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August marked the 35th anniversary of “A Public Hanging,” the first show mounted by a group of artists that would gather to form Gallery X, just a few months later. It has since been renamed “The Public Xhibition.”
But before delving into that, consider this prologue a brief local art history lesson that takes place well after the halcyon days of Bierstadt and Ashley and Bradford and Ryder and a couple of Giffords and well before 2011, when urban studies theorist Richard Florida declared New Bedford as the seventh “Most Artistic City in America.”
In the early 1980s, local sculptor Chuck Hauck, a 1981 graduate of the Swain School of Design, best known for his folk art inspired weather vanes, whirligigs, nautical figureheads and hybrid fantasy animal figures, and a dozen or so colleagues formed the 2nd Street Art Exchange.
It was housed on an upper floor in an old brick building behind Freestone’s. Hauck and company used the raw space as shared art studios and a place to play music, as well as an occasional gallery. When the owners converted it to office space in 1986, thought was given to setting up a serious long term viable gallery space in the city. Gears were turning but it wouldn’t be until August 1990 that something clicked.
Hauck was contacted about organizing a group of artists to do a one-time show to coincide with an event involving the Ernestina. That exhibition was called “A Public Hanging.” Renting space in an empty storefront on Spring Street for the month, he quickly rallied a group of more than 20 artists to display their work. Grasping the reins, Hauck organized an unruly bunch of freethinking self-important artists into a cohesive group.
There were many Swain alumni, including John Nieman, Craig Coggeshall, Pam Power, Richard Vanasse, Sung-Hee Chung, John Moylan, Barbara Worthington, Diane Cournoyer, Diane Conlon and others (including me), as well as local historian Bob Maker, collagist Kathy Crowley and then punk poet Karen LeBlanc, now the minister of the First Unitarian Church.
Out of chaos came cohesiveness, and the group became the collective of visual, performing and literary artists known as Gallery X, so named for the original space’s proximity to the YWCA (long since moved) and the Zeiterion Theatre (now called the Zeiterion Performing Arts Center.)
The cultural significance of the formation of Gallery X in 1990 — and its endurance — cannot be overstated. In 1995, the X moved into an 1855 building on William Street that was originally the First Universalist Church and the home of a number of other denominations over the years.
Ten years before AHA!, before there was a New Bedford Art Museum or an Artworks!, before the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth established a downtown campus in the Star Store building for the College of Visual and Performing Arts (and closed it two decades later), before DATMA, before Alison Wells or Judith Klein or Robert Duff or the late Robert Hunt opened their namesake galleries, before the Colo Colo Gallery, before the Seaport Art Walk, before Superflat NB changed up the local mural game, before the sorely-missed U.G.L.Y. Gallery, before the Navio Collective Gallery, before 65 on William, before there were regular art exhibitions in the Hatch Street building or in the Kilburn Mill, before art was being hung at the Co-Creative Center or the Pour Farm Tavern or at Groundworks … there was Gallery X. Gallery X wasn’t a game changer. It was the one that started the game.
Over the decades, hundreds of artists have become members of the gallery. There have been over 600 shows since 1990.
In an online solicitation seeking new members, Gallery X notes that the membership includes formally trained and self-taught artists, students and hobbyists of all ages and skill levels. Nothing provides greater evidence of its broad and inclusionary philosophy than the annual August exhibition now called “The Public Xhibition,” an unjuried celebration of community creativity.
It is — and always has been — joyously and unapologetically “all over the place.” “The Public Xhibition” effectively democratizes the exhibition of artwork by exercising something that might be called non-curating, by allowing everything to stand on its own merit, without judgment. Visitors, viewers and art critics will make their own determinations, but the non-curators won’t.
But what about that name change? What happened to “A Public Hanging?”
Long ago, the charter members of the gallery were much younger, perhaps naive. That world seems vastly different now. Thinking back on it, the edges are fuzzy, the colors bleed. The show was called “A Public Hanging” for a simple reason: everyone in the amorphous “public” was invited to “hang” their artwork. We liked the name. It was simple word play.
Artist Sue Ellen Stroum illustrated the first postcard and it got some laughs as it displayed a Mad magazine level of morbid humor. A half-dozen artsy types in black with spiky hair, big hoop earrings and at least one handlebar mustache stare up at a woman in a short dress, standing on a chair. The picture is cropped at her waist. It is unclear whether she is hanging a painting or slipping her head through a noose.
And therein lies the humor. None of us thought much about it. It was silly. It was simple word play.
Most of the original members have long since left Gallery X, moving off to far flung cities or transitioning into lives in which careers, marriages, parenthood, even grandparenthood leave little time or space to commit to a gallery. Too many have died. Over the years, hundreds have drifted through as members.
Of the original crew, only Hauck and Nieman have always stayed the course, always loyal to the cause, the twin cornerstones of the gallery.
And then this happened. At a regular monthly meeting, a relatively new member (who shall remain unnamed) suggested that given recent historical events, including the police killings of unarmed Black men around the country and the Black Lives Matter movement that arose as a result of that violence, that perhaps the name “Public Hanging,” even if not intended to be hurtful, was, at best, insensitive.
There was disagreement. The name was connected to the history of the gallery. It was tradition. It was harmless. It was simple word play.
The new member quit the gallery that night.
Nieman was distraught and he sought the advice of LeBlanc, the previously mentioned punk poet-cum-Unitarian minister, who was a member early on and who had no problem with the “Public Hanging” name back in the day. But she had evolved. And when Nieman reminded her that it was just simple word play — just a reference to the hanging of work by the general public, she had the perfect impromptu response.
“John … if you had a show of pictures by Massachusetts photographers, would you call it “Mass Shooting?” It was simple word play. He was stunned. And he knew she was right.
The change to “The Public Xhibition” makes sense. Gallery X did the right thing. And it fits in with the gallery’s love of X puns as names for shows, such as the “X-Mas Show,” “X-Stravaganza,” “Something X-Tra” and the like.
Goodbye, “Public Hanging.” It was clever. It was simple word play. But times change.
Long live “The Public Xhibition.”
Gallery X is hosting a series of events in conjunction with its 35th Anniversary Capital Campaign. Visit givebutter.com/GX35
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
Thank you for this history of Gallery X!
Carolyn Dlouhy was a member in the mid 1990’s. She had been Carolyn Strules and we had briefly dated in high school at Stang in the 1960’s. By chance I went to an art show at X and bumped into Carolyn. She showed me her work that she had hung. We talked old times, her art, what we were both doing…we began to slowly fall in love, seeing each other on and off for years. It took a while but we were finally married in 2016, just before our 50th high school reunion. Her art hangs all over our home. Gallery X is special for very many reasons, seen and unseen.