JJ Grey’s Blackwater Sol Revue

Art, Wild Florida, and finding community in Northeast Florida

May 15 and 16, 2026

I went to JJ Grey’s Blackwater Sol Revue to bring an art gallery to a concert weekend.

I came home thinking about a pair of white cowboy boots.

That probably requires some explanation.

In May, I packed up the Alice Absolutely mobile gallery and headed to Northeast Florida for my first event with Live Wildly. They were the presenting sponsor for JJ Grey’s Blackwater Sol Revue, a two-venue weekend that began with the Top of the World Experience at Ponte Vedra Concert Hall and continued the next day at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre.

Live Wildly wanted me to bring the mobile gallery along as another way to connect people with Wild Florida.

It made sense.

JJ Grey is a native Floridian, and there is something distinctly Floridian about his music, especially that North Florida sound running through it. It belongs to a Florida of blackwater rivers, pine flatwoods, heat, mosquitoes, back roads, and people whose relationship with this place goes back generations.

Still, this was the first time I had exhibited my work as part of a concert weekend, and I wasn't entirely sure how people were going to react to walking into an art gallery between performances. As it turns out, art and music aren't very far apart. Neither are music and Wild Florida. That was probably my biggest takeaway from the entire weekend.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to love Florida, particularly what it means to love Florida now.

People tend to talk about conservation as though it requires a person to remove themselves from modern life. Go deep into the woods. Put the phone away. Become some impossibly pure version of an outdoors person.

But most of us aren't living that way. We drive across the state. We go to concerts. We eat at restaurants. We live in subdivisions and cities and small towns. We have jobs and errands and air conditioning.

But we can still care deeply about what happens to the wild places around us. Those things aren't contradictory. Standing at a JJ Grey show made that particularly obvious to me. Wild Florida isn't separate from Florida culture. It helped create it.

Once people started coming into the gallery, that connection became even clearer.

At first, there was sometimes a little surprise.

Art? Here?

Then people would start looking. And talking.

I'd tell someone that the Green Heron in one of my pieces came from a photograph I took in Fakahatchee, and suddenly we weren't talking about my artwork anymore. We were talking about their trip to the Fakahatchee. Or the Everglades. Or the part of Florida where they grew up.

People told me stories about wildlife they remembered seeing as children. They talked about how Florida had changed.

Some remembered growing up during a time when seeing an alligator wasn't nearly as commonplace as it is today. Alligators were still recovering from the years when they had been pushed toward extinction. Now, for many Floridians, they're simply part of the landscape again.

That kind of story interests me because it is about more than an animal. It is about memory. Home. Change. What we notice. What we almost lose. What becomes ordinary again.

That is one of my favorite things about making the Florida Field Guide. The artwork may start the conversation, but eventually the art fades into the background. A bird becomes someone's childhood. An alligator becomes a story about their grandfather. A landscape becomes the place their family used to fish. People don't just recognize Florida species. They locate pieces of their own lives in them. At Blackwater Sol Revue, I started seeing the same thing happening around the music.

This was a community. Not necessarily my community, at least not when I arrived. I know art people. I know conservation people. I know plenty of Florida people. A dedicated music community was something different for me.

And the people I met were incredibly open about bringing me into it. They wanted to know how long I had listened to JJ Grey. They wanted to know which songs I loved. They told me what brought them there. An exchange was happening.

I had shown them something I cared about.

So they showed me something they cared about.

And then, at the very end of the weekend, in walked the boots.

The last woman to come through my booth worked somewhere in the music industry. I don't remember now whether she was involved in production, events, or another part of the business. I remember absolutely nothing about that detail. I remember her boots.

They were white cowboy boots, nearly knee-high, with a low heel, and she had covered them in patches from bands she loved and shows or tours that meant something to her.

They were spectacular.

Not expensive-looking spectacular. Not designer spectacular. BETTER!

They were completely hers!

You couldn't walk into a store and buy another pair. They were a record of where she'd been and what she'd loved enough to carry with her.

I have not been able to let those boots go.

I've seen the same idea in motorcycle culture, where people collect patches from rallies, rides, and places they've been. But I'd never seen someone turn a pair of cowboy boots into this incredibly personal archive of a life in music. There was also something vulnerable about them. Music can be weirdly tribal. People can get very serious about what you're supposed to listen to and what you're not supposed to like.

She had skipped all of that! Here are the bands I love. I'm literally wearing them.

Looking back, those boots may be the best image I have for what the entire weekend was about. People carry the things they love with them. Sometimes it's sewn onto a pair of boots. Sometimes it's a song. Sometimes it's a photograph of a Green Heron taken in a swamp. And if you want people to care about the things you care about, I think you have to be willing to start there.

That was something I saw Live Wildly doing particularly well during my first event with them. You can't force people into caring about something. You can have an important mission. You can have your heart completely in the right place. You can have all the facts in the world. But if you don't understand how to meet people where they already are, they may never stick around long enough to hear what you have to say.

At Blackwater Sol Revue, nobody had to choose between going to a concert and caring about Florida. The music was Florida. The stories people told me were Florida. The wildlife was part of those stories. The art simply gave us another place to meet.

I went there to bring a little more Wild Florida into a concert weekend.

What I found was that it was already there.