Derek Gores Gallery

Derek Gores Gallery occupies a storefront on Highland Avenue in the heart of the Eau Gallie Arts District, showcasing the work of one of Brevard County’s best-known contemporary artists in the space where much of it is made. Derek Gores built a national reputation for his collage work, assembling figurative pieces from cut fragments of recycled magazines, maps, and found paper that he layers into detailed portraits and figures, and the gallery displays both large-scale collage originals and a parallel body of work in his “wet drawing” series, done in charcoal, chalk, and water on paper and panel. A related body of work, the gallery’s Unmentionables Series, applies the same wet-charcoal technique to lingerie studies rendered on gold panels, giving the space a mix of accessible figurative collage and more intimate, painterly pieces.

Because the gallery functions as both a retail space and an active studio, visitors sometimes catch the artist at work or see pieces in progress alongside finished, framed originals. Beyond one-of-a-kind originals, the gallery sells signed limited-edition prints and smaller merchandise, giving visitors at different budget levels a way to take home a piece connected to Gores’s work. The gallery also takes on commission projects for private collectors, brands, and events, and periodically runs classes and workshops for visitors interested in learning collage or drawing techniques directly from the artist’s own practice.

Hours run later than a typical downtown gallery, which suits its role as an evening destination during the Eau Gallie Arts District’s monthly First Friday gallery walk. The gallery is open for private showings on Mondays, keeps standard hours from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, extends into the evening from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and keeps shorter Sunday hours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. That later weekend schedule makes it an easy stop for visitors doing an evening walk through EGAD’s gallery row along Highland Avenue, where Derek Gores Gallery sits within easy walking distance of the Foosaner Art Museum, Fifth Avenue Art Gallery, and the district’s other studios and shops.

For collectors and casual visitors alike, the appeal of Derek Gores Gallery is seeing a nationally exhibited artist’s process and output in one place, in the same neighborhood where he works, rather than only through prints or secondary markets elsewhere. It gives Eau Gallie’s arts district a genuine anchor artist-run gallery to go along with its cooperative galleries and museum, and it has become one of the reasons visitors specifically seek out Highland Avenue rather than treating it as just another stop on a broader Melbourne itinerary.