Artist co-op Sebastopol Gallery finds an even better home for local art
It’s bigger and brighter and only steps away from the old location on Main Street
It’s been a long year for the crew at Sebastopol Gallery, but what began as a disruption turned into their good fortune. Last October the arts collective received notice from their landlord of 20 years that the lease on their location at 150 N. Main St. would expire in seven months. Panic followed. In time, new opportunities emerged and as of Saturday, July 11, the gallery is officially ensconced—and open—at its new location in the Basso Building at 186 N. Main St., Suite 11.
At 2,695 square feet, the new space is double the floor space of the old location. Prior to move-in, it was filled with work cubicles and coaxial wiring, a podcast room and a tea room left over from several different former occupants. But with the help of the landlord and gallery members, the clutter was removed, the interior remodeled and opened up, and new track lighting and display cases installed. Notably, a significant portion of the wall space is composed of floor-to-ceiling windows. These windows, combined with the new lighting system, add an enormous amount of light to the gallery. The result? The new space is visually dazzling, and the art is literally eye-catching.
“This, I feel like, is where we’re blooming,” said gallery member and magical realist painter Sharon Eisley, after a recent all-hands meeting at the new location. “This is beautiful; it’s a super upgrade. It’s taller, it’s brighter—it just feels professional. It looks like and is a professional gallery. The other one was more like a hometown co-op. Even though everybody has professional grade art, the art matches [this] space.”
Gallery member and woodturner Kalia Kliban described the move to the new location as speedy, chaotic and surprisingly efficient. “It was like a trail of ants. We hired movers for the really, really heavy, inconvenient things. But mostly, we walked down the street with boxes in our arms,” she said.
“The community was very, very supportive,” said the gallery publicity director, Teri Sloat. “People stopping in, offering to help. They offered to help us move. They offered to carry things.”
In fact, the lease on the new space was secured only three weeks before the move, and the entire transfer and remodel took place over that brief period of time. The months leading up to that proved difficult.
“The whole process has been very trying, very difficult. Lots of challenges,” said Gallery Director Katy Boggs.
“We wanted to stay on Main Street somewhere,” said Sloat. But an initial search for appropriate spaces for rent downtown proved fruitless. Eventually, after considering other locations including Petaluma and even contemplating a revamp of their collective business model, they were able to locate the property where the gallery now resides. Timing played a crucial part, as did networking. But so did their collective vision.
“I’m a firm believer in visualizing,” Sloat said, “and I think the fact that together we sort of kept our eyes on the idea that we’d be carrying our art down the street, to the end of the block, even though that building wasn’t [yet] open.”
In addition to offering considerably more display space and significantly better lighting than the old location, the new gallery has an additional, separate room big enough to hold small classes in. Thus the gallery is rolling out a new offering to the community: classes, to be taught by the resident artists. They will be small, probably 6-9 people in size, and the schedule is already up.
Aug. 8 — 2-Day Mixed Media, Collage, Encaustic taught by Diana Majumdar.
Aug. 15 — Watercolor Basics Salon with Lynn Zachreson.
Aug. 29 — Monoprinting on the Gelli Plate with Susan St. Thomas.
Sept. 5 — Visual Storytelling with Teri Sloat, on Sept. 5.
Stay tuned for more classes in the near future.
Yet in spite of the upheaval, the changes and the new opportunities, business in the new space will remain much the same as it always has at Sebastopol Gallery.
“It will remain a collective of Sonoma County artists,” Sloat said. “We’ve been pretty careful to stick to that as our identity. Because we have such local talent, and we’ve been careful to choose our artists so that we represent a wide variety of arts within the gallery. We don’t have two very similar landscape painters, or two very similar still life painters — we offer a special niche for each artist.”
Boggs agreed. “It’s definitely the same business plan. It’s a co-op. So we all work at the gallery. We do the jobs of treasury, publicity, all the little jobs that would run any business. We have no employees—we are the employees. The miracle is that 14 of us meet every month and make collective decisions. We’re still together. It’s been many years, right? This is our 20th.”
The feeling is that the gallery is poised, now more than ever, to cater to the local community and beyond.
“You know, you could get a print [here], or you can buy a big, original piece if you want. You can get a $5,000 diamond ring, or you can get a $40 pair of earrings. So I think the goal is to hit all the levels of income,” Sloat said.
“We have a diversity of art,” Boggs said. “We have oil painters, we have watercolor painters, we have pastel painters, we have someone who breaks outside the frames and tells a story with every single solitary painting she does. We have someone who does monochromatic, absolutely beautiful birds and maps of the area, multimedia type of things.
“Many of the scenes are from Sonoma,” she added. “Our artists are from Sonoma. They love where they work. We love where we live.”
Now open, the new Sebastopol Gallery features Sharon Eisley’s exhibit, ‘Take Your Time,’ through July 31. A time and date for Sebastopol Gallery’s Grand Opening will be announced shortly.
For more information, visit Sebastopol Gallery, 186 N. Main St., Sebastopol. 707.829.7200. www.sebastopolgallery.com
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