- [Katherine] When you see someone like George who's able to kind of hold on to that beauty and just explode at the end of his life, makes me feel positive about human nature.

[ethereal music] [ambient music] [film reel whirring] - [Gary] Every day I would walk from my home in South Beach through Flamingo Park and I centered myself around 10th Street and Ocean Drive.

[riveting classical music] No cars, no traffic.

Walk around the beach, walk around Lummus Park, Ocean Drive, people sitting in their benches in front of every porch.

Youngest person there by 30 or 40 or 50 years.

[riveting classical music] [riveting classical music continues] At that time, the hotels were whitewashed, all the same.

There was no glamour.

[riveting classical music] And I look up and there's one room in the Colony Hotel.

It was a premier room, right on either side of that beautiful marquee full of decorations.

[ambient music] The door opens, this little old stooped over man, with a crew cut and a goatee beckons me to come in, doesn't speak a lot of English.

[ambient music] He was a sweet, pleasant, had a natural grace about himself.

I just fell in love with him.

And I went back for years.

[ambient music] - This show is an introduction to the work of George Voronovsky, someone who was producing work throughout the 1970s and early eighties, and who is largely unknown.

[ethereal music] - I've long been interested in outsider and vernacular art, art made by untrained artists, and I think that stems from my having grown up in Miami Beach during a very opulent era.

And I started collecting.

[ethereal music] George's room was an explosion of color and life.

Wherever you looked, there were decorations and paintings.

Literally in this little room, that's probably nine by 12 feet, 5,000 objects.

[ethereal music] - [Katherine] He was really just taking walks all around South Beach and finding post-consumer, postwar capitalist society trash.

He was gathering it and turning it into this exceptional universe.

[ambient music] - [Gary] Candy wrappers fashioned into flowers, soda cans carved into stars bursting in these explosive arrangements.

[ambient music continues] - As far as we know, George wasn't really looking to other painters.

He was never apprenticed with anybody.

He was truly somebody who was making art from his own vision and through his own experimentation.

That's something that's very typical of self-taught artists, is that they're not just painting on canvas or sculpting in stone or wood.

[ambient music continues] In George's case, he was transforming a myriad of materials that he found throughout South Beach.

The kinds of boxes that flotation, fun rafts and those sorts of things came in.

[ambient music continues] Old pieces of cardboard from pizza boxes.

[ambient music continues] And then he amazingly was able to carve styrofoam.

[ambient music continues] - [Gary] Outsider artists are untrained, usually eccentric.

They don't follow the rules.

They don't care about tradition.

Color is not a matter of theory, but of fun.

And they create generally because they have some urges, some deeply seeded urges to explore and express.

[dramatic ambient music] - [Katherine] The more that we looked at the paintings, the more that we kind of identified architectures and flora and fauna, the more that we realized almost all of these paintings are of childhood memories, from the Ukraine, maybe from Crimea.

- [Gary] George was a memory painter and he painted his recollections of growing up in Kiev.

His father was an attorney.

They were cultured people.

He plays instruments.

He writes and he paints.

After World War II, he lost his family.

His wife divorced him while he was in a concentration camp, but what we're learning now that it might have been to save him 'cause his return could have gotten him killed under Stalin's regime.

He comes to Philadelphia, works on the railroad.

Washing dishes, cleaning cars, belongs to the Tolstoy Foundation.

One of his hobbies when he had time off was to get in a Greyhound bus and go anywhere with this little camera filmed through the windows, walk through gardens.

[ambient music] [ambient music continues] And always dreamt as Miami Beach's paradise.

[ambient music continues] [ambient music continues] He was positive.

Everything was positive.

His was a beautiful world in spite of his hardships.

[ambient music continues] [upbeat folk music] - [Katherine] He was one of hundreds of thousands of refugees of World War II who wound up in South Beach in Miami in the second half of the 20th century.

- [Gary] That was in fact the last resort for a Jewish culture who survived Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, filtered through Ellis Island, new England, and they found South Beach as a community where they can practice their Maoris and traditions.

[upbeat folk music] - This re-identification with childhood joy was his way of kind of recuperating the trauma that he'd experienced in his life.

[ambient music] He did do this one painting over and over again, and it was a memory of of him and his brother's findings snake skins and egg shells in the forest of Eastern Ukraine as children.

[ambient music continues] And they did it as he described in the title, to preserve the beauty of nature.

[ambient music continues] What he was able to achieve on the surfaces of these paintings is just so incredibly remarkable.

On all different kinds of surfaces, kind of found cardboard and sometimes canvas board or canvas and different kinds of pigments.

For many years, he was kind of watering down store-bought pigments that he got at the Woolworth five and dime to make them last longer.

[ambient music continues] - I had an idea to write a grant for him.

I submitted this grant and sure enough he gets it.

It's $3,000.

It's a lot of money in late seventies.

We took him to Rex Art.

Carl Gables was a premier art store at the time.

And I said, "George, here's a wagon.

Take your time."

I said, "Fill it up!"

[ambient music continues] And I come back in an hour and there's canvases and acrylics and brushes, so that was a second life for him as an artist.

[riveting classical music] - [Kyle] "Dancers and Fireworks" is my favorite piece of George's, and it's sort of two paintings in one.

While the lower half is comprised of these dancers surrounded by ballerinas, the top half of the painting is sort of full of symbols from Ukrainian and Slavic folklore.

Right across the center is a mythological firebird.

There are designs that evoke pysanky, the egg decorating tradition of Ukraine.

There are other motifs that you would see in Ukrainian embroidery.

- [Katherine] One of my favorite works on the show is a beautiful painting of this luxurious cruise ship kind of skimming along the water, and we think it's probably something that he did see from his view where he was living in South Beach.

[zen music] I think he has special kind of identification with birds because of what happened to him in terms of his separation from his family.

Animals just run wild and free in all of his art, but birds are really this kind of constant motif throughout.

[zen music continues] - When I met George that first time, it wasn't that I knew that I was just with someone special.

It was more of a almost an intuitive or innate attraction to the guy.

I had brought my girlfriend, Theresa, and she fell in love with George, too, and he fell in love with her.

We visited him, I'd say two to three times a week.

We took him onto the cruise ships.

He would sit in the back.

I guess he would just dream.

He just had a wonderful time.

We just loved him.

He was part of the family.

[zen music continues] His health started to fail.

I had a friend who worked at Rebecca Towers, which was one of two HUD housings for elderly and poorer people, and she let him move in.

And it was on the bay, so of course he had a view of the Port of Miami and he was high up and he got a nice panorama, so he was very happy there, but he was a little nervous and he said to me, "Can I hang my artwork up?"

I said, "Of course you can."

[zen music continues] He lived there until he passed away.

He died at Mount Sinai Hospital.

[waves crashing] We've packed up the paintings and the decorations, and we've been serving as guardians of this work for 40 years.

We raised two children and I taught college before I got to retirement and having the time to establish George's reputation.

[ambient music] - When I first learned of George's work, I was very intrigued and then COVID happened.

I went to see the work in person where Gary had it stored at that time, and that for me was truly a transformational experience.

[ambient music continues] When you see someone like George who's able to kind of hold on to that beauty his whole life, that need to express and just explode at the end of his life with that kind of artistic impulse, that for me is very restorative and no matter what else is going on in the world, it makes me feel something extremely positive about human nature.

- The work itself is unique, it's heartwarming, it's human, it's tender, but so was he.

[ambient music] [ambient music continues] [ambient music continues] [ambient music continues] [ambient music continues] [ambient music fades]