Dean Quigley is an artist who paints what he knows and loves best; Florida Indians. Having grown up on Florida’s West Coast, his knowledge of the state’s Pre- Columbian history is based on over ten years experience and study in the fields of archaeology and ethnology.
Dean’s art and expertise has been utilized by Pinellas County the cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg, several museums, and private enterprise in the location and filing of information pertaining to archaeological sites throughout the Tampa Bay region. He has participated in several major archaeological including St. Catherine’s Island, Ga., Big Mound Key, Pine Island, and many others through out Florida. Dean is also a frequent lecturer at many schools and institutions as well.
An illustrator by training, he received a BA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 1986. After a short stay at the St. Petersburg Times he worked continuously as a freelance illustrator for various clients and publications including Surfer Magazine and Mother Jones. Since 1992, Dean devotes many hours a day to drawing and painting the "Lost Florida". Dean’s work can be found on the cover of Florida’s First People by Dr. Robin Brown and Indian Mounds You Can Visit by Mack Perry. His work is also featured in many public and private collections including Anheuser Busch-Great Buy Distributors collection, U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, Seminole Indian Nation of Florida, and many others.
Extensive research is required for the development of each of Dean’s paintings. This includes interviews with archaeologists (professional and avocational), paleo-botanists, and talking with many Indian people from throughout the Southeast region. Often he finds himself out in the field searching for clues about Florida’s twelve thousand years of Indian history. "When I was nine years old I found a flint spear point in a creek near my home and since then the interest about these people so long ago has been part of my life. I believe that it is important to learn from the past, Indian people have always been here and still are. Though the tragedy of the past is over, a greater one still looms ahead; in the last five hundred years Florida has suffered irreparable damage, the whole world has, a lot must be learned form all indigenous people if we are to survive."
Upon removing us from our modern and artificial surroundings, Dean’s paintings lead us through the primeval world of the now vanished Calusa, Timucaun, Tequesta, and Tocobaga Indians. It was a time when the bounty of Florida’s ancient environment shaped their lives.