By LYN LETSINGER-MILLER, for The Democrat
Ninety years ago, Frank Hohenberger took a photograph of members of the Brown County Art Gallery Association celebrating the gallery they had organized the previous year.
At first, the early colony was known as the “Brown County Group” and artists were showing their work in Indianapolis and Chicago. Wisconsin artist Adolph Shulz, who visited Brown County at the invitation of the county’s first artist, T.C. Steele, encouraged his Chicago Art Institute colleagues to come to southern Indiana.
By 1925, many of those artists, including Shulz and his wife, Ada, had moved to Nashville. The need to establish a gallery in town was being discussed.
On Sept. 3, 1926, they gathered at the home of Will Vawter to organize an art association and get to work. The timing was not random. An Indianapolis businessman, William Wilkes, offered to buy a dilapidated grocery store and fix it up for a gallery.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]That night, the artists formed an association and named Carl Graf as its first president, William Wilkes as vice president and Dale Bessire as secretary-treasurer. They also formed a committee and began rehabbing the building.
By mid-October, they had a respectable gallery and were ready for a grand opening. Fifty paintings went on display and according to newspaper reports, well over a thousand people visited in the next few days.
The gallery became a major destination and included a visit by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934. By the 1940s, the art association was considered one of the most important regional art colonies in the country.
A downtown fire in 1952 spared the gallery but forced a change for the association. The Wilkes family, who had provided the space to the artists for 30 years, wanted to sell the gallery to the association, but instead, the association decided to accept property donated by Adolph Shulz, and build a new building.
The new gallery opened in 1954 on what was State Road 46, the same site where it remains today. However, in 1966, the building was destroyed by an arsonist. Townsfolk ran to pull paintings from the burning building. A vault saved many paintings, but others were lost. Once again, a new building was reconstructed — said to be fireproof — and reopened in 1968.
Tough years would follow with money hard to come by. But despite the setbacks, the community kept the gallery going. Finally in the mid-2000s, a dedicated group of artists, community leaders and art patrons began turning things around. Visitors and buyers returned, and soon, it became clear the existing building was too small.
That changed in 2015, when an ambitious board of directors planned a major addition, featuring an art education studio, new permanent exhibit spaces for Gustave Baumann and Wm. Zimmerman, new space for the art association and Indiana Heritage Arts, and retrofitting the existing building. With great support from the community, art patrons and public trusts and foundations, the project was completed with a grand opening Oct. 24, 2015.
The art association reports that attendance is up dramatically, and best of all, the gallery is debt-free.
