An opening reception for “Witnessing Eden” by current Artists-in-Residence Tony Fernandez and Jorge Gonzalez Graupera will be held this Sunday, September 8th from 4 pm to 6 pm in the Great Hall of the Stone House. The exhibition will showcase photographs by current Artists-in-Residence Tony Fernandez and Jorge Gonzalez Graupera. The images displayed in the Great Hall will be in conversation regarding the unparalleled connection between nature and the observer. Each photographer will interpret the grandeur of the Deering Estate as botanist John Kunkel Small once expressed in his book From Eden to Sahara: Florida’s Tragedy. Small’s writings, a lament and a call to action, speak of a landscape once lush and vibrant, now facing the ravages of human intervention and environmental neglect. He captures a time when Florida was a paradise on the brink, teetering between the untouched Eden it once was and the encroaching desert it risked becoming. In echoing these themes, Fernandez and Gonzale...