The best art in Delray right now is happening behind a roll-up door.
Not on Atlantic. Not in a gallery with track lighting and a wine pour. On Webb Avenue.
A quiet industrial street where, for more than two decades, a builder ran his construction company out of a plain block building. Concrete floors. Big bay doors. The kind of place you drive past a thousand times and never once look at.
Then something started growing inside it.
First came Joseph Roehm, From Roehm With Love. Twenty-eight years a florist in this town, though "florist" sells him short. The man is an artist. He has designed the flowers for the weddings and the funerals and the second, third, and fourth generations of the same Delray families. He moved onto this block and called it his forever home. You don't say that about a lease. You say that about a place that finally feels like yours.
Then Carol Calicchio brought her studio in. If you don't know her work, picture abstract florals built up in thick layers of paint until the light actually moves across the canvas. She is in the design magazines. She has a book. And of every space in this county, she picked this one.
That is the thing about culture. It doesn't announce itself. It picks a quiet corner and just starts.
A new arts district is taking shape on the north end of Delray Beach. And right now, there is one space left on the block.
