Shoosty®

Shoosty (Stephen Shooster, BFA, University of Florida, 1989) luxury designer, fine artist, and author, retired from a family-owned mid-cap call center headquartered in South Florida where he was Co-CEO. In charge of technology for 43 years, he enabled his company to scale and serve many of the finest brands: Toyota; Lane Bryant; Zara; Hermes; Wolford; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA; and The Chicago Art Institute. The family company grew from 10 employees to 3,000 before his exit in 2019 before the pandemic. Nominated for the Florida Culture Artists Alliance, Shoosty brings a unique perspective that embraces technology and the arts. To balance his intense focus on technology, Shoosty is a prolific artist. Part scientist, part artist, he identified early on a desire to shepherd his collection with documentation. In time, this became a remarkable catalogue raisonné comprising 17 volumes featuring over 2,000 original pieces in various media. Shoosty has recently completed a multi-city tour displaying his scope of scale and themes taking over the entire Mills gallery in Orlando for his whimsical collection of Shoosty® Bugs, the entire building of the Hillsboro Historical Society for his Shoosty® Landscapes, and he joined the Orlando City Center group show for The Art of Music. These shows all ran concurrently. Stephen Shooster is also a writer. His work as an author includes The Horse Adjutant a book about the survival of Leon Schagrin, a victim of the Nazi Holocaust. Shoosty and Shagrin speak on the subject of bullying, hate, and antisemitism. He also wrote The Biography of Herman Shooster, his father. Shooster intends to use these materials as sources using artificial intelligence. He wants to talk with his sources in their voices. His technical skills are still sharply intact. He studies as he paints while listening to audiobooks and podcasts.