This time of the year I often find myself pausing to look backwards: It was on October 19th in 1985 that we opened our first art gallery in Austin, Texas.
In some ways, we were well ahead of our time!
I say this, because one of the first people to walk through the door after we first opened looked around for a bit, then looked at me and my business partner and said "I don't think Austin is ready for something like this" and then turned and left.
Hardly the sort of response you would be hoping for, having just spent many months and a small fortune building what seemed to be a perfect vanue.
Sadly, those words turned out to be more prophetic than we feared. We had to face — after a while — that we were basically trying to present Modern Art to a marketplace that essentially was more oriented towards "country decorating with Grandma" than hip city style.
And so, we ended up modifying and pivoting and changing and doing our best to still maintain the original spirit of the project we were trying to do, while adapting more and more to "local tastes."
The interesting — and slightly sad — thing about it all was that the gallery actually won a number of awards for innovative style; awards as a "top 50 small art retailer" nationwide and we won a couple of architectural awards for the way the gallery was laid out and presented but it never translated into actual revenues that we could pay the rent with. Sometimes we would look at each other and laugh uncomfortably and say "it's the same way that art films might win many Academy Awards but flop still at the box office!"
Even so, the gallery stayed open for 13 years although most of those years were a considerable struggle. When we finally closed our doors, I had kind of soured on the whole retail idea, and I had soured on the whole art business. However with the benefit of many years of hindsight, I can today say that I don't really regret anything we did; the choices we made. It was a worthy project and we really did enjoy ourselves even if we never made money at it.
I suppose it was also an object lesson in the old truism that if you're looking to make a living at something art is not a good choice!
So, the Red Dragonfly Gallery — after which this blog is named — was actually our second Gallery, opened here in our local town many years later, in 2016.
This time around, we definitely got the type of style we were offering and the market in much better balance in terms of being a match, but our timing was unfortunate. First we experienced a devastating loss as a result of a freak flood event that forced us to close down for an extended period of time, and the damage was not covered by insurance; the insurance company crapping out on a clause that a "300-year rain event" constituted "an Act of God" and thus was exempt.
No sooner than we had somewhat recovered from that calamity, the city undertook a major 9-month renovation project on the street and utilities in front of the gallery all but cutting off access to our front door. Meanwhile — on a broader level — we were slowly getting into the era where digital art was increasingly starting to replace physical art.
Whereas we were sad to have to close down the Red Dragonfly gallery, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because not long after we closed our doors (with a lot less money in our pockets, mind you!) this thing called Covid came along and we would have been forced to have closed anyway.
Undoubtedly, we have loved both our two galleries; they are both now firmly closed books in our world, and we are not going to get into that business again!
That said, both my wife and myself are artists in our own right and we continue to work with things creative but any sales we engage in are purely for our own account, nowadays. And that is precisely as it should be!
Thanks for stopping by our little blog and taking this little walk down memory lane with us! Do feel free to leave a comment if you feel so inspired.
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All images are our own, unless otherwise attributed.
