“Well.”
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Don’t forget to pay the toll! Local artist Kate Daughdrill keeps operations at The Garage, her cozy First Street gallery, running smoothly. |
The white-haired woman doesn’t know what to make of The Garage. She looks into the tiny room—a sort of brick closet posing as an art gallery, although it’s really an art gallery posing as a brick closet. Her eyes run along the wood panel floor and overhead lighting, over the needlepoint boxers by artist Jesse Wells and the digable, earthy drawings by Kristin Smith. She looks from the sofa, where I sit, to the floor again, where founder Kate Daughdrill and her accomplice, boyfriend Sam Bush, sit cross-legged, beaming up at her.
“Well,” she manages. More smiles. “Well, what is this?”
Well, it was a little “g” garage until June 2008. After she graduated from UVA, Daughdrill began a fellowship at Christ Episcopal Church, which also owns the adjacent garage space. Daughdrill asked to use the space to host concerts and art exhibits and, on June 17, The Garage’s door slid open for a performance by a pair of folk bands.
Since then, each exhibition and performance has grown in impact and ambition—thanks in no small part to Daughdrill, both an energetic local networker and an art student with a proven curatorial eye. With help from Bush, whose band The Hill and Wood played its first gig at The Garage, the space has hosted gigs by local bands like Birdlips to Wes Swing to The Invisible Hand.
The list of featured visual artists is even more impressive. Daughdrill and The Garage started young and eager, with artists like printmaker and soft sculpture artist Patrick Costello, then branched out to larger crowds by booking more seasoned artists with similar sensibilities, like Jeremy Taylor and his “Salus” exhibit. Last April brought about one of The Garage’s biggest successes: UVA professor Dean Dass filled the space with a series of prints titled “Signs of Divinity are Hard to Read,” and a reception attracted other established art faculty and gallery owners, including Beryl Solla from PVCC and Lyn Warren of Les Yeux du Monde.
Daughdrill leaves in the fall to start graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art; while Bush will take over the day-to-day work of The Garage, Daughdrill says she has already booked exhibits through February 2010, including a “suitcase show” organized by The Bridge’s Greg Kelly and currently on view. She adds that she hopes to visit “about once a month.” To both Daughdrill and The Garage, I say: Thanks for the last year. I wish you well.
