The Bakery building in Shockoe Bottom, where nonprofit Universal Arts Teaching Gallery is taking the parking deck commercial space fronting 18th Street. (Jonathan Spiers photos)
After opening to residents this time last year, The Bakery apartment building in Shockoe Bottom is filling out with its first commercial tenants, one of them a new art gallery that grew out of the painting of the building’s massive mural.
The mixed-use high-rise at Grace and 17th streets has landed leases with coworking brand HQ and with Universal Arts Teaching Gallery, a nonprofit gallery and educational center formed by Richmond artists Matt Lively, Ed Trask and Heide Trepanier.
HQ, one of several brands under global coworking group IWG, is taking the roughly 5,000-square-foot space at the corner of Grace and 17th, adding to other IWG outposts in and around Richmond that include its Regus office space brand.
HQ signage is posted at the space that the coworking brand is taking at The Bakery.
Daniel Salomonsky, who heads up Historic Housing, the local firm that developed and owns The Bakery, said the HQ space is targeted to open in June following a $350,000 buildout. He said he reached out to HQ after talks with potential restaurant users – including a local bakery – didn’t pan out.
Daniel Salomonsky
“Restaurants are having a tough time right now. We were working with a bakery in Richmond, and we could not make it work out,” Salomonsky said. “That being said, having this product will actually be a better business decision. The buildout cost is a lot less, and it’ll complement the mixed use of the area really well.”
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the building, Universal Arts opens Saturday in the 700-square-foot space that fronts 18th Street below The Bakery’s parking deck.
Lively and Trask used the space while they were painting the mural on the deck’s south wall that depicts a red-tailed hawk and flocks of purple martins. It was during that job that Trask suggested to Salomonsky that the then-shell space that contractors had been using for storage would work well as a gallery.
Ed Trask (Photo courtesy Ed Trask)
“The positioning of it, being underneath a parking deck, and everything about the way it was set up … it’s got the perfect mix of industrial and concrete,” Trask said. “I knew that it could be made tight by having a few really good, crisp white walls.”
Having hired them for the mural, and with the building also featuring other art – refurbished signs from the former Weiman’s Bakery that had been on the site; Underground Railroad quilt patterns painted on the building’s façade (a tribute to African Americans from when Shockoe Bottom was a hub of the slave trade) – Salomonsky said he was game for the gallery.
“Something we were trying to do with The Bakery building was inspire more economic development in the Bottom, and we feel that part of what will help the Bottom is an investment in the arts, in murals, in artistic lighting,” Salomonsky said.
To help the gallery get started, Salomonsky said Historic Housing will be a corporate sponsor for Universal Arts, allowing the nonprofit to rent the space at a discount. He said a hope is to get more corporate sponsors for the gallery and its monthly exhibits, the first of which opens Saturday and continues through June.
Matt Lively, left, and Heide Trepanier, right, with social media manager and fellow artist Amy Smith in the Universal Arts Teaching Gallery space.
Trepanier, who is heading up the gallery with Trask and Lively and took the lead on forming the nonprofit entity, said its mission is to support emerging and older artists in the region who may get overlooked by retail galleries or are underrepresented in the industry. In addition to group exhibitions, the gallery will offer small classes on topics ranging from fine art to professional development.
“A lot of times you’ll have an older or late-career artist that is overlooked by the gallery system, just because they’ve been in the system for so long, and the way the art world works, you can get over-visibility; it’s very fickle,” she said. “We want to be support for those artists and young artists that need a leg up.”
Trepanier said the gallery will take 30% of artists’ sales, with further support for operations coming from the classes and events, as well as grants, donations and other revenue streams. She said they’re currently working on a grant for a mural class that would utilize buildings in the Shockoe Bottom area – something Salomonsky said his company is also supporting.
“This is the beginning of something (broader) that we’re trying to do for the area,” Salomonsky said. “We have a projector that lights up our mural at night, and we would love to do more building imaging in other areas in the Bottom, so when someone drives through, they see art, they see light.”
The mural that Lively and Trask painted at The Bakery. The gallery space is around the corner fronting 18th Street.
Trepanier said the group is also looking to establish an arts district for Shockoe Bottom similar to the district along Broad Street that hosts the First Fridays Art Walk. She said a Shockoe district designation would help in securing grants and could tie into the Broad Street district.
The gallery’s neon signage is from an old Universal Ford dealership sign that Trask had salvaged.
They’re working on that effort with Shockoe Records, the local record label that helps promote the neighborhood with events like 804 Day.
For Trask, who has been painting murals and graffiti art in Richmond for decades, opening a gallery to support other artists is a full-circle moment.
“I’ve always thought it would be amazing to have something that could actually support those artists that are on the fringe,” Trask said.
“I’ve seen what mural-making has done to change communities and the art world, I’ve seen what it’s like to be seen as an outsider, and I’ve also seen now, myself, being an older artist who needs support,” he said, laughing. “If I can give that to other artists, I think it’s fantastic.”
Saturday’s opening is from 4 to 7 p.m. at the gallery at 120 N. 18th St. The gallery’s regular hours will be noon-6 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays starting the following week.
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