Discarded books rarely re-renter a library once they’re tossed in the recycle bin. Fort Pierce’s Kilmer Branch Library, 101 Melody Lane, made an exception this summer through hosting the collages of Laura Kinnamon.
A selection of Kinnamon’s work, curated by the Kilmer Library’s ArtSpace program, went up for display starting Monday. The “whimsical parade” of portraits there, some made of shredded library books, will stay up until Sept. 30.
“I think it was an insurance issue, that the library had to discard books after a certain amount of time before getting new ones,” she said in an interview Sunday. “They couldn’t go out into the public. So, they let me have them to use in art.”
Those discarded pages made their way into her portraits. They blend buoyant, often cartoonish fusions of found objects plastered to canvas. Her latest work also uses vape pens; magazine ads; and vintage stamps.
Her work has been displayed at several galleries in Fort Pierce: 2nd Street Art, 131-B, N. 2nd St.; and the Cool Beans Brew II coffee shop, 1115 Delaware Ave. Outside of Florida, Kinnamon has presented at shows in Joplin, Mo.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For Kinnamon, 55, her story in St. Lucie, like many newer moves here, began during the COVID-19 pandemic. She moved in early 2020 to care for an ailing uncle in Okeechobee, where she started endearing herself to local libraries.
Not long after, she moved to St. Lucie with her husband, Gene. An artist himself, he shares spaces with his wife. His work includes portraits of actors Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon as Brad and Janet (no impolite interjections, please) from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”; and “Nuka-Cola” bottle caps from the “Fallout” video games.
The link between Laura and St. Lucie libraries begins near her home, close to the U.S. 1/Prima Vista Boulevard intersection. There, she became “the first volunteer to come on” to the Ravenswood Library, close to Airoso Boulevard, when the pandemic ebbed, she said. “That was the main branch I used to volunteer at.”
That library closed Aug. 30 to make way for a new $7.8 million replacement, due to open late 2027. “I used to make the ‘take-and-go’ crafts” that children and, usually, their “grandmas” made on afternoons and weekends, she added.
In her downtime, she walked around her new neighborhood. Company was scarce as people cooped up indoors while she gathered the odd bit of trash for her work. “It was rough, especially since we had just moved into a house in a new neighborhood; and we couldn’t go out to meet the neighbors, really.”
To this day, she continues fostering an artistic community in Fort Pierce, evoking her childhood in suburban Chicago. “There were so many artists’ groups,” she said. Her mother, trained in watercolor painting, joined her in other media from pottery to textiles.
Laura Kinnamon’s work with found objects accent inside jokes, such as with her cat portraits. One depicts herself, Gene and their cat posing in front of each other ala Gustav Kilmt’s “The Kiss.”
Her found object work, like that presented in Philadelphia, pays “homage to Marcel Duchamp and his Readymade series,” she said. Duchamp’s pieces used unaltered discards from bicycle wheels to a urinal.
She added the one artist she’d like to meet, “alive or not,” would be Spanish surrealist Joan Miró, toward whom she attributes some emotionality. “I just love his playfulness and his color.”
At times, that lightness can betray a more somber history with Kinnamon’s subjects. One portrait is of Fenella Lorch, or the “Isdal Woman.” Inspired by a true crime story, the portrait draws the Englishwoman found dead in Norway with bouffant curls and a face made of watches.
The largest piece at Kilmer is a portrait of her late brother, Eric.
In the Kinnamons’ native Illinois, he had interned at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, and fixed robots on the assembly line at the Toyota plant in Lawrenceville.
Eric died at 32 around 2000 in a crash with a “drunk driver” after a graveyard shift, said Laura. “He would always joke: ‘don’t take those main roads, take the back roads; it’s safer.’ Unfortunately, in his case, it wasn’t.”
A dedicated stamp collector, her work often includes stamps in subtle dedication to him.
Some of the “boxes and boxes” Eric left behind, Laura said, found their way into his portraits. They also adorn “Welcome”: a still life of a pineapple with spines made of golden eagles soaring with envelopes in their beaks.