Kafi Benz
Kafi Benz (born 1941) is an American author and artist who began participation in social entrepreneurship through environmental preservation and regional planning in 1959 as a member of the Jersey Jetport Site Association, which opposed plans by the New York Port Authority to found a new airport in the Great Swamp, the central feature of a massive 55-square-mile watershed in New Jersey bounded to the south and east by the Watchung Mountains, 30 miles west of Manhattan.
The Jersey Jetport Site Association was a small, but effective conservation organization, circumventing the efforts of the Port Authority to replace Newark Airport with a much larger complex farther to the west.
After infiltrating meetings of the powerful authority headed by Austin J. Tobin, that were held to marshal support among construction companies and unions, the members of the association distributed opposition literature and drew public attention to its efforts.
In 2023, her home town named a room of a new municipal community center in one of its historic buildings to honor Benz for her role in the effort to protect the Great Swamp.
[16] In August 2011, twenty-one Gary sculptures were packed into vans and moved from Colts Neck, New Jersey for a ten-year display at the Tallahassee Museum in Florida.
She also represented his wife and her longtime friend, pencil medium artist Sue Hughes (née McQuillan), while she was working out of a studio in New Jersey and later, in California.
[25] Soon thereafter, Benz participated in a project with transparent watercolor artist, John Crawford, to publish his research of an early Renoir painting of Marie Le Coeur, that was among his art collection since its acquisition in Chicago during the 1930s.
[26] He is the namesake of the John Crawford Art Education Studio that was created after his death at SouthShore Regional Library of Hillsborough County,[27] which now features many of his own paintings.
During this time she developed a relationship with the French graffiti artist, MTO,[29][30] that eventually, led to Benz being identified by him as the curator for several of the murals he later created independently.
[34] The controversy raged on for months and led to the destruction of the huge mural that provoked it, dubbed Fast Life (although it was intended as Fat Lie).
Benz became the co-translator and narrator of a documentary film MTO created about his perspective of the saga and the murals he painted in response to various stages of it, as they unfolded.
At that time, he executed a mural that is more than two stories tall, Florida, Mon Amour...,[38] on the northern wall of The Players theatre that was located on Tamiami Trail and opposite the Municipal Auditorium in Sarasota.
She was cited as a special contributor to the survey of archaeological, historical, cultural, and natural resources in the coastal areas of Sarasota County that was conducted by the Florida department of environmental regulation, as well as for recommending sites deserving further research.
Unfortunately, the condominium market in Florida had collapsed shortly after Campeau acquired the property and the ambitious plans to use the 1929 home and auxiliary buildings as the clubhouse and headquarters of the development were never realized.
Following the public acquisition of the property, the objectives of Benz's organization were expanded to broader preservation issues involving archaeological, artistic, cultural, environmental, and historical aspects of the region.
The parcel includes more than 11 acres (4.5 ha) and contained a great deal of wooded and undeveloped land, wetlands, a tennis court, and a Sarasota School of Architecture structure that served as a private clubhouse or recreational lounge for a bay front home opposite it on Bay Shore Road that had been sold separately from the house and held for a long time by a developer.
The clubhouse was roofed with glazed blue Japanese ceramic tiles, used pecky cypress timbers for framing, and had expansive glass partitions along the western elevation, facing the tennis courts.
Decades later, the federal highway standards now support the use of true modern roundabouts and some states have begun requiring road planners to defend any proposal lacking this innovative intersection design.
Professional experience for Kafi Benz has included commercial art, graphic design, and illustration; marketing, public relations, and corporate image development;[88] real estate development; medical research publication and editing for a Fortune-100 ethical pharmaceutical corporation, Ciba-Geigy, now Novartis, that ranks highly in the multinational pharmaceutical industry; legal and technical editing and publication of the issuances of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a regulatory agency of the federal government; ghost and speech writing; and electronic engineering product development for the second generation of early personal computers by Litton Industries.
