People We Love: Justin Luper
If beloved sitcom Parks and Recreation had been set in Casselberry, Florida, rather than Pawnee, Indiana, parks department director Leslie Knope would have been spending her time on the arts, instead of catching possums and filling hummingbird feeders. To draw that dream out further, Knope's subordinate Tom Haverford, instead of being a swag-addled goldbricker, might be a little like Justin Luper, Casselberry's hard-working arts and marketing supervisor.
Pawnee and Haverford are fictional, but Casselberry and Luper are not — luckily for Orlando. (Although we'd watch that show.) Before overseeing the surprising awakening of the arts in that small Orlando-adjacent city, Justin Luper wasn't sure what he wanted to do — draw, write, design skateboard graphics — and like a lot of people, cycled through several different college majors, ranging from business to creative writing. After graduating from the University of Central Florida in 2008, Luper spent time playing in local bands, creating visual art, and working as an art installer at the Orlando Museum of Art, the Mennello Museum of American Art, and Rollins College's Cornell Fine Arts Museum. He created a downtown mural with fellow artist Adam Lavigne for 2017's Art in Odd Places, wrote and illustrated zines, started a vintage clothing company with his fiancée, worked with her on producing pop-up markets.
In 2020, he recommitted to his visual practice. "I was going full force 'I'm gonna be an artist.' I got my website up and running, I booked my biggest show so far, a solo exhibition at Mills Gallery, I got to a stopping point with the body of work, the paintings that I was doing for the solo exhibition and yeah, so ... COVID happened," Luper recalls. "COVID hit, everything shut down, and I was kind of just like, 'Well, what do I do now?'"
The loss of that solo show, and the sense of "what now, and why not something new?" that infected most of us in the pandemic, eventually led Luper to apply for a job with the City of Casselberry. The position, in, yes, the Parks Department, would oversee Casselberry's existing Arts House programming, reconceptualize its then-new Sculpture House, and be the guiding light leading the Arts Center when construction was finally finished.
Unlike the average curator's job, however (if there is such a thing), this role in a lean and mean city government required someone willing to wear many hats — not simply booking art shows but maintaining existing relationships with local arts groups, doing community outreach, writing and designing marketing collateral, working with budgets and more. In other words, a job that required a lot of disparate skills — a perfect fit for someone with experience in a lot of disparate fields.
Almost three years after Luper took on the arts position in Casselberry, it's clear that this was an auspicious hire. Casselberry's profile in the visual arts punches way above its weight as a bedroom community of 30,000, with a multi-facility arts complex to rival any in Central Florida. Luper has maintained the charming Arts House, which traditionally hosts shows from various local artists groups; implemented an updated vision at the Sculpture House, modernizing the mission by enlarging "sculpture" to include any three-dimensional art, including installation, audiovisual and temporal works; and inaugurated the shiny new Arts Center with an exhibition of national artists more rigorous than anyone would have expected. His hands-on knowledge of installing and displaying art has proven a boon for both the city and the artists trusting their work to the facilities; and his experience "on the other side," so to speak, has proven beneficial to communicating with those artists. Not to mention, his own artistic practice and the varied acquaintances he's made spending 17 years in the different pockets of Orlando's art scene(s) are catnip to younger, edgier artists who might not be drawn to exhibit in a small city gallery.
Luper fits all the pieces together gracefully, and we look forward to seeing his local career grow. We can think of at least one museum in this town that could take lessons on how to make a splash without sinking the boat.