By F. Lennox Campello

When the Fraser Gallery first opened in Georgetown in 1996, it seemed that everyone was full of advice to us on how to succeed; people who otherwise had never ever operated a gallery business were suddenly masters of the business of running a gallery, which after all is a business!

It is also a labor of love, and most fine arts, independently owned commercial art galleries in this great nation of ours (note that I wrote “most” or 98% of them) are labors of love and often run by the skin of the owners’ teeth!

“Who is your backer?”, once asked the then director of the Hirshhorn Museum as I gave her a ride to her home after a rare gallery visit. “Backer?” I said, not understanding her question.

“Who’s financing your gallery?”, she asked in all honesty, as she had been surprised that we were about to enter the art fair scene in New York.

“Ah!”, I responded after I finally understood her question; “Mr. Visa and Mr. MasterCard.”

There are a lot of hardworking galleries in our area; some, like Judy Heartsong’s Artists & Makers Studios in Rockville and the Art League in the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, are surrounded by dozens of hardworking artists’ studios and thus a visit is a huge super bang for the buck.

In Bethesda there’s Waverly Street Gallery, a really good cooperative gallery where they just had their INVITATIONAL 2024 exhibition which featured gallery artists and guest artists. In this gallery I really like Dennis Crayon’s “wet” paintings, which showcase Crayon’s terrific skills in using the visual power of water to cleverly abstractify (I just invented that word) otherwise ordinary subjects. Next at the gallery is a show titled CIRCLES by Geoff Desobry.

Picture of Street – “Old Neighborhood” by Dennis Crayon

In Kensington, the great Adah Rose Gallery hosts regular vernissages nearly every month! From her represented artists, for years I’ve admired the work of Gregory Ferrand, who is not only a brilliant and skilled painter, but also an intelligent story maker via his super interesting works. Next at Adah Rose is “May You Live In Interesting Times” a two-person shows with two very talented and hard-working artists with a formidable artistic footprint in our area: Maremi Andreozzi and Wayson Jones

Washington’s Foundry Gallery is a powerful DMV cooperative, full of talented artists in all media, many of whom are “new” to me, such as Mrinal Joshi, a Nepal-born artist whose artwork is concurrently attractive, terse, and immensely intelligent. The artist states that instilled in her work “a sense of longing for the past and a desire to preserve the present while understanding that nothing lasts forever. The glaring appropriation creates a sense of familiarity and invokes times gone by while being veiled with lightheartedness. Underneath, however, is a ground to ponder the ephemerality of beauty, power, fame, glamour, and youth, and a sense of isolation and alienation.”

Boy in batman costume – “This is the Life!” by Gregory Ferrand

Next on their exhibition schedule is Tamsin Avra with an exhibition titled “…So That This May Become False.”

Both Foundry and Waverly Street are cooperatives — I am a big fan and supporter of cooperative galleries. Together with independently owned commercial fine arts galleries (such as Adah Rose), non-profit galleries, university galleries, museum galleries, and alternative art spaces, they make up the visual arts tapestry of a city or region.

All galleries everywhere, including fabled places like New York and LA, struggle to survive and sell work in order to pay the artists, pay rent, pay for publicity, pay for openings, pay for electricity, pay for the plumber the 2-3 times a year that somebody flushes a sanitary napkin (or one of those indestructible hand towels) down the toilet at an opening and clogs the pipes, pay for websites, etc.

We are lucky to have them.

About the Author: F. Lennox Campello’s art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area has been a premier source for the art community for over 20 years. Since 2003, his blog has been the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet with over SIX million visitors.