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FACE PAINTING
Hanowitz encourages portrait commissions, too, and he charges an unorthodox fee: He accepts per hour whatever his clients earn per hour at their job. Most portraits take two to three hours for him to complete. “I find that this will average out to a fair wage for me and an affordable one for low-wage workers,” he says. “Obviously, Jeff Bezos won’t be calling soon.”
Neal Hanowitz
A retired teacher finds a second calling as a portrait artist
For portraitist Neal Hanowitz, it all started with Marie and Bernadette. The pandemic was in its frightening infancy, and the two women—“elderly, with very interesting faces,” Hanowitz recalls—drove by his house in Osceola Park and commented on his starfruit tree. Hanowitz gave them some starfruit and snapped their photographs.
Soon afterward, Hanowitz, a retired art teacher, painted their faces on some leftover scraps of canvas, kick-starting a quarantine project that has extended for more than two years. “I painted my daughter, family members, then delivery people,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. I had no intention of showing anything. They were just piling up; I was just having a good time.
“I had plans to do 100. People said, ‘why 100? Why don’t you just do 50?’ I said, it’s a round number, it’s an arbitrary number, and then I’ll stop. I’m up to about 65 [as of February 2022], and I’m going to keep going.”
It took the urging and assistance of Hanowitz’s youngest daughter, Maya, who works in public relations, to pitch his work to local arts venues. He received a call back from Grace Gdaniec, manager of Arts Warehouse, who agreed to offer him essentially limitless exhibition space in the arts center’s vast back gallery during the entire month of February. “I said [to Maya], ‘did that really happen? Pinch me,’” Hanowitz recalls, of receiving the call from Gdaniec. “Getting a show here was pure luck, absolute happenstance. I would’ve been happy to have one piece in the bagel place.”
When displayed at Arts Warehouse, the faces captured a broad crosssection of contemporary suburban life: old and young, white and Black and brown, hatted and bespectacled, face-masked and ear-budded. Yet under Hanowitz’s distinctive and revealing brush, they seemed to share the traits that are most fundamentally important.
We don’t see politics or tribes or ideologies in these portraits. Instead, a
sense of community radiates off the canvases. The works are neither flattering nor tactless, and yet everybody comes across as personable and engaging— not a rogue’s gallery but an everyperson’s gallery: Osceola Park as a microcosm for America. “I saw it as an opportunity to give the people he had painted a space to exist and represent the community that we have here in Delray Beach,” Gdaniec says. “It’s a snapshot of a growing neighborhood that I think is reflective of a larger conversation about the diversity of our area, from Osceola Park and beyond.” Through this ongoing project, strangers have become friends. “All these people, I know their names. Some of them follow me on Instagram,” Hanowitz says. “The art and social aspect of it are intertwined.” The 71-year-old artist may be fresh off his first solo exhibition, but he’s anything but a late bloomer. He grew up in an art-loving “I haven’t seen a face yet that doesn’t fascinate me. family in Manhattan and then Queens, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1968 to 1972. His first What does matter is the job after graduation was as a “studio grunt” for minimalist legend Frank Stella. “I was lighting, and the shadows a 22-year-old, some punk kid interested in … and if I don’t get it, then art, trying to make a living as an artist in New York, which proved to be too over-
I’ll start over again.” whelming for me,” he recalls. Hanowitz drifted away from the art world and into construction, house painting and restoration. He was 40 when he discovered teaching, what he still calls his “first love;” he taught art for 28 years, from New Hampshire to Switzerland to Myanmar, before retiring in Delray Beach at 68. (His wife, Audrey, works at Saint Andrew’s School in Boca as a college counselor.) Listening to Hanowitz’s passion for portraiture, it’s easy to believe he’ll extend the series past 100. “The message here is that we’re all the same,” he says. “I’m democratizing the act of having a portrait done. It’s generally reserved for people who have a lot of money. I feel like everybody deserves one. Every single person in this world is important, equally.”
Ginger FlesherSonnier
A math teacher turned entrepreneur has struck the right entertainment equation
How does a high school math teacher become the CEO of a multimillion-dollar dining and entertainment empire? Ginger Flesher-Sonnier will be the first to tell you that this transformation wasn’t in the cards. When, in 2012, she took an early retirement from teaching, “never in a million years—not in any dream” did she see herself running an elevated hospitality company.
By 2022, she had already designed, operated and sold an escape room business, built up a successful axe-throwing chain, and opened Florida’s first THRōW Social in downtown Delray Beach. The indoor-outdoor restaurant-lounge is dotted with diversions, from axe throwing to state-of-the-art dartboards to board games, glow-in-the-dark table tennis and cornhole ramps that went to college.
This past January she cut the ribbon on THRōW’s grand opening with a hatchet while flanked by ballerinas in light-up flamingo costumes. It was whimsy with an edge—a defining paradox of Flesher-Sonnier’s branding and, thus far, the zenith of her eight-year focus on “experiential entertainment.”
While she has always harbored an entrepreneurial spirit— “As a kid I would rake paths through leaves in the yard and then charge kids a nickel to drive through it on a bike”—it was a visit to an escape room in the Czech Republic in 2014 that sparked her interest. The escape-room wave hadn’t yet crested in major U.S. cities, but rooms like the one she played in Prague were turning up as No. 1 attractions on TripAdvisor all throughout Europe.
“I thought, this is the culmination of all my decorating skills, all my puzzle skills,” Flesher-Sonnier says. “I had been a math teacher for years and a Math League coach for the schools I had been at. It was part of my nature to incorporate puzzles while trying to create an experience.”
So she set out to open her own room in Washington, D.C. “What I noticed was that the lobbies [in typical escape rooms] were bare and sparse, and the rooms were shabby, with used furniture or IKEA furniture. I thought, if I had a real design that fit the theme, it would be so much nicer. … Almost immediately, I had one room open, and there were so many people contacting us to book parties and events, we were sending them to the Starbucks on the corner because we didn’t have a [waiting] room.”
Fleshier-Sonnier would go on to design 18 escape rooms in three locations in the D.C. metro area, with elaborate, carefully detailed themes like a haunted house, “Back to the ‘80s” and “Titanic,” which required players to, among other challenges, learn Morse code on an antique radio and escape the vessel before it sinks. She sold the venture to an escape-room conglomerate in 2021, having shifted her focus to Kick Axe Throwing; once again forecasting a trend, she had launched three axe-throwing venues, including the first in New York City. She opened the first THRōW Social in February 2020 in Washington, D.C., in the upstairs loft of a Kick Axe.
Fleshier-Sonnier moved to South Florida in spring 2020 and soon found the business conditions more suitable than the restrictions of her familiar New York-Pennsylvania-D.C. sphere. “It was so much easier to get going again,” she says. “[Up there], it felt like at any moment, they could decide on something new to impose on you. It went from masks to no masks to masks to vaccines, in every city, back and forth, and having to fire people if they didn’t get the vaccine. … We hadn’t thought about opening down here; we were like, why not?”
The math teacher in Flesher-Sonnier ran the numbers and made it work. Because of its lucrative gaming aspect—and other innovations, like its covered outdoor VIP cabanas and live music seven days a week—THRōW, she says, operates at a 30 to 35 percent profit margin compared to 10 percent for most restaurants.
She appears to enjoy a charmed life with her husband Darren, a retired Green Beret, in a waterfront property in Lighthouse Point that was a former Designer Showcase for Ronald McDonald House. (Her one daughter Allison, 31, lives in Brooklyn.)
But her ease of living is the result of her ongoing innovation, of scouting Canada and Europe for the next big thing in “eatertainment,” of building out the sort of places she would like to frequent. She’s eying locations for future THRōW Socials in Fort Lauderdale and Miami. She is also considering an indoor adult mini-golf concept snaking through a bar and lounge. If her previous track record is any indication, it’ll be another hospitality hole-in-one.
AARON BRISTOL
Ginger Flesher-Sonnier
