Cultural Scene

Star-gazing is a common pursuit in the Gulfshore arts scene, with the region home to a number of performing, visual, literary and other artists of international acclaim. But who will the stars themselves be watching? We turned to five top arts figures to tell us who’ll be standing out from the cultural crowd this season.

Our experts: Kat Epple, an Emmy-award-winning composer and flautist from Fort Myers; Naples newcomer and bestselling mystery author Janet Evanovich; Naples sculptor Walter Koenigstein, whose bronze sculptures can be seen at the Guggenheim in New York; Grammy-award-winning gospel singer and Fort Myers resident Larry Ford; and Naples artist Jonathan Green, whose Gullah-informed paintings have been exhibited around the world.

Their picks? A diverse lot who are amazingly celestial themselves. A young artist who’s letting his light—and his voice—shine; an author and a painter with solid bodies of work behind them whose new works move in tantalizing directions; and a sculptor and a musician of national renown.

Harp guitarist and composer Andy Wahlberg is that rare musician who has never had a day job. A gig playing guitar in coffeehouses on Florida’s east coast when he was 14 got him his first bookings; by his mid-20s he was making his living on the college club circuit. Wahlberg, who graduated from high school in Fort Myers, moved to Naples from New York City in 1982 to start a family. When he’s not on the road, he has a large following on the Gulfshore, playing at Old Naples Pub and Venetian Village’s Village Pub several nights a week. He’s jammed with Spyro Gyra, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and countless other arena acts, but to other harp guitarists, there’s no bigger name than Wahlberg’s. Each year dozens of players of this uniquely strung instrument get together to riff; this year Wahlberg hosted the annual convention and concert at the Naples Beach Hotel.

There aren’t many mean streets in naples, but that hasn’t prevented novelist Tina Wainscott, a Lely High grad, from becoming a fast-rising star of suspense. She sold her first book to St. Martin in 1994, when she was just 27; her 16th, In Too Deep, was released last year. It’s set in Miami, but a couple take place in Southwest Florida; you’ll find recognizable city landmarks in 2000’s A Trick of the Light. Wainscott was initially marketed as a romance writer, but with each book she moved closer to straight suspense, where her take-charge women characters and tight plots were a more natural fit. Her next book, a psychological thriller to be released in July 2007, takes its scares from mind-games and manipulations rather than physical jeopardy.

Call Deevon Rahming’s talent heaven-sent. Each Sunday, the 17-year-old Fort Myers High School senior uses his big gospel voice to move and challenge the congregation at the Fort Myers mega-church First Assembly of God, captivating them with his charisma and maturity. More than 20,000 people enjoyed his solo performance in the church’s big-ticket Noah’s Ark festival last fall, and he won Fort Myers’ own Southwest Idol competition. So far, secular success isn’t tempting him: He’s talking to music pastor David Thomas about traveling to Australia as an apprentice to Hillsong, an international music ministry program.

Naples abstract artist Jo-Ann Lizio cherished her small-town upbringing in Peekskill, N.Y., but being surrounded by mountains also nurtured in her a lifelong need to see what the view was like from up there. Fascinated by the forms and colors the world takes when seen from on high, she incorporates those into her abstract paintings. Flight has been the organizing principle for much of her work. Shown at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 2003, Pilot Eyes (foreground) was part of her Flight Centennial collection, works that incorporated metals from salvaged aircraft and celebrated the history of women in aviation. The industrial and historical themes have lately given way to what Lizio is calling a "flight of fancy" that’s centered around freedom and metamorphosis, with butterflies central figures in the show she’s debuting in Miami this month.

For artist Jud Nelson, there’s always something more to see. whether Nelson is sculpting a pair of worn leather gloves out of black Belgian marble, as for this 1995 piece, or replicating the individual dimpled surfaces of Cheerios in cap rock, as he did for a commission for General Mills in 2004, he begins by coming to know in intimate detail the unique qualities of each object. Best known for his hyper-realistic marble sculptures of mass-produced goods—toilet paper, pot pies, hot dog buns—Nelson is in collections all over the world, including the Guggenheim in New York and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. A fixture on the New York art scene for more than 30 years, he has coming shows at Florida Arts Cultural Center in downtown Fort Myers and BIG Arts on Sanibel Island. Since moving to south Fort Myers in 1999, he’s discovered the delights of our ubiquitous construction cap rock. Lighter than marble, it has him working on a bigger scale—a 2,000-pound camel is part of a high-profile commission for Jorge Perez’s downtown Oasis development.