Kirk Palmer rubbed elbows with jungle tribesmen and their families as a child growing up in Bolivia. He traveled to the Middle East as a foreign area officer in the Marines and witnessed some of the most abject poverty that exists on this planet. He once walked through the streets of the City of the Dead in Cairo, where families subsist on less than a dollar a day and sleep in ancient catacombs. But nowhere has he seen poverty like he sees in the States.
“I’ve lived in so many other places in the third world,” Palmer says, standing in his home studio amidst several works-in-progress, “and I’ve never quite encountered these problems the way I have here, locally, in my own community.”
Palmer is finishing his BFA in painting at Eckerd College and is preparing for his senior show, scheduled to hang in the Morean Art Center’s Progress Energy Gallery from May 1st to May 15th.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2010.