The Palm Beach Post

July 12, 2014

By Laura Lordi

This exhibit is all the buzz!

What’s All The Buzz About, which opened Friday at the Lake Park’s Art on Park gallery features four members of South Florida EcoArtists who are combining their talents to educate the public about bees.

“This is my answer to all of the hoopla and activism going around about the extinction of bees, and GMOs. … To bring people together to discover and connect through their separate and unique identities (and mediums), and create an environment where these connections can be made” said artist and curator Rolando Chang Barrero.

The featured EcoArtists are Xavier Cortada, Jesse Etelson, Lucy Keshavarz and Kelly Rogers.

Cortada’s interactive piece is a “tile drawing” of a native coreopsis flower, which is one of Florida’s most popular flowers with wild bees. The image is arranged in separate small squares in a grid pattern. Behind each tile is a packet of coreopsis seeds. Viewers can take a tile with the seeds home to plant and upload a photo of the flowers to the project website, www.flor500.com.

Etelson’s sculpture mimics a beehive and appears at the trunk of a pine tree.

Keshavarz will show her clay “fossils” (imprints on clay) of leaves of native Florida plants which are important to bees.

Rogers’ living sculpture, the “Bee Hive Backpack,” is designed like a book, in which each page is a honeycomb to be inhabited by live bees. Rogers strapped the backpack to her shoulders and walked through locations where bees were known to migrate.

The show benefits the Palm Beach Beekeepers Association and runs through Aug. 11.