a drawing by Lester Leroy Amen at CityArts, made with coffee and ink on brown paper bag
Work by Lester Leroy Amen at CityArts Credit: installation view, CityArts

During a month where downtown arts hub CityArts is firing on all cylinders with Hannah Howell’s kinetic Silence Is a Symphony exhibition of live music photography, you would be forgiven for missing a perhaps equally eye-opening exhibition, tucked away in a small gallery on the second floor. 

The intimate Side Gallery, for another week or so, houses the exhibition Work by Lester Leroy Amen, an evocative and oft-harrowing retrospective of work by an overlooked artist getting his posthumous due. 

The door to the intimate Side Gallery is ajar in a manner that reminds OW of the beginning of the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” music video, seemingly having just swung open to reveal a room where paintings, illustrations, watercolors and collages crowd most of the available wall space in a riot of color and line and form. The works featured are but a small sampling of the lifelong output of a man driven to create, no matter the obstacles thrown in his way. And there were indeed many.

Amen was born in Omaha in 1954 and began drawing as a child. As a young man, he enlisted in the Marines and began practicing his art in earnest, with several of his pieces selected for inclusion in the U.S. Marine Corps Museum Art Collection. Following an honorable discharge in 1981, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington in 1988. 

Amen would struggle with addiction and personal problems for years — and his work would become more abstract and confessional — culminating in nearly a year spent in prison in Fairfax County, Virginia, where he produced some of his most primal work. 

Amen spent his final years in Orlando, living in the care of his brothers, but still working on art and even, rarely, exhibiting work in the late 2000s. He passed away from pancreatic cancer in Orlando in 2014. But his family, especially sibling Martin, faithfully held on to his art for years, awaiting the chance to share it with the public.

Jump to 2025, and it all started with a phone call over the holidays to Jason Fronczek — curator, educator and arts advocate with the Florida Prison Education Project. CityArts’ Barbara Hartley connected him with Amen’s family, and he visited the Winter Park garage where Amen’s brother kept the artwork. Fronczek was “blown away” by the skill and emotion (not to mention amount) of work he came face to face with. With an eye toward a small exhibition in January, Fronczek threw himself into sorting through these singular works.

“I started to see the story emerge, not of just this guy who did random paintings or drawings, but the story of his different institutionalizations came to life. Institutionalization one was his Marine service. Institutionalization two was his education, and the third was his jail time,” explains Fronczek. “I got to see the effects of each of those within his work, expanding as they happen. And I was really interested in sharing his story.”

Fronczek remembers when photographing the works and walking back and forth between the paintings, mapping out connections, he felt a connection with Amen.

“All of them, in essence, are self-portraits about his experiences, but seeing them collectively, whether it be the fine art drawings from the Corcoran School, whether it be his military drawings, pencil work or pastels, or if it was the junior-high stuff, or even later career, where he was going through addiction, and later in life his cancer, they all felt equally weighted as far as his visual storytelling. His lines, color choices, everything jumped out of the page at me, and I felt this commonality of life experiences,” says Fronczek. 

In his curation of Amen’s work, Fronczek selected and presented it in an almost linear fashion, breaking it up into distinct chapters and visual clusters. You enter the gallery and follow the progression of Amen’s art from right to left, all experienced at close quarters, seemingly wrapping around you. The exhibition begins at the beginning, starting with pieces from his youth, to more formalistic works done during his time in the Marines, through a casual collaboration with his then-young daughter and an eerie sketch of a headless body, which soon segue into the prison works that take up the main wall. As you move toward the end of the left wall there are several abstract and colorful “visceral body shapes” from the later years of his life. It’s an intense journey.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a series of dense pen-and-pencil illustrations on brown paper bags taped together, drawn by Amen when he was in prison. Despite the everyday nature of the “canvas,” these are majestic and fraught works that unspool like scrolls reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch and Gary Panter. Move closer to these and you’ll see layers of text written in around and over the art, some faint to the point of unreadable, adding more layers of meaning and confession. Fronczek posits that many of these are self-portraits, with Amen coming to terms with his life and failings (real and imagined) up to that point. These are the ones that resonate with gallery visitors the most.

“They’re a combination of pencil, pen and some washes on paper bags,” explains Fronczek. “That he was taping these paper bags together to create these larger canvases, rather than the standard paper that was available in jail, showed he had a great drive to continue to create. It shows also that he had a great story to tell.”

And despite the terrifying imagery, Fronczek points out that these prison illustrations have an underlying redemption arc to them, laying graphically bare how Amen was confronting his addictions and flaws, and finding some measure of solace in his art. “The mentality that I saw in the work from there on out was … ‘Life is going to happen. I made the choices I made. The consequences are there. I’m OK with it. Let’s keep going,’” says Fronczek. And he did.

This exhibition — appropriately,  given the emotional intensity of the works — will be up through Valentine’s Day. There will be a small gathering at the Side Gallery from 6-9 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 7, and some of Amen’s family and friends will be there to take it all in. You’re invited to join them. Can we get an Amen?

Work by Lester Leroy Amen: through Saturday, Feb. 14; Side Gallery, CityArts, 39 S. Magnolia Ave.; downtownartsdistrict.com; free.

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This article appears in Feb. 4-10, 2026.