chided.

Neith Nevelson, born in 1946 in New York City, settled in Coconut Grove in the mid 1970's with one of her youngest daughters, Xochtle Nevelson. Almost immediately, Neith became part of what has made Coconut Grove a colorful place. Her paintings in the early to mid 1980's were commissioned by some of the most prestigious art-galleries in South Florida and worldwide. (Coincidentally, as it has been constantly been pointed out by others, Neith is the granddaughter of Louise Nevelson, an artist that merits no introduction.)

The fact that Neith was, is, also a very talented and well-known artist enriched the Grove as a place where culture and entertainment mingles and where Neith, once upon a time, was referred to by the locals as "the lady in the bike," in reference to Neith's way of selling her art work-- mostly hand-painted t-shirts she'd peddle on the streets from her bike. Curiously enough, these t-shirts are now much sought after by collectors of Neith's work. Unfortunately, of these only a few are known to exist.

Neith, in many ways, exemplifies the cultural changes and reinventions of two turbulent decades, the 1960s and the 1970s, decades that reached their experimental upswings in the more conservative 1980's.

But if these saw changes in the art world as well, good art transcends the fads of the transient and mass-produced, and into universal paradigms equally true for all times.

In a career over thirty years in the making, Neith Nevelson has focused her energies, her inner-will and professional standing in the art community by choosing to do what great artists have always done-- refuse to bow down to the banal.

In many ways, too, the true artist is also a rebel, often without a cause, sometimes with a cause, but always a in love with that daemonic, mysterious energy from whence his/her talent springs. In Neith's case, it is energy unrestrained.

It is art created from an unschooled talent, often raw, always beautiful; it is a combination of lines, colors and forms which often seem to loop upon itself with no rhythm or pattern, but which, on second look, the symmetry was already set from the very first splash of color.