Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
One day last summer, Galen Gondolfi walked out his door, only to be handed a kitten by a woman who then hastily scrambled onto a bus. It was so small it fit in his hand, and it might not have survived if he and his wife, Jessica Baran, hadn’t shot formula down its throat with a syringe. They named her Marianne, after Baran’s mother.
“She had all the trappings of an unexpected pregnancy, you know?” Gondolfi says.
She’s still young enough to have those piercing slate-blue eyes all kittens are born with, and she skitters around the slippery wood floors of fort gondo compound for the arts, stalking a crumpled piece of brown paper. Oh, and by the way, now Gondolfi’s a cat person. That’s recent. Baran’s allergic. So Marianne lives next door, in the storefront recently vacated by vintage shop HighSpektical, along with her new friend, Chester (named for Baran’s father).
Marianne’s arrival—along with the emptiness of the space—suggested maybe it was an auspicious time to bring back beverly, the short-lived gallery named for Gondolfi’s mom, which occupied the building circa 2006 to 2007 (a little longer, if you want to go with the unofficial opening in 2005). Then, it was an all-women gallery—the first show was titled “Girls, Girls, Girls.”
“I hadn’t even painted the gallery yet,” Gondolfi says of that show. “It was still all blue, and it looked like a giant aquarium.”
In fact, Baran exhibited there in ’05, before she knew Gondolfi. Nine years later, she’s gondo’s new director. In addition to hosting exhibits, it’s home to a well-regarded poetry series featuring local and national poets. The beverly space, Baran says, is now open to both genders, and it will be a way to extend and change the way things work at gondo.
“I’m excited, because as we’ve been programming gondo, there’s actually been a lot of demand,” she says. “I think I even have shows through 2015 now. It’s crazy! People are interested in the space as a solo opportunity, which is really there. And so next door is more of an opportunity to do more curated exhibits, complemented with different kinds of shows and different kinds of projects. I was torn when I suddenly realized how far ahead we were booked—I thought, ‘Wow, I never knew this was going to happen… Do I start turning people down, or reshaping the program?’ Then when this opportunity came up next door, it seemed like the perfect solution.”
For beverly’s first show, Baran organized “Learning From Donald Judd,” a partnership with The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. It plays off of both the Pulitzer’s current exhibit, “Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works,” and the seminal 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas, by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who advocated for design that speaks a more common language. Pulitzer assistant curator Tamara Schenkenberg led a group on a “nuts-and-bolts” tour of Judd’s show. Then, artists and the general public were invited to a daylong workshop where they transformed household goods—including cardboard and Legos—into their own Judds-inspired pieces.
“It’s this idea of trying to humanize those forms,” Baran says. “I think his work always is very covetable, and you want to physically interact with it. But even his aesthetic philosophy delineated this lack of the artist’s hand.”
The Judd exhibit opened December 7, concurrent with gondo’s new show, New York artist Kirk Nachman’s “Without Opus,” which uses black-and-white comic-strip storyboards to deliver what Baran calls “shaggy-dog narratives.” Though she sees the two galleries working synergistically, they are vastly different spaces—gondo’s small and almost homey. The building next door has mostly been commercial, housing businesses like STyLehouse, All Along Press, and Peridot.
“It’s a really lovely space,” Baran says. “It’s one long room; it’s larger than gondo.” It has high tin ceilings and big windows, as well as space to put in more standard gallery lighting. “And there’s a space in the back that would be perfect for a little library,” she adds. “I would hope to carry the poets we have, not just art books.”
Though beverly was created to free up more space on the gondo calendar, its own is filling up fast—Baran has already scheduled a two-person collage show by Buzz Spector and Mary Jo Bang; a sound installation by Kevin Harris, formerly of Floating Laboratories; solo shows from multimedia artist Dail Chambers and photographer John Early; and a show from Kansas City father-and-daughter artists Garry and Peggy Noland.
“It’s all in the name of family planning, right?” Gondolfi says. “We’ve got the gallery named after my mom, the dog-park sculpture garden in the back yard”—named after his dad, Leno—“and then we have Jessica’s parents represented in feline manifestation. At one point or another, if we need another cat name, we could name it after Jessica’s sister… But we’d have to adopt four more cats to keep up with my siblings.”
“Learning from Donald Judd” and “Without Opus” run through January 4. beverly is located at 3155 Cherokee. For more info, visit fortgondo.com.
