Keith Crowley was born in an unremarkable suburban borough located a short distance from Philadelphia. He completed most of his education at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and after graduating spent the next 14 years living and maintaining a studio in Philadelphia. While living in Philadelphia, Keith worked as a Preparator in many capacities, but spent 10 years working at the Princeton University Art Museum. Since 2015, he has maintained a painting practice in Sarasota and is the Senior Preparator at the Ringling Museum of Art.

“While spending time with the paintings, my sincere hope is that the paintings stir memories that might be long forgotten. Interstitial spaces between where we intend to go, or that we may have only glanced at while stopped at a traffic light often yield the greatest value. Color layering is the primary means to achieve this sense of place. The most compelling imagery often arrives during encounters with the familiar.”

Keith Crowley

INTERLOPER
Keith Crowley

ON VIEW Jan 3rd - Jan 24th, 2026

public opening reception
JANUARY 3rd, 5PM - 8PM

A man in a green shirt and tan pants looking at a large vertical painting of a tall tree with green leaves against a blue sky, displayed outdoors on a cobblestone street near a stone wall.

In late February 2025, I traveled to a small city in Lacoste, France, situated in a valley adjacent to the Luberon mountain range in Provence (about a 90 minute drive west from Marseille). This was a two-month artist residency, provided by the Savannah College of Art and Design for its alumni. The studios are medieval caves (the one I worked in was originally the village’s cistern). My proposal was to work exclusively in watercolor, pushing the scale of the work as large as my space would allow, while also producing many large to modest scale works.

Having never visited France prior to this residency, I hoped to divest any notion of exotic subject matter or superficial tropes and instead, cultivate a feeling of familiarity. The only way to achieve this was spending as much time as I could simply being out on morning and evening runs into the valley and through the villages and cities, as well as nocturnal walks absorbing the nuances specific to this place. All of this is occurring while being very much an outsider - which, if I’m honest - has been the way I’ve identified myself throughout my life. Being removed from one’s subject often provides a vantage that those on the inside cannot entirely have.

My work has always sought to find peculiar moments that perpetually surround us, specifically when the light shifts in a way that transforms what we think we know about a place or thing. I consciously avoid having preconceived ideas about the beginning of an image as much as I possibly can.

Some of this work remains at the Savannah College of Art and Design Lacoste campus, and some of the work is being shown at Couthure Arles; however, I am deeply grateful that the majority of the work made it through the Customs process and was able to be exhibited here at 502 Gallery.

- Keith Crowley