Marco Island Historical Museum Exhibit Receives Award

The Marco Island Historical Society (MIHS) announces that the MIHS exhibit, Art of the Dig: Wells Sawyer’s Watercolors, has received the 2023 Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) Bronze Award. The SEMC Exhibition Competition showcases the best in the museum profession among museums throughout the Southeastern United States. Award winners will be celebrated at the 2023 Annual Meeting Awards Luncheon on November 15, in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Art of the Dig exhibit was at the Marco Island Historical Museum (MIHM) from October 2022 to January 2023. It was developed as a companion exhibit to the current exhibit of rare and important pre-Columbian Native American artifacts discovered on Marco Island in 1896. The exhibit amplified the current exhibit of rare and important Key Marco artifacts, including the Key Marco Cat. Many of these artifacts and others that disintegrated upon exposure to the air were captured by Sawyer’s watercolors and photographs as they were discovered. 

According to Austin Bell, Curator of Collections for the Marco Island Historical Society, “Sawyer’s works not only document some of the best-known evidence of Florida’s early Native peoples, but also demonstrate his immense skill and talent as an artist. The now-iconic watercolors, which first melded the arts and sciences more than a century ago, continue to provoke inquiry while serving as timeless visual connections to Florida’s past.”

Wells Moses Sawyer, an important American painter, was the expedition artist for the famed 1896 Pepper-Hearst expedition to Marco Island that discovered the world-famous Key Marco Cat — currently on exhibit at MIHM through 2026. The award-winning exhibit featured six of Sawyer’s original watercolors depicting the Key Marco artifacts as they were discovered as well as 25 reproductions of his works. The works were provided to MIHS by the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives, and University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

An unprecedented five-year loan extension by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History continues the original three-year loan of the Key Marco Cat to MIHM through 2026. The enigmatic half human/half feline is reunited with additional rare pre-Columbian artifacts discovered with it that are on loan from the Penn Museum. 

The Marco Island Historical Museum is located at 180 S. Heathwood Drive. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Admission is free and the site is handicapped accessible.