Glen Lake Artists, the birth of Glen Arbor’s gallery scene

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

The second in a year-long series of articles about local art, culture and creativity.

In 2016 there are 14 art galleries in Glen Arbor and Empire, as well as innumerable creative people practicing their craft in the privacy of a home studio. It was not always this way.

The locality’s first art gallery was established in 1985, and up until that point, the Glen Arbor/Empire art scene might have been more accurately characterized as an art vignette. But with the arrival of Glen Lake Artists Gallery (GLA Gallery), the foundation was laid for today’s perception of the Greater Glen Lake Area as a place that attracts art and craft makers.

The GLA Gallery is an outgrowth of the Glen Lake Artists (GLA), a loose confederation of visual artists who in the 1980s met each week for breakfast at Art’s and other restaurants to talk about “what you were doing, where you were selling,” said Ruth Conklin, printmaker, painter, Glen Arbor gallerist and an original GLA member. “We’d talk about books, too. It wasn’t gossipy. It was really just about talking about art.” Over time, the group created an annual, early October studio tour.

“But they wanted a place to show their work that was more permanent,” said John Huston, a founding member, who with his wife, Amy Stevens, now own GLA Gallery.

In 1985, the GLA created GLA Gallery, a cooperative gallery. A spot at The Homestead was rented in the first summer. Then, for two more summers, the gallery was shuffled around the resort, and had all the predictability of a pop-up gallery, which didn’t foster regular sales or a solid identity, Huston said. In 1988, the gallery found its place at the Arbor Light building on Lake Street.

“That space was just being used as a storage room,” Huston said. “And it seemed like the perfect spot for the gallery. There was good light. Lots of wall space. It was right next door to the Arbor Light store” — then, a general store with dry goods as well as other objet d’toureest. And, he adds, “It was right across the street from Art’s. We had a lot of walk-in traffic.”

GLA Gallery represented the works of 27 exhibitor-members its first year. In the following 30 years, “we’ve had over 100 local artists” represented by the gallery, Huston said.

In the gallery’s early days, “local artists” were loosely defined as artist and craftspeople from Leelanau, Grand Traverse and Benzie counties; but there was flexibility in the definition.

“In the beginning, occasionally Ananda (Bricker) and Suzanne (Wilson) would come in with a carload of paintings and say, ‘We should put them in the gallery,’ and it didn’t matter where (the artists) were from,” Huston said.

The criteria for determining whose work fit the gallery was occasionally influenced by big-heartedness and enthusiasm rather than a written code of standards. “It was pretty flexible,” Steven said. “But, for the people who started the gallery, the whole idea was that there was no venue for people in this part of Leelanau County to show their work, and that’s why they did it.”

GLA founding members Ananda and Suzanne, both now deceased, were strong, creative personalities with passion and drive for cultivating an artists’ community. The gallery was their conduit for trying to bring this ideal to life. It was operated on the traditional cooperative model: every member pays a fee to belong; every member helps staff and work the gallery. The GLA Gallery operated as a cooperative venture for 17 years. Over time, however, member-exhibitors began to peel off, and some of them opened their own galleries. Suzanne and Ananda — both of whom achieved the kind of first-name recognition status enjoyed by Cher and Madonna — along with GLA founding member Midge Obata were interested in art education and wanted to offer classes. This desire led them to help create the Glen Arbor Art Association in the late 1980s.

In the early 1980s Huston became a member of the GLA, and then the gallery, through his work as a potter. Stevens got involved with the GLA when she’d moved to the area in 1986. She began teaching at the Leelanau School, and connected with Suzanne Wilson, who also taught there. By 1992, Huston and Stevens had married, and found themselves managing and running the gallery almost by default. Among the gallery’s members, there had been an evolution of interests, and a migration away from the GLA Gallery to other ventures. Although the original gang was breaking up, the desire to see the gallery continue did not diminish. Huston remembers being told by one of the GLA founders, “If you don’t take over the co-op, it’s just going to end.”

“We felt a real commitment to it,” Stevens said. “By this time, there were other galleries in town. But they weren’t showing just-local artists. As more galleries appeared, I thought it was really important to preserve the gallery’s early mission, which was for local artists to have a venue in which to show their work. And we’ve kept to that.”

Huston and Stevens’s definition of “local” is work made within a 50-mile radius of Glen Arbor. Localness is a driving force and defining value for this seasonal gallery.

“People will say, ‘Was this made here? Does the painter live around here?’ I think that’s important to people,” Stevens said. “We live in an age where things we use every day are made all over the world. They’re made anonymously and they’re mass-produced. There isn’t that sense that they were touched by human hands, and people are really hungry for that connection.”

A similar desire for connection, but of the artist-to-artist variety, takes us back to the beginning of this story. “The Glen Lake Artists group was an opportunity for everyone to crawl out of the woods and get together,” said Becky Thatcher. “The group was a catalyst, always welcoming people in and telling people about the gallery. The gallery gave us a way for the public to find us, so we didn’t always have to leave town to sell something.”

Midge Obata felt that welcome. A weaver living in St. Louis, Obata made her GLA connection in the early 1980s. She met Ananda Bricker at a local art show, and the door to other friendships opened. “From then on, I met all these other artists,” Obata said. “I went home and told my kids, ‘I’m going to move to Glen Arbor!’ The reason I moved up here is because I met all these artists.” Now, Obata and her family run North Gallery, a seasonal gallery on Lake Street.

Amy Stevens remembers it this way: “When I first moved up north from Grand Rapids … there wasn’t an art scene in Glen Arbor. There were some artists. And Glen Lake Artists Gallery was just getting off the ground. If you think about it, if it wasn’t for Suzanne Wilson, Ananda and Ben Bricker, Midge, Becky, there would be no art scene — or a different art scene.”

In 2013 GLA Gallery relocated to its present space, across from the Glen Arbor Art Association and behind Lake Street Studios. After 25 years at the Arbor Light building, “the building’s owners changed and they decided to lease the space to someone else,” Stevens said. “It has been a really, really positive thing. We’ve been around long enough. People have found us; but it was hard to pare down our artists from 30 to 15. The move has also helped us refocus and redirect our business for the 21st century, for how the world has changed, for how Glen Arbor has changed. And we do like being back with other artists.”

The following is a list of Glen Arbor and Empire galleries and institutions — the physical representation of the art scene spawned by the Glen Lake Artists and the Glen Lake Artists Gallery: the Glen Arbor Art Association, Synchronicity, Arbor Gallery, Arabella, Ruth Conklin Gallery, Glen Arbor Botanicals, Glen Lake Artisans, Becky Thatcher Designs, Greg Sobran Gallery, North Gallery, Center Gallery, Forest Gallery, Dickinson Photo Gallery, Sleeping Bear Gallery, The Secret Garden.