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By Cynthia Ross
The Front, an artist-run co-operative gallery at the corner of Main and Barre streets invites passersby to enter and contemplate creative worlds.
How did such an art space come into being? How does it work? And what role does a small independent gallery like The Front play in our capital city, our rural state? Curiosity led to a conversation with founding member Glen Coburn Hutcheson.
Hutcheson grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, attended Haverford College, and later the New York Studio School, where he earned a degree in sculpture. In 2009, at age 29, he moved to Vermont to join a friend and find his way as an artist.
Hutcheson had been working at the Drawing Board in Montpelier and had a small studio space in the Center for Arts and Learning (CAL) on Barre Street. Then in 2013, with the idea of creating his own artist residency — a place and time to focus completely on making art — he took out a 6-month lease on a vacant space at the corner of Main and Barre streets to serve as a pop-up studio gallery.
When the lease ended, his landlord, Jesse Jacobs, liking the idea of an art space there, encouraged him to get studio mates. That’s when James Secor came on the scene, along with a couple other artists. For a year or so Shamus Langlois and Abigail Feldman ran a little gallery at the front of the space and called it Gallery 6, while Hutcheson, Secor, and a few others worked in the back.
After about a year, when Gallery 6 disbanded, the group that became The Front came together. They subleted the front gallery area, while Hutcheson maintained his studio in the back.
The Front has a 23-artist membership and an equal-ownership business model, cooperatively managed. Each member contributes to the rent and shares responsibilities for maintaining the gallery. Members tend the gallery on the weekends when it is open, attend bi-monthly meetings, and instigate and participate in events such as movie nights, critiques, pop-up events, poetry readings, or crankies (paper movies).
“Part of the reason we succeeded at this collaboration,” Hutcheson said, “is that there is a deliberate effort on everyone’s part to keep things moving smoothly.” Along with solo shows, the gallery features a bi-monthly group show. This has an enlivening effect on the artists; showing and sharing work on a regular basis encourages creativity.
From the artists’ perspective, Hutcheson said, this co-operative venture provides space for learning and experimentation rather than focusing on sales and branding, as commercial galleries typically do. He pointed to some collaborations in the group, including one in which he worked with 12 different artists making a pair of panels with each one. One artist would start the picture, then hand it over to the other to develop it further, back and forth, until they deemed it finished. This experiment, Hutcheson said, “opened up the field of possibility of what I could do.”
By dealing so directly with another person’s vision and way of working, that is, having to bring his own approach to meet what the other artist put on canvas, he learned about his own color palette and his own way of seeing. It was a non-verbal conversation that probed deeply into worldviews.
For the larger community, he said, one can see the gallery as a “focal point for the gigantic creative energy and output of Montpelier and central Vermont. … Seeing art provides aesthetic pleasure, joy, spark, a sense of freedom, openness, and possibility that has visible paths in it that look passable and fun. The Front should be an example, one among many, of what people can do.”
The Front, at 6 Barre Street, Montpelier, is open Fridays from 4 to 7 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The current exhibit at The Front is “Meanwhile,” Elizabeth Nelson’s paintings, up through Feb. 1, with an artist’s talk on Sunday, Jan. 25. For more information go to thefrontvt.com.
