Old firehouse, new spark

By Darrell Laurant

Published: September 3, 2008

What images swim into your mind’s eye when you hear the words “art gallery”?

Chic? Spotless? Quiet? A place where the owner or employee on duty tends to dismiss you with a frozen glance if it’s obvious you didn’t come in to buy anything?

If that’s your image, then the Firehouse on Rivermont Avenue is the anti-gallery. There, there are no fixed hours or schedule, and the watchwords are “anarchic,” “unfinished” and “relaxed.”

And, if you happen to be an artist, “free.”

“I don’t charge any commission or anything like that,” said Nate Hall, the de facto gallery operator at this former fire station. “I just want to help out the artists.”

If he took that stance in New York, he would probably be run out of town by the other galleries. But in Lynchburg, where a new art scene is just beginning to burst through the old layers, it’s simply another variation on an increasingly diverse palette.

Like a lot of the players in this new scene, Hall grew up in Lynchburg, left to find excitement, then returned.

“I wanted to be closer to family,” he said.

In the process, he acquired an alternative family — the 20 and 30-somethings of his peer group who flock to the broad-shouldered red brick building he has shared with a variety of housemates for art, music or simple conversation.

The building was purchased by Nancy Marion of the Design Group (also a noted local historian), after the city closed it down in 1991. In the middle of the space, obscured by a Don Baldizon painting, is a chalk board with the message still intact after 17 years. “Ending,” it reads, “9/16/91.” And underneath that, “Fort Apache.”

The area around the intersection of Rivermont Avenue and Cabell Street has also been described by a local judge as “Dodge City.” Nate Hall hasn’t found it that way, however.

“Everybody pretty much leaves everyone else alone,” he said. “I’ll sometimes see people doing things they probably shouldn’t be doing (selling drugs), but I know a lot of them from when I was at E.C. Glass, and they’ll just say, ‘Hey, Nate, what’s up?’”

It doesn’t hurt, however, that the gallery/living space is something of a fortress, surrounded by an iron fence and hidden behind two massive wooden doors.

Hall said he and his friends “enjoy sitting out front and watching people go by, but I remember when I was a kid, I’d drive through here with my grandparents and they’d immediately lock the doors.”
Hall — not an artist himself — finds himself drawn to local “outsider artists.”

The artists — painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers and illustrators — exhibiting at First Friday this week at the Firehouse include Baldizon, Raymond Ferguson, Willie Shouse, Becca McCharen, Erin Zunwalt, Thomas Dean, Seth Meeks, Andrew Montgomery, Lindsey Stroud and Clay Brimijoin. Noah McMillan will play the piano.

“There are a couple of galleries up the street,” he said, “and on one of the First Fridays (July), people just came out of there and wandered down here. We didn’t advertise or anything. It just happened.”
The interior of the Firehouse is enormous, with room for triple the paintings now hanging.

“It’s kind of rough now,” he said, “but it’s got a lot of potential.”

The upstairs living space features a spacious firehouse kitchen, a sliding pole in Hall’s bedroom and easy access to a roof from which, Hall said, “you can see all over the city.”

Apparently, he’s already spotted the future of local art.