Creative economy
Long time Second Street Gallery board member Pam Friedman is familiar with the tension between providing art that’s sophisticated and offering exhibitions that please a wide audience, including valuable donors.
“When I was on the board, selling things was always good, but that wasn’t our point. We’ve had a zillion arguments over the years, ‘Shouldn’t we be showing more horses?’” she said.
From the beginning, the nonprofit was intended to be an alternative space for alternative art, a reaction against the inevitable, rampant commoditization of the gallery marketplace.
“These spaces were looking for an alternative to the market, to the art world, to the commercialness of art practices and to the commercialness of our very world,” said Dass. “The founders—and it is important to note that they were both academics and community members—were seeking an alternative vision.”
Alternative visions rely on taking risks. An exhibition of New York artist Geoffrey Chadsey, which debuted in April 2012, employed appropriated photographs to create luminous watercolors confronting topics about the male psyche and ego. Taylor, in his understated British way, called the work “a bit homoerotic.” Chadsey voyeuristically included candid scenes in photographs that probably were never intended for display in the public sphere.
When the grumbling came to Taylor via different channels, he stood his ground.
“I think we should absolutely be showing it,” he recalled saying. “Technically the work was really well done and I think a town like Charlottesville can handle it. And, if it makes them uncomfortable, I’m O.K. with that occasionally.”
In the early years, there was the constant threat of extinction to add spice to the gallery’s creative tension around programming.
“The discussion every other meeting was, ‘Are we going to go out of business?’ because we had no money…It was like bumblebees not being able to fly, but they do,” Friedman said.
The gallery’s mission evolved as it figured out new ways to engage the community, inventing creative fundraising opportunities, pursuing community arts grants, and developing education and outreach programs.
Aaron Eichorst, the gallery’s newest board member and a school teacher, was initially drawn to the organization because of the emphasis it places on art education.
“What attracted me was their programming,” he said. “We’ve had this wonderful partnership where some of their exhibiting artists and other local artists come into our classrooms and work with the students.”
Artists exhibiting at Second Street visit local schools to lead workshops 15 to 20 times per year, and school children are brought to the gallery to experience the exhibitions first hand. Past classes have included mask making, glass blowing, silk screen printing, and letterpress printing.
“Art is something that adds to our cultural reservoir, our understanding of the world,” Eichorst said. “So I think it’s important for people to think about. It is just as literature and music expand our knowledge of what it means to be human.”
As a leader in the nonprofit art world, Slaughter described the pressure everybody has felt in the years since the financial crisis, which has increased the temptation to play it safe and focus on exhibits that will be attractive to the community. It’s a sort of Scylla and Charybdis, because if you develop a reputation for playing it safe, then you endanger your grant funding.
“The economics of maintaining a gallery are very difficult. Sometimes people don’t understand that,” Slaughter said. “It is not like the artist gets all of the money for a piece that’s sold. And the gallery has the overhead, the rent, staff. It’s very difficult to keep a gallery afloat and have quality art.”
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. To survive as an art gallery, you have to show great art. Sarah Sargent, who served as director of Second Street from 1993 to 1999 and reviews fine arts for C-VILLE, remembered the defining moment of her tenure at the gallery: Laurel Quarberg’s massive sculpture installation “Returning the Favor.”
At the time, Second Street didn’t have space for the show, so it was held at McGuffey Art Center. The piece consisted of a metal armature with glass shelves attached to either side containing 52 flutes of champagne on one side and glasses of milk on the other, symbolizing the numerology of the American flag and issues of wealth and poverty in our country.
“There were 52, the artist’s metaphor for the have and the have nots. And, it had sensors so when you approached it, it started vibrating very subtly,” Sargent said. “People were very respectful. They could see it was fragile. They respected its space.” While the exhibition challenged viewers on one level, with its over symbolism, its appeal was universal because of the way it was executed and exhibited.
“One lady told me, ‘I just like the Impressionists, but I have to tell you I love this,’” Sargent said.
Sargent invoked a quote by the late Mark Rothko to hammer home the point. The great abstract expressionist, famous for huge paintings containing only a few horizontal, floating color fields once said, “I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. … I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.”
Sargent said she constantly wrestled with the relevance of contemporary art when she was director of Second Street, but in the moments that everything came together, the experience was unparalleled.
“I have problems with parts of contemporary art, but when it’s really soulful and honest, it can be an amazingly potent expression of humanity or just something that’s really, really beautiful that sort of hits you where you live,” she said.