There is a new face on the Vero gallery scene. Located in the expanding southern end of the downtown arts district, The Other Half Gallery focuses on contemporary works in painting, mixed media and ceramic sculpture. It also holds the studio of gallery owner Ann Lee Fuller, who displays her paintings alongside the works of five of her artist friends from the Catskill Mountains, where Fuller and her husband, Stuart, have their other home. In explaining her reason for opening an art gallery in Vero, Ann Lee Fuller says that she didn’t want to be “just a snowbird” here.
“I’m spending half of my life in Vero, so I had better get on with it and commit. Hence the name of the gallery, ‘The Other Half.’”
The gallery, which will have its grand opening Saturday afternoon, occupies a former duplex built in 1955. A block-and-a-half south of the eastbound Twin Pair, it is in an area experiencing rapid change of late, with new galleries, restaurants and boutiques moving in.
By the time Fuller acquired it, the building needed extensive renovation, a project that began last spring and continued through summer. It now displays an updated façade, clean white galleries with polished concrete floors, and new track lighting that precisely illuminates the art on display.
One of the rooms in the building, as well as the structure’s back lot, is devoted to a second business, Hidden Garden, a potted plant and garden accessory boutique owned by Elaine Erlanger.
Fuller’s adventure started in 2011, when she and her husband decided to buy a house in Vero to be near Ann’s elderly parents, who moved here at around the same time from Utica, NY, to live with their son, Ann’s brother.
“We bought the house across the street from my brother, in a development west of town, sight unseen,” Fuller says.
Arriving in laid-back Vero was a bit of a culture shock for her; prior to moving here, she and Stuart lived for more than 25 years in the heart of New York City. Home was a 3,000-square-foot loft in Chelsea, the city’s lively arts district.
Ann Lee Fuller operated a successful graphic design business; Stuart Fuller was an executive at Philip Morris before taking early retirement to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience at NYU.
After they sold their loft, they decided to make their weekend home – a country house on 10 acres in the Catskill Mountains – their residence during the warmer half of the year. The other six months are spent here.
The only problem with Vero was the lack of a studio space for Ann. In 2014, with a solo show at the Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, NY, hanging over her head, Fuller rented space in a downtown office building. There, she worked on her “Storytellers” series, a group of mixed media paintings on cradled wood panels. Each features an image of that bird of fable and superstition, the crow.
In the process of working toward her goal (of the 38 paintings she created, 33 were ultimately sold) Fuller says she “fell in love” with Vero’s old business district.
At the time, Elaine Erlanger operated her Secret Garden boutique in the rear yard of the same building.
The two became friends. Their friendship evolved into a partnership when Fuller was preparing to go back to the Catskills for the summer.
“My parting words to Elaine were, ‘Go find us a building,’” Fuller says.
The building Erlanger found for them wasn’t officially on the market, but Fuller decided it was close to ideal.
“I saw its potential; I thought it was perfectly located for a space for Elaine and a space for me, but it was more building than we really needed or wanted,” says Fuller, who had initially thought only to invest in a studio space for herself.
And then she “had this epiphany.” She would open an art gallery.
“The reason that we are only showing [artists from the Catskills] is because they are trusted friends whose work is, I think, beautiful,” says Fuller. She and Stuart have also collected a number of works by the artists.
The artists included in the round-up are Inverna Lockpez, a native of Cuba who now lives in Flagler Beach. She is showing a series of paintings based on Florida’s bird life.
Nat Thomas is a painter and collagist who originally hails from Louisiana. Peter Yamaoka, a ceramic artist, bases his vessel forms on antique Asian pottery.
Helane Levine-Keating, a professor of literature at Pace University, is also a photographer in color who finds abstract compositions in the natural world.
Born in the Netherlands, Gerda Van Leeuwen makes unique prints with rust stains and pigment on Japanese paper mounted on canvas.
Although some of the works in the gallery are rooted in the natural world, the overall feel of the gallery’s offerings is abstract. The vision that the artists share relies very little on realistic portrayals. Even Lockpez’s birds are composed in such a way as to emphasize the abstract quality of their forms and colors.
Fuller is counting on the fact that her gallery’s focus on abstract art, on the power of suggestion rather than literal depiction, is what will set The Other Half apart from the other galleries on the street. The work in her gallery aims to evoke a mood in her audience that, once experienced, will be hard to forget.
Just inside the front door of the gallery hangs an impressionistic abstraction by Fuller called “Snow Memory.” She wonders if the painting will appeal to other Vero snowbirds. “I haven’t seen snow in five years,” she says. “Maybe they’ll love it because they haven’t either.”
The Other Half’s grand opening Saturday is from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. The gallery address is 1847 14th Avenue.
