SNOHOMISH — Arts of Snohomish has left its Carnegie Library annex home of seven years and has taken up residence in the heart of downtown Snohomish.
It’s a move that comes with some mixed blessings. The Carnegie annex space was “huge,” said Arts of Snohomish secretary Judy Macaulay. It offered a lot of working exhibit space, but the concrete floor and overhead fluorescent lighting drawbacks. Being a couple of blocks off the beaten path of downtown Snohomish shoppers didn’t help either, she said.
The move into the historic Marks Building at 1024 First St. solves the foot traffic problem and offers much nicer exhibit space for the 24 Arts of Snohomish members, Macaulay said. The downside is that it’s much smaller — roughly one-fifth the size of the Carnegie annex.
The upside, Arts of Snohomish President Allene Soshea said in the new gallery, is that viewers no longer have to navigate “the maze” of dividers in the Carnegie annex to see all the art. About 100 member paintings hang on the walls and three-dimensional works fill display cases in the new 600-square-foot gallery.
“It’s been a lot better to compare works here” in the Marks Building, said Soshea, a watercolorist. “I like it a lot better.”
The city of Snohomish had been renting the group space in the Carnegie annex at a very low rate, allowing AoS to save money for the move they knew would come as the Snohomish Carnegie Foundation sought their own funding to restore the library. It meant removing the annex that was tacked onto the two-story building in 1968.
AoS lost its lease when the Carnegie Foundation secured the funding in 2010 to begin a seismic retrofit of the original 1910 building.
Macaulay said the artist group cashed out one of its two certificates of deposit to pay for the move to First Street. They’re paying more in rent, but she noted that July’s art sales in the new gallery were as good as any Christmas sales the artists had in the Carnegie annex.
Arts of Snohomish signed a lease on the Marks Building space on June 1 and moved in July 1, said AoS member Kelly Maier, an oil painter who specializes in animals. The group spent that first month turning the former sportsmen’s supply shop into a gallery. They held a grand opening celebration Sept. 9 and 10.
“I love the building it’s in,” Maier said. “It’s nice and light and cozy.”
Maier and Soshea noted the increased foot traffic in the move from the Carnegie annex.
“Sometimes, we’d see only five people a week,” Maier said.
“I love the space because people know where we are,” Soshea said of the new gallery.
Even with the much smaller display space, the group’s sales doubled in the first month the gallery was open, Maier said. Arts of Snohomish will participate in downtown promotions, she said.
Macaulay said the group has artists representing a wide array of media. A jury picks artists who apply to join the group, which recently added a sculptor to its ranks.
Macaulay and her daughter, Wendy Clark, 29, live in north Seattle and joined Arts of Snohomish three years ago after investigating artist-owned galleries in Kirkland and Edmonds. The mother-daughter fused-glass artists “are a team.”
Kurt Batdorf is editor of the Snohomish County Business Journal.
Learn more
To see what’s on currently on display with Arts of Snohomish, sign up for a newsletter and learn more about the artist members, go to www.artsofsnohomish.org.
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