The Armory Art Center honors the legacy of late instructor Sam Perry with this retrospective exhibition of paintings, drawings, and animations. Curated by his colleague and friend Mark Cohen, the exhibit represents a broad look at his work through the years. If you were fortunate enough to study with Sam Perry—or to be his friend—you know the passion for art that lived and breathed through him. Sam was a beloved instructor, having started teaching at the Armory Art Center in 1987 when it opened, continuing there and at Palm Beach Atlantic University until his illness. Students studied with him for years, some for decades. His impact on the art communities he touched is still felt today.

A Tribute to Sam Perry from Terre Rybovich

If you were fortunate enough to study with Sam Perry—or to be his friend—you know the passion for art that lived and breathed through him. Sam was a beloved instructor, having started teaching at the Armory Art Center in 1987, when it opened, and continuing there and at Palm Beach Atlantic University until his illness. Students studied with him for years, some for decades.

Sam was born and raised in West Palm Beach and educated at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, later earning his MFA from Florida Atlantic University.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he excelled as an abstract artist in commercial galleries in Miami, New York, and elsewhere.

But then came September 11, 2001, leaving Sam overwhelmed by the human toll. “It was a paradigm shift for me. I became more aware of humanity and its frailty,” Sam explained. He abandoned abstract painting and started to sketch the people around him at Starbucks.

Figure sketching and the challenge of capturing the body in motion were life-long pursuits of Sam’s. His post-9/11 drawings are striking for their portrayal of heads turning, arms gesturing, and nervous ticks. And as his interest in motion deepened, he inevitably turned to animation.

But Sam was a master painter and draftsman. His venture into animation wouldn’t be like most beginners’. Indeed, his drawing skills, familiarity with the figure in motion, mastery of color and composition—and his novice animation technique—made for singular works. He soon produced a series of animations, often in collaboration with Bill and John Storch, his counterparts in music.

And then, not surprisingly, Sam started to miss the tactile nature of painting. But this time, he’d been immersed in digital imagery—the neon colors, the detailed stages of motion, and more. He started a series of paintings, basing each on a single animation frame. And, once again, one medium fed another with uncommon results. These paintings were a departure from any painting Sam had done up to then.

What next? A return to sketching in public. “I needed fresh information,” Sam explained. He chose Johan Joe’s café as his setting, completing 64 drawings in two months. They were soon followed by paintings subtle in tone, like the drawings.

He made one more animation, a departure from his experiments in cross-fertilizing mediums. It’s a beautiful yet strange depiction of the disconnectedness he confronted in the digital world. A fractured landscape humanized by characters both quirky and clumsy. “We don’t have to make social statements that are ugly; we can make ones that are sublimely beautiful,” Sam proclaimed. “That’s where we exist, in that realm of beauty.”

Truly Sam Perry exists in the realm of beauty now. And to the extent that we can learn from his example, we can experience it in our own lives and art.

About Sam Perry

Sam Perry was born and raised in West Palm Beach and educated at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, later earning his MFA from Florida Atlantic University. Sam was a man of many talents, self-taught in different styles and imaginative components. He won several awards and grants, and his large-scale painting ‘Flashlight Gods’ has hung in the Palm Beach International Airport for over 30 years. His work has appeared in numerous solo exhibitions and is collected by universities, private patrons and museums, including the Norton Museum of Art; he has sold both nationally and internationally, and is recognized by fine art galleries New York, Miami, and West Palm Beach.