Memorial Day means a lot to the folks at Earl’s Hideaway. Whether veterans love to ride Harleys or Harley riders love veterans, I’m not sure, but thousands show up for the biker bar’s annual Memorial Day celebration. This year, Earl Fest’s eighth, includes some great blues bands. The music starts at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Monday, with Betty Fox, Devon Allman, Albert Castiglia, Lauren Mitchell and Nico Wayne Toussaint on the line-up.
Sunday’s Devon Allman and Nico Wayne Toussaint caught my eye. Devon is Gregg Allman’s son. Though he started playing music at 5, he didn’t meet his father until he was 17. They bonded immediately and after experimenting with a number of musical styles, his DNA finally got the better of him and blues became his language.
Toussaint is a French harmonica-playing vocalist whose sound is rooted in Chicago blues; he played at the 2013 Montreal Jazz Festival and his band just took third place in the International Blues Challenge in Memphis.
Also playing Sunday: Lauren Mitchell, a husky-voice, Sarasota-based funk and blues singer and Miami-based Cuban-Italian-American guitarist and vocalist Albert Castiglia.
Earl’s is at the center of the Sebastian riverfront district.
Space Coast Symphony once again proves itself to be accessible to the community, staging affordable concerts right through summer. The Sunday afternoon concert, “An Earth Odyssey,” includes HD footage from NASA as a backdrop with a space theme that could easily interest even children, and a ticket price anyone can afford – literally: $20 in advance, using the website, and free to kids 18 and under and for anyone with a college ID. The orchestra also has a “pay what you can” option for those who demonstrate need.
Music includes a new work by a young University of Central Florida graduate, Adam Lydon, then Robert Shumann’s “Concert Piece for Four Horns and Large Orchestra” and after a break, Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” the opening theme for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Sunday’s concert is at 3 p.m. at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center.
This is the last weekend to see the exhibit “Environmental Photography” at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The show includes the work of photographic artists concerned with endangered wildlife, climate change, pollution, and erosion. The show includes photos by James Balog, a renowned photographer who has spent much of the past 35 year shooting subjects like polar ice and old-growth forests as well as endangered animals. His parents, James and Alvina Balog, live in Vero and are avid supporters of the museum.
A second exhibit at the Vero museum, “Embracing Space and Color: Art On and Off the Walls, remains in place through the first week of June. Curated by the museum’s Jay Williams, the wide-ranging show includes both sculpture and painting and has a work by Devorah Sperber that recreates famous artworks upside down, using spools of colored thread in a pixelated effect. The image is turned right-side up by peering through a glass ball hanging in front of the artworks.
At the Foosaner Museum in the charming – if underpopulated — Eau Gallie Arts District in Melbourne, an exhibition of Japanese woodcuts gleaned from the vast collection of Syracuse University. “Ukiyo-e to Shin Hanga” includes 40 works from the color ukiyo-e printmaking from the 18th and 19th centuries, to the 20th century prints of the Shin Hanga movement. In tandem with the Syracuse prints, the museum is offering a second exhibit comprising kimono, more prints, swords, and decorative objects from the collections of both the Foosaner and its sister museum, the Ruth Funk Museum of Textile Arts.
Both museums are part of Florida Institute of Technology.
And in West Palm Beach, it’s the last weekend for the Norton Museum of Art’s “High Tea: Glorious Manifestations East and West.” The exhibit includes 100 pieces spanning 1,200 years of tea service from Asia, Europe and the U.S. No doubt Vero’s Mad Tea-Potters already heard of this one through Tea and Chi owner Maria Sparsis, a potter herself.
Stuart’s Elliott Museum on South Hutchinson Island is hosting an exhibit of 40 chairs representing 200 years of American design. The show, curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, includes works by Frank Gehry, the Stickley brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames and Isamu Noguchi.